Byzantine and Islamic Art and Archaeology

HART 305 traces how the Mediterranean and Near East reinvented their visual culture between Constantine and the fall of Constantinople, watching Late Roman, Byzantine, and early Islamic worlds borrow from and define themselves against one another through churches, mosques, mosaics, and manuscripts. You'll work through weekly lectures and readings from Lowden and Hillenbrand, sit a midterm and quizzes, prepare a presentation, and learn to read buildings and objects on excursions rather than just memorize them. As a senior-year archaeology requirement, it ties together the Roman and medieval material you've met earlier and gives you the vocabulary needed to handle Anatolian sites and Islamic monuments in fieldwork or graduate study.