Courses Offered This Year

• Professor: Dr. Blair Betik
• Monday/Wednesday, 11:00-11:50 a.m. (with Friday sections)
• O’Donnell Lecture Hall (OAC 2130)

This course introduces the arts and societies of the major cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and ancient Middle East: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Bronze Age Aegean, Greece, Etruscan and Roman. The timespan of this survey primarily covers 4,000 BCE to 350 CE, from the pyramids of the pharaohs to the official Roman adoption of Christianity. Special attention is placed on art and architecture as a part of human life, from everyday activities to fabulous spectacles and the afterlife. Considering that these works of art were used and viewed in spaces and contexts that are drastically different than the museum and gallery culture of today, the course aims to resituate the art of the past within its original socialhistorical context and to probe the cultural value of these works on their own terms. At the same time, we examine the ways in which these works have been given the status of “masterpieces” within the canon of art history and question how and why these works were selected as special carriers of cultural value in our contemporary society.

CC Credits: Creativity & Aesthetics

Image information: Ludovisi Gaul, marble, c. 1st–2nd century CE (Roman copy after a 3rd-century BCE bronze original), Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Altemps, Rome.

• Professor: Dr. Roberto Conduru
• Tuesday/Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-12:20 p.m.
• O’Donnell Lecture Hall (OAC 2130)

This course offers an overview of Latin American art from ancient times to the present, treating ‘Latin America’ as both a geopolitical and a cultural category. It examines art as a wide-ranging and complex cultural phenomenon, considering the region's enduring legacies and the ongoing processes of change that have shaped its arts. Key issues include: Indigenous sovereign societies; Spanish and Portuguese colonies; world exchanges; slavery and abolition; independence movements, political revolutions, and sociocultural reforms; Latin America’s distinct identity in relation to other geopolitical regions; links between political and artistic independence; modernism as a conflict among nativist, internationalist, and multiculturalist trends; and contemporary art within the contexts of postcolonialism, decolonization and globalization. This introductory survey course is designed for undergraduate students from diverse academic and professional backgrounds; no prior art history coursework or experience with Latin America is required. The course features slide lectures, classroom discussions, and visits to SMU and Dallas museums.

CC Credits: Creativity & Aesthetics

Image information: Miguel Covarrubias. Genesis, The Gift of Life, 1954. Glass mosaic, 144 x 720 in. Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX.

• Professor: Dr. Stephanie Langin-Hooper
• Tuesday/Thursday, 12:30-1:50 p.m.
• O’Donnell Lecture Hall (OAC 2130)

This course explores the art of ancient Egypt, the Land of the Pharaohs, from the first pyramids (ca. 3500 BCE) through the death of Cleopatra and the Roman conquest (30 BCE). It focuses on major royal monuments, temples, funerary art and mummies, statuary, and luxury arts. Emphasizes an understanding of Egyptian art within its cultural context, in order to better understand both the ancient civilization and the modern fascination with Egypt.

CC Credits: Historical Contexts

Image information: Mummy mask of King Tutankhamun, c. 1323 BCE, Valley of the Kings, Egypt.

• Professor: Dr. Adam Herring
• Tuesday, 2:00-4:50 p.m.
• Greer Garson Theatre (OAC 3515)

This UHP 3000-level course examines the Inca site of Machu Picchu (Peru), and the artistic and cultural legacies that brought it forth (chronology; artistic media; political, social, and religious institutions; historical processes). Students will study the principal media, techniques, and functions of Inca art and architecture of Machu Picchu and the Cusco region. As a UHP course, the class will take enrolled students on a learning trip to Cusco and Machu Picchu in March/April (dates TBD). Enrollment through University Honors Program.

CC Credits: Creativity & Aesthetics, Human Diversity

Image information: Machu Picchu

• Professor: Dr. Blair Betik
• Monday/Wednesday/Friday, 1:00-1:50 p.m.
• Greer Garson Theatre (OAC 3515)

This course is an exploration of the visual culture from the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. Focus is placed on analyzing Roman houses, especially wall painting, sculpture, mosaics, small objects, and domestic architecture, through the lens of visual and historical analysis. Civic and religious architecture at Pompeii is also studied. Emphasis is on understanding the ruins of Pompeii within the broader context of Roman painting and other Roman arts during the Republic and Early Empire.

CC Credits: Creativity & Aesthetics

Image information: Woman in Concert, wall painting, 30–40 CE, from Pompeii, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli.

• Professor: Dr. Stephanie Langin-Hooper
• Tuesday/Thursday, 9:30-10:50 a.m.
• Greer Garson Theatre (OAC 3515)

From the Tower of Babel and the Hanging Gardens to the Code of Hammurabi, the art of Mesopotamia holds a mythical aura. This lecture course investigates and demystifies the arts of ancient Iraq and its neighbors (Iran, Israel, Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean) from the invention of cities (c. 4000 B.C.E.) to the beginning of Islam (c.600 C.E.). It also examines temple and palace architecture, monumental sculpture, glyptic, terracotta, and small-scale luxury arts to appreciate some of the oldest civilizations in the world.

CC Credits: Creativity & Aesthetics

Image information: “Ram in the Thicket” (goat in a tree) incense burner, c. 2450 BCE, Royal Tombs of Ur, Iraq.

• Professor: Dr. Ravinder Binning
• Monday/Wednesday/Friday, 9:00-9:50 a.m.
• Greer Garson Theatre (OAC 3515)

This course is a survey of medieval art and architecture, from the fall of the Roman Empire through the 13th century, in both the Christian West and East. It explores, both thematically and chronologically, a wide range of visual culture, from cathedrals and illuminated manuscripts to sacred works in glass, metal, ivory and wood. It also examines how the rich cross-cultural exchanges between Christians, Jews and Muslims during this period helped forge an extraordinarily rich array of art and architecture.

CC Credits: Historical Contexts

Image information: Folio 34r ("Matthew; Chi Rho). The Book of Kells. (Trinity College MS. 58). Ninth Century. Ink, parchment. Trinity College, Dublin, IE.

• Professor: Dr. Amy Freund
• Tuesday/Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-12:20 p.m.
• Greer Garson Theatre (OAC 3515)

This course introduces students to the art historical study of a range of artistic media and techniques, and provides the skills needed to produce a materially grounded analysis of artworks. Through a series of in-depth case studies of different media (sculpture, painting, printmaking, photography, drawing, ceramics, textiles, etc), participants study historical and contemporary artmaking processes, learn to recognize a range of materials and techniques, acquire basic art handling skills, and study conservation technologies that help analyze and preserve artworks. The course combines hands-on work with art objects in local museums, libraries and art studios with an introduction to technical art history and a consideration of how art historians write about artistic materials and processes. Students leave the course with skills essential for careers as museum curators, conservators, registrars and art handlers.

CC Credits: Technological Advances and Society

Image information: Casting of a bronze equestrian sculpture, from Diderot and d'Alembert’s Encyclopédie, engraving, France, 1765.

• Professor: Dr. Randall Griffin
• Monday/Wednesday/Friday, 10:00-10:50 a.m.
• Greer Garson Theatre (OAC 3515)

This course examines the origins of photography in the early 19th century, when photography emerged as part of a late-Enlightenment scientific discourse and was interwoven with a wide array of new institutional spaces, including botany, anthropology and geology. It also examines photography on the battlefield and in prisons, the emergence of documentary photography and the role that medium played in shaping consumer culture, and the emergence of art photography, from Victorian peasant imagery to Precisionist portrayals of skyscrapers in the 1930s.

CC Credits: Technological Advances and Society

Image information: Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Le Grand Prix, 1913.

• Professor: Sophia Salinas
• Tuesday/Thursday, 12:30-1:50 p.m.
• Greer Garson Theatre (OAC 3515)

This course is an international survey of contemporary art from 1965 to the present, with specific attention to the rise of the current proliferation of new modes and new media in art (multimedia, installation, performance, site-specificity, video, interactive, and digital art), locating its origins in the social upheaval and shifting artistic practices at the close of the 1960s. It also examines contemporary art practices as they relate to a range of influential developments in critical theory, social history, and local and global visual cultures.

CC Credits: Creativity & Aesthetics

Image information: Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, 1995, fifty-one channel video installation (including one closed-circuit television feed), custom electronics, neon lighting, steel and wood; color, sound.

• Professor: Dr. Tashima Thomas
• Monday/Wednesday/Friday, 11:00-11:50 a.m.
• Greer Garson Theatre (OAC 3515)

This course explores the Afro-Fantastic as an aesthetic and theoretical framework for examining the liberatory possibilities of blackness in this contemporary moment. ‘Afro-Fantastic’ is a term that loosely assembles creative modalities of blackness including Afrofuturism, Afro-Surrealism, Afro-Punk, and Afro-Gothic.

CC Credits: Creativity & Aesthetics

Image information: Fabrice Monteiro, The Prophecy, 2025.

• Professor: Dr. Randall Griffin
• Wednesdays, 2:00-4:50 p.m.
• OAC 2020

It was during the Gilded Age (1865-1915) that highbrow culture (operas, symphonies, art museums) first flourished in America. Wealthy women from Boston and New York went to Paris each summer to find haute-couture fashion, and art collectors rejected the fashion for Hudson River School paintings of Yosemite and the Rocky Mountains. Instead, collectors purchased scenes of French peasants, exotic rug merchants in Cairo or the canals of Venice. Owing to those changes in taste American artists attended art schools in Paris, Dusseldorf, or Munich, and devoted themselves to European subjects. The artists who continued to represent American subjects often wedded those native themes with current European fashions in art. The seminar will discuss various ways in which American art from that era has been interpreted by art historians and social historians. The strengths and weaknesses of the various assumptions about the imagery will be evaluated.

CC Credits: none

Image information: John Singer Sargent, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 1885, Tate Britain

• Professor: Dr. Amy Freund
• Tuesdays, 2:00-4:50 p.m.
• Prothro Hall 0203

This seminar introduces students to seminal texts and contemporary debates in the research and writing of art history. Each week is devoted to a fundamental critical issue raised in the study of images and objects, including form, materials, content, context, connoisseurship, taste, biography, iconography, social identity, politics, ideology, class and economics. Students read, discuss and compare the many methods adopted

by art historians and use those methods in discussions of objects in Dallas/Fort Worth collections. The course also contains a research and writing workshop component in which students are introduced to research tools, taught writing skills specific to art history, and guided through the process of conducting scholarly research. Enrollment is required for art history majors and is a prerequisite to all other 4000-level seminars.

CC Credits: Oral Communication

Image information: Honoré Daumier “The Bourgeois at the Salon” 1842, lithograph, France