Special Topics in Art, Architecture and Archaeology

A rotating-topic seminar where the instructor picks one theoretical lens or regional-chronological focus per semester and reads material culture through it; the version sketched here threads color, the body, place, and food across periods from the Palaeolithic to Byzantium to ask how objects carried social meaning. You'll work through case studies in lecture and discussion, sit a midterm and final, give a presentation, and write an essay that analyzes a specific work in both its formal and cultural context. It's an upper-level elective that assumes you already have the survey-level grounding from earlier HART courses, and it's where you start practicing the interdisciplinary, theory-aware reading of objects that thesis work and graduate study will demand.