History of Art

HART B220 Critical Approaches to Visual Representation: Landscapes, Art, & Racial Ecologies
This course is writing intensive. This course uses art, visual, and material culture to trace the plantation’s centrality to colonial and post-colonial environments in the Atlantic World from the eighteenth century to the present, as a site of environmental destruction as well as parallel ecologies engendered by African-descended peoples’ aesthetic and botanical contestation. Objects to be considered include landscape painting, plantation cartography, scientific imagery, environmental art, and ecologically motivated science fiction.

HART B268 Telling Bryn Mawr Histories: Topics, Sources, and Methods
This course introduces students to archival and object-based research methods, using the College's built environment and curatorial and archival collections as our laboratory. Students will explore buildings, documents, objects, and themes in relation to the history of Bryn Mawr College. Students will frame an original group research project to which each student will contribute an individual component. Prerequisite: An interest in exploring and reinterpreting the institutional and architectural history of Bryn Mawr College and a willingness to work collaboratively on a shared project.

HART B380 Topics in Film Studies-Digital Media Art
D. N. Rodowick has argued that the digital arts "are the most radical instance yet of an old Cartesian dream: the best representations are the most immaterial ones because they seen to free the mind from the body and the world of substance." In this seminar, we will explore digital images in relation to cinema, photography, and other media. We will examine the fate of materiality, the body, and duration in 21st c. media, and consider whether or not the digital marks a significant break from the analog. Texts by Gilles Deleuze, Lev Manovich, Hito Steyerl, and others; works by Natalie Bookchin, Harun Farocki, Jacolby Satterwhite, and others.