Jordana Moore Saggese

This is a survey of the arts from the early 19th century to the present time. This class examines profound transformations within modern culture: mechanized industry and transportation, mass urbanization, individual expression, political pluralism, cultural extremism, the avant garde; and their impact upon the traditional arts of painting, sculpture and architecture. Also explored are the new mechanical arts of photography, film, and video. Intended for second semester freshman students.

Current students can access course information here.

This graduate seminar is a survey of the key texts, thinkers, concepts, and theoretical approaches that influence the study of visual culture and the production of criticism. It is an opportunity for students to engage with the ideas that are deployed in these conversations, while gaining the ability to use these resources in their own work. The course is by design interdisciplinary, drawing upon the theoretical advances made in fields as diverse as philosophy, linguistics, art history, psychoanalysis, and literary studies. We also attend to how these discourses are creatively transformed by those working within feminist and/or queer theoretical frameworks. The guiding thesis of this course is that the visual is situated within larger fields of cultural production, which require carefully defined strategies to make explicit their ontological, epistemological, historical, and political assumptions. Download the course syllabus here.

How do we represent difference? How have the visual arts been used to classify, to pathologize, and to regulate non-white, queer, or differently abled bodies? This course offers a comparative and thematic approach to studying the representation of otherness in art and visual culture from the eighteenth century to the present. We will work to expand the definition of otherness, and consider the roles that ethnicity, nationality, and politics play in representations of otherness across various continents and chronologies. Via a combination of weekly reading assignments, lectures, and discussions we shall undertake contextualized examinations of image-making strategies and of power differentials mediated across communities of artists and viewers.

This course studies art and material culture of the modern American world, from the late colonial era to the present day. Over the semester, we will pay particular attention to the role that artistic production and consumption have played in constructing American social identities and in larger social and political debates around issues of labor, identity, modernism, and nationalism.

In a 2002 interview, contemporary artist William Pope.L proclaimed: "Bottom line, artists don't make art, they make conversation." Indeed, Pope.L’s performances often provoke conversations about race, class, power, and privilege by deploying humorous and unexpected modes of social and cultural critique. For artists outside the majority, performance uniquely provides a live and interactive means of complicating the notion of representational visibility in both art and non-art contexts. This course explores the politics of performance and, more specifically, its potential to question rigid constructions of identity and difference. We will be especially interested in discussing how queers, artists of color, and those with intersectional identities use performance as a survival strategy, a mode of becoming, a means of intervening, a form of speculating, or a way of imagining other spaces that challenge ideological conventions and norms. We will consider the role of performative interventions as a model of social and intellectual activism, looking at examples both historical and contemporary, global and local. Class will be organized around the discussion of critical readings and screenings of live and recorded performances. Students will sharpen their research, verbal communication, and writing skills in the development of a research project on a topic of their choice.

This course is a survey of the key texts, thinkers, concepts, and theoretical approaches that influence the study of visual culture and the production of criticism. It is an opportunity for students to engage with the ideas that are deployed in these conversations, while gaining the ability to use these resources in their own work. The course is by design interdisciplinary, drawing upon the theoretical advances made in fields as diverse as philosophy, linguistics, art history, psychoanalysis, and literary studies. We also attend to how these discourses are creatively transformed by those working within feminist and/or queer theoretical frameworks. The guiding thesis of this course is that the visual is situated within larger fields of cultural production, which require carefully defined strategies to make explicit their ontological, epistemological, historical, and political assumptions.