ART AND MEDICINE

Undergraduate Lecture
How fine artists, scientific illustrators, and popular image-makers have envisioned medicine’s culture—especially its ways of knowing the body, and the implications of such knowledge for constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality; the metaphorical uses of disease and deviance in the visual arts. Designed to introduce students in the humanities, fine arts and social sciences to the culture of science, while also offering life science and pre-med students an opportunity to think critically about the visual history of their own practices, and how they intersect, often in unexpected ways, with the history of art.

RACE AND REPRESENTATION

Graduate and Undergraduate Seminar
The visual culture of the African diaspora in the US, France and Belgium, with forays into the art of the Caribbean. Readings are drawn not only from art history, anthropology and sociology, but from gender, cultural and new media studies, and postcolonial theory. We also consider the visual culture of racial violence, as transmitted through social media.

POPULAR CULTURE AND MODERNITY

Undergraduate Seminar
Andy Warhol’s portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor may seem old-fashioned; yet the Guggenheim Museum stages a huge retrospective of the works of fashion designer Giorgio Armani, and Disneyland becomes an object of analysis for scholars from a variety of fields. How do we sort these differences out? What happens when popular culture starts to change the way in which art is perceived, and even defined?