Graduate Seminars

• ARHS 6304
• Prof. Bailey Benson
• Friday 2:00 – 4:50 p.m., Owen Fine Arts Center 1190

This graduate seminar examines how Romans remembered through visual and material culture, exploring how portraits, inscriptions, monuments, and spaces embodied, preserved, or erased memory across the empire. Drawing on key theories of collective and material memory, students investigate commemoration, identity, trauma, and forgetting, from ancestral masks and temple dedications to damnatio memoriae and the reuse of monuments. Through these case studies, the course reveals how memory functioned as a political, social, and emotional force in Roman life and its enduring afterlives.

photo: Sebasteion at Aphrodisias, 20-60 CE

• ARHS 6335
• Prof. Amy Freund
• Thursday 2:00 – 4:50 PM, Owen Fine Arts Center 1190

What did it mean to picture non-human animals in early modern Europe? In the seminar, we will examine the visual representation of animals in a range of media and contexts, from painted portraits to scientific treatises to automata. Themes to be considered include: the role of animals in European representations of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, the building and decoration of menageries, the depiction of animals in scientific illustration, the arts of the hunt, the place of animals in portraiture, artists’ use of animal materials, and art’s role in nascent campaigns against cruelty to animals. Our readings will be drawn from art historical and historical studies but also from primary sources on animals and from recent theorizations of the human/animal relationship.

photo: Jan Van Kessel the Elder, Insects and Reptiles (detail), c. 1660, Oak Spring Garden Foundation

• ARHS 6353
• Prof. Randall Griffin
• Tuesday 2:00 – 4:50 PM, Owen Fine Arts Center 1190

This seminar will explore Abstract Expressionism.  Artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Norman Lewis, Sam Gilliam, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler helped create a seismic shift in the American art world after World War II.  The seminar will examine paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, and sculpture.  That work invites questions about why abstraction had such a hold on artists in the 1950s and 1960s, the reasons it incarnated originality and authenticity, and how it was coded as masculine or feminine.  The class will also study the role critics, galleries, and collectors played in the success of that avant-garde movement.  Students are encouraged to investigate the legacy of Abstract Expressionism in different parts of the world.

photo: Franz Kline, Mahoning, 1956, Whitney Museum of American Art

• ARHS 6366
• Prof. Michelle Rich, The Ellen and Harry S. Parker III Associate Curator of Indigenous American Art
• Wednesday 2:00 – 4:50 PM, (off-campus location: Dallas Museum of Art)

In this graduate seminar we will explore Maya art from the past to the present across Mexico, Central America, and the U.S. diaspora. The class corresponds to the co-organized exhibition Maya Women and the Art of Life, scheduled to open at the DMA in October 2027. Topics include ancient and contemporary Maya visual culture; the history and trajectory of Maya-based exhibitions; the spatial narrative structuring Maya Women and the Art of Life; and general curatorial practice including exhibition concept development, research and development, content creation, funding, and evaluation.

top photo: Wall Panel Depicting Ix K'an Bolon, Pomona, Mexico, 692 CE. Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. James H. Clark, 1968.39.FA.

bottom photo: Monumento vivo, 2024. Marilyn Boror Bor. Performed in Santiago de Chile, Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende. https://marilynboror.com/monumento-vivo/.