专业描述

The program in the History of Art and Architecture is conceived to reveal the ways that artistic practices at once reflect and shape the societies in which they are produced. Students delve into works of art, architecture and visual culture within their historical contexts and experiential dimensions. Courses prepare students to consider art works as evidential—each work representative of its original time, place, and circumstances of production. Students view art history as a discipline that has a history, and examine the historical and theoretical frames that have shaped its definition over time. Thus, for instance, students examine the assumptions behind linear histories of art unfolding along a continuum of time, countering these with readings that trace developments across geographical space. Students probe the ways that form is linked with meaning, and the ways that changes in form can be read as indicative of developments that take place across time and space. So, too, they are encouraged to register the shifting boundaries of art history’s domain, which has come to extend well beyond the “luxury” items of high art (painting, sculpture, drawing, architecture) to the broader realm of material culture.