Courses

AFST B204 #BlackLivesMatterEverywhere

Spring 2026

#BlackLivesMatterEverywhere: Ethnographies & Theories on the African Diaspora is a interdisciplinary course closely examines political, cultural, intellectual, and spiritual mobilizations for Black Lives on local, global and hemispheric levels. We will engage an array of materials ranging from literature, history, oral histories, folklore, dance, music, popular culture, social media, ethnography, and film/documentaries. By centering the political and intellectual labor of Black women and LGBTQ folks at the forefront of the movements for Black Lives, we unapologetically excavate how #BlackLivesMatterEverywhere has a long and rich genealogy in the African diaspora. Lastly, students will be immersed in Black queer feminist theorizations on diaspora, political movements, and the multiplicities of Blackness.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Anthropology; General Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities; Latin American Iberian Latinx; Museum Studies.

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AFST B206 Black Latinx Americas: Movements, Politics, & Cultures

Spring 2026

This interdisciplinary course examines the extensive and diverse histories, social movements, political mobilization and cultures of Black people (Afrodescendientes) in Latin America and the Caribbean. While the course will begin in the slavery era, most of our scholarly-activist attention will focus on the histories of peoples of African descent in Latin America after emancipation to the present. Some topics we will explore include: the particularities of slavery in the Americas, the Haitian Revolution and its impact on articulations of race and nation in the region, debates on "racial democracy," the relationship between gender, class, race, and empire, and recent attempts to write Afro-Latin American histories from "transnational" and "diaspora" perspectives. We will engage the works of historians, activists, artists, anthropologists, sociologists, and political theorists who have been key contributors to the rich knowledge production on Black Latin America.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; General Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx; Museum Studies.

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ARCH B101 Introduction to Egyptian and Near Eastern Archaeology

Fall 2025

A historical survey of the archaeology and art of the ancient Near East and Egypt.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Museum Studies.

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ARCH B102 Introduction to Classical Archaeology

Spring 2026

A historical survey of the archaeology and art of Greece, Etruria, and Rome.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Classical Culture and Society; Classical Studies; History of Art; Museum Studies.

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ARCH B125 Classical Myths in Art and in the Sky

Spring 2026

This course explores Greek and Roman mythology using an archaeological and art historical approach, focusing on the ways in which the traditional tales of the gods and heroes were depicted, developed and transmitted in the visual arts such as vase painting and architectural sculpture, as well as projected into the natural environment.

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Classical Culture and Society; History of Art; Museum Studies.

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ARCH B203 Building the Polis: Ancient Greek Cities and Sanctuaries

Not offered 2025-26

A study of the co-development of the Greek city-states and their sanctuaries. Archaeological evidence is surveyed in its historic context. The political formation of the city-state and the role of religion is presented, and the political, economic, and religious institutions of the city-states are explored with a focus on regional variations in timelines of development, building styles, and connectivity. The logistics of building construction, religious travel, and interregional influences will also be addressed.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Classical Languages; Classical Studies; Classics; Growth and Structure of Cities; Museum Studies.

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ARCH B252 Pompeii

Not offered 2025-26

Introduces students to a nearly intact archaeological site whose destruction by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 C.E. was recorded by contemporaries. The discovery of Pompeii in the mid-1700s had an enormous impact on 18th- and 19th-century views of the Roman past as well as styles and preferences of the modern era. Informs students in classical antiquity, urban life, city structure, residential architecture, home decoration and furnishing, wall painting, minor arts and craft and mercantile activities within a Roman city.

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Classical Languages; Classical Studies; Classics; Growth and Structure of Cities; History of Art; Museum Studies.

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ARCH B317 Cultural Heritage and Endangered Archaeology

Not offered 2025-26

This course will examine how and why archaeological sites are 'endangered'. Primarily focusing on the Near East and North Africa (the MENA region), we will examine the different types of archaeological and heritage sites found across this broad region, and some of the threats and disturbances affecting them. We will consider how different interest groups and stakeholders view, value and present historical and archaeological sites to the general public, as well as the success of modern initiatives and projects to safeguard the heritage of the MENA region. Our research will consider the ethics of cultural preservation, as well as the issues and problems encountered by heritage specialists working in areas of modern conflict. Whilst not all damage can be prevented, the course will consider how different threats and disturbances might be mitigated. Prerequisite: Upper level 300-level course. Students should have completed at least two 100 level/200 level courses in either classical or near eastern archaeology.

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ARCH B347 Ancient Artifacts in the Bryn Mawr Special Collections

Not offered 2025-26

Centered on the question, how we can learn from and through objects, this course explores a selected corpus of artifacts from the ancient Mediterranean in the Bryn Mawr Special Collections with the aim to uncover how these objects were made and used and what they might have meant to their ancient users. Students will handle, study, and interpret a variety of artifacts made of clay, metal, stone, and glass, ranging from vessels, mirrors, and statuettes to mosaics and frescoes used originally in a variety of contexts of ancient Mediterranean daily life and spanning now their second-life as constituents of the Bryn Mawr Special Collections. Through close observation and analysis of the procurement and trade of the raw materials of these objects and their manufacturing techniques and decoration, including its themes, which extend from daily scenes and mythological tales to colorful abstract motifs and intriguing inscriptions, students will examine the use and function of these artifacts as evidence of meaningful ancient Mediterranean cultural thought, behavior, and experience. Interpretation will be based on close observation and active and experiential learning, through tactile engagement with these objects, comparing and contrasting them, studying their conservation, and inquiring, through deep critical thinking, archival work, and reflexivity, about their provenience, collecting, and digital itineraries. Prerequisites: ARCH B101 and B102.

Writing Attentive

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Museum Studies.

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EDUC B300 Community-Engaged Learning: Theory, Research, and Practice

Fall 2025

As one of the foundations of education studies, community-engaged learning requires that students integrate academic and experiential learning, which depends on the development of knowledge, skills, and dispositions to learn from field experience. By examining and enacting community-engaged learning from the perspectives of theory, research, and practice, advanced Education students in this course will extend and deepen prior experience in an educational organization with a blend of continued field work, associated research, and mentoring of Education students new to the setting. Through this approach, enrolled students will a) build an enriched relational, contextual (policy-based and geographic) and historical understanding of a specific educational organization; b) gain an understanding of how practitioners and learners in that site conceptualize their work and goals; and c) study and practice methods for initiating and supporting students of education in successful, imaginative working relationships that foster community-engaged learning towards equity and justice.

Writing Attentive

Counts Toward: Museum Studies; Praxis Program.

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FREN B105 Directions de la France contemporaine

Spring 2026

Ce cours se donne pour but de vous faire goûter à la culture française actuelle, mais aussi de vous donner une idée claire de la société où elle naît. Nous en aborderons des aspects très variés en nous concentrant sur ces institutions dont le fonctionnement la distingue d'autres pays (école, hôpital, etc.). Les films que nous allons voir nous permettront d'analyser ces particularités françaises. Il s'agit également de vous encourager à vous exprimer aisément en français : les discussions seront privilégiées et nous réviserons régulièrement des points de grammaire afin d'améliorer votre expression tant écrite qu'orale. Au terme de ce cours, vous pourrez vivre en France sans vous sentir sur une planète étrangère. Prerequisite: FREN 005 or 101.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies; Museum Studies; Visual Studies.

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GEOL B210 Cataloging Collections

Not offered 2025-26

This course is an introduction to cataloguing as an integral component of museum collections management. Students will consider the history, theories, and practices of cataloguing as a museum practice as it relates to the different objectives of various types of museums (art, natural history, science, history, zoological). Students will explore how cultural attitudes, institutional policies, and social expectations have historically influenced, and continue to shape, the development of collections management policies and procedures, while undertaking projects related to collections research and cataloguing. They will evaluate and recommend standardized vocabularies to build a collections database that accommodates more complex histories while optimizing searchability. They will engage with instructors who are actively involved in the professional operations of and calls to "decolonize" collections, becoming trained in the fundamentals of cataloguing collections as they actively rethink these structures and contribute to object records.

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HART B120 History of Chinese Art

Fall 2025

This course is a survey of the arts of China from Neolithic to the contemporary period, focusing on bronze vessels of the Shang and Zhou dynasties, the Chinese appropriation of Buddhist art, and the evolution of landscape and figure painting traditions.This course was formerly numbered HART B274; students who previously completed HART B274 may not repeat this course.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: East Asian Languages & Culture; Museum Studies.

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HART B201 Critical Approaches to Visual Representation: Medieval/Modern

Section 001 (Fall 2024): Byzantine Icons, Then and Now
Section 001 (Fall 2025): Byzantine Textiles in Life, Death, and Afterlife

Fall 2025

This is a topics course. Course content varies. This course is writing intensive. This course examines intersections between the medieval and modern worlds through art and architecture. Students study medieval works of art and/or architecture as well as their afterlives in the modern era, as realized through revivals of style and form, museum exhibition excavation, alteration and adaptation for reuse, etc. There are no prerequisites for this course. Enrollment preference given to majors and minors in History of Art.

Current topic description: Summary: This course explores the manifold uses and meanings of textiles in early Byzantine society in Egypt as indicators of social status and expressions of individual and group identity. Topics include: reading the iconography of textile decoration and its relation to Byzantine cultural and religious traditions and values; textiles as "second skins" of buildings and people; the significance of textiles in local production as well as long distance trade in pre-modern "global" systems of commerce; textiles as metaphors in Christian theology, and the connection between actual and ideal textiles. The course also explores the fraught history of the excavation, collection, sale, and display of early Byzantine Egyptian textiles in the modern era. The status of textiles as a "minor" or "decorative" art is problematized through consideration of current art historical and archaeological methodologies that privilege the function and social values of "material culture" and the "lives of objects." Ethical questions surrounding the excavation and sale of textiles in the early twentieth century as well as changing practices in their conservation and museological display.

Writing Intensive

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Museum Studies.

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HART B275 Museum Studies: History, Theory, Practice

Fall 2025

Using the museums of Philadelphia as field sites, this course provides an introduction to the theoretical and practical aspects of museum studies and the important synergies between theory and practice. Students will learn: the history of museums as institutions of recreation, education and leisure; how the museum itself became a symbol of power, prestige and sometimes alienation; debates around the ethics and politics of collecting objects of art, culture and nature; and the qualities that make an exhibition effective (or not). By visiting exhibitions and meeting with a range of museum professionals in art, anthropology and science museums, this course offers a critical perspective on the inner workings of the museum as well as insights into the "new museology." Not open to first-year students. Enrollment preference given to minors in Museum Studies. This course was formerly numbered HART B281; students who previously completed HART B281 may not repeat this course.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Museum Studies; Visual Studies.

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HART B276 Topics in Museum Studies

Not offered 2025-26

This is a topics course. Course content varies. This course was formerly numbered HART B248.

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HART B340 Topics in Material Culture

Section 001 (Fall 2024): Ornament
Section 001 (Spring 2025): Textile Dyes

Spring 2026

This is a topics course. Course content varies. This course was formerly numbered HART B345.

Current topic description: TBA

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: Museum Studies.

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HART B365 Exhibiting Africa: Art, Artifact and New Articulations

Spring 2026

At the turn of the 20th century, the Victorian natural history museum played an important role in constructing and disseminating images of Africa to the Western public. The history of museum representations of Africa and Africans reveals that exhibitions-both museum exhibitions and "living" World's Fair exhibitions- has long been deeply embedded in politics, including the persistent "othering" of African people as savages or primitives. While paying attention to stereotypical exhibition tropes about Africa, we will also consider how art museums are creating new constructions of Africa and how contemporary curators and conceptual artists are creating complex, challenging new ways of understanding African identities.This course was formerly numbered HART B279; students who previously completed HART B279 may not repeat this course.

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Anthropology; Museum Studies; Visual Studies.

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HART B420 Museum Studies Fieldwork

This course provides students a forum in which to ground, frame and discuss their hands-on work in museums, galleries, archives or collections. Whether students have arranged an internship at a local institution or want to pursue one in the Bryn Mawr College Collections, this course will provide a framework for these endeavors, coupling praxis with theory supported by readings from the discipline of Museum Studies. The course will culminate in a final presentation, an opportunity to reflect critically on the internship experience. Prior to taking the course, students will develop a Praxis Learning Plan through the Career and Civic Engagement office. All students will share a set syllabus, common learning objectives and readings, but will also be able to tailor those objectives to the specific museum setting or Special Collections project in which they are involved. Note: Students are eligible to take up to two Praxis Fieldwork Seminars or Praxis Independent Studies during their time at Bryn Mawr.

Counts Toward: Museum Studies; Praxis Program.

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HIST B208 Monuments, Museums, and Memory

Not offered 2025-26

In this course we will examine how U.S. history circulates in public, investigating the ways scholarly, curatorial, archival, and creative practices shape popular conceptions of the American past, in particular understandings of racial, gender, sexual, and class oppression and resistance. Students will build skills in historical interpretation and archival research and explore possibilities and challenges in preserving and presenting the past in a variety of public contexts-monuments, memorials, museums, historical sites, movies and television, genealogy, and community-based history projects.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Growth and Structure of Cities; Museum Studies.

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HIST B237 Themes in Modern African History

Not offered 2025-26

This is a topics course. Course content varies

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities; International Studies; International Studies; Museum Studies.

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HIST B349 Topics in Comparative History

Not offered 2025-26

This is a topics course. Topics vary.

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ITAL B240 Philadelphia the Global City: The Italian Legacy across Time

Fall 2025

This course investigates the history and evolution of Philadelphia as a globalized and multi-ethnic city, using as a case study for this analysis the impact and legacy of transnational Italian culture across the centuries. By adopting a cross-cultural, trans-historical, and interdisciplinary approach, the course explores the influence that - along with and in intersection with many other cultural inputs - also Italian arts and cultures have exerted on the city, making it become the cosmopolitan and transnational urban environment that it is today. Throughout the centuries and way before Italy even started existing as a state, Philadelphians traveled to the peninsula and brought back objects to display in emerging cultural institutions or studied the country's art and architecture styles to shape the evolving aspect of the city. Simultaneously, incoming immigration formed new neighborhoods - such as South Philly, home to the Italian Market - and Italian figures came to prominence and became part of the social fabric of the city. Nowadays, many non-profit organizations work to preserve the traces that Italian migrants left within Philadelphia's multi-ethnic urban environment as well as to extend the city's global profile and celebrate its heritage and diversity. Through specific field trips, on-site experiential activities, and forms of civic engagement this course highlights both the enduring fascination of Philadelphians with Italy (or with the idea thereof) across the centuries and the role that the Italian Diaspora played in the development of the city. The course ultimately challenges geographical, chronological, and cultural boundaries by showing how places, arts, identities that today are perceived as 'American' have in most cases an intersectional, multi-ethnic, and cross-cultural history to tell. This course will be taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program. All readings and class discussion will be in English, and no knowledge of Italian is required. Students seeking Italian credits will complete their assignments in the target language.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Growth and Structure of Cities; History; History of Art; Museum Studies; Praxis Program.

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ITAL B315 A Gendered History of the Avant-Garde

Not offered 2025-26

The very concept of 'avant-garde' is steeped in a masculine warlike imagery, and the founding manifesto of Futurism even glorifies 'contempt for the woman'. Yet, feminine, queer, androgynous, and non-binary perspectives on sexual identity played a central role - from Rimbaud to current experimentalism - in the development of what has been called 'the tradition of the new'. In this seminar we will explore such a paradoxical anti-traditional tradition through texts, images, sounds, and videos, adopting a historical prospective from early 20th century movements to the Neo-Avant-Garde. We will unearth the stories and works of great experimentalists who have been neglected because of their gender. We will deal with poems made up entirely of place names, of recorded noises, of typographical symbols. Taking advantage of the college's collection and library, we will try to read texts with no words, surreal stories, performances, objects, and we will make our own avant-garde experiments. Course taught in English, no previous knowledge of Italian required.

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PSYC B231 Health Psychology

Fall 2025

This course will provide an overview of the field of health psychology using lecture, exams, videos, assignments, and an article critique. We will examine the current definition of health psychology, as well as the theories and research behind many areas in health psychology (both historical and contemporary). The course will focus on specific health and social psychological theories, empirical research, and applying the theory and research to real world situations. Prerequisite: Introductory Psychology (PSYC B105) or Foundations of Psychology (PSYC H100). Students may take either this course or HLTH/PSYC H245 not both.

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: Health Studies; Health Studies; Museum Studies.

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SPAN B312 Latin American and Latino Art and the Question of the Masses

Fall 2025

The course examines the ways in which Latin American and Latino texts (paintings, murals, sculptures, and some narratives) construct "minor," "featureless" and "anonymous" characters, thus demarcating how and which members of society can and cannot advance a plot, act independently and/or be agents of change. By focusing the attention on what is de-emphasized, we will explore how artistic works, through their form, are themselves political actors in the social life of Latin America, the US, and beyond. We will also consider the place of Latin American and Latino Art in the US imaginary and in institutions such as museums and galleries. Prerequisites: Course is taught in English. Students seeking Spanish credit must have taken at least one Spanish course at the 200-level, or received permission from instructor. Course does not meet an Approach. Counts toward Latin American, Iberian and Latina/o Studies. Counts toward Museum Studies. Counts toward History of Art.

Writing Attentive

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: History of Art; International Studies; International Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx; Museum Studies.

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