Architecture and Design Studies

“The future belongs to the ghosts,” remarked the philosopher Jacques Derrida in 1996, as his interlocutor, Bernard Stiegler, phrases the main idea behind that statement: “Modern technology, contrary to appearances, increases tenfold the power of ghosts.” With the advent of the internet, various forms of social media, and the ubiquity of filmic images in our lives, Derrida's observations have proven to be quite prophetic, such that they call for a new field of study—one that requires less an ontology of being and the real and more a “hauntology” (to invoke Derrida's punish term) of the spectral, the virtual, the phantasmic, the imaginary, and the recurrent revenant. In this seminar, we consider ways in which the past and present are haunted by ghosts and vexed by spectrality. Topics to be covered include: specters and hauntings, figures and apparitions, history and memory, trauma and political crisis, fantasy and imagination, digital interfaces, haunted data and archives, and visual and acoustical images. We will consider a range of films and video, photography, literary texts, acoustic reverberations, internet and social media, and everyday discourses and imaginings. Through these inquiries, we will be able to further our understanding of the nature of specters and apparitions in the contemporary world in their many forms and dimensions. Students will be invited to undertake their own hauntologies and thus craft studies of the phenomenal force of specters, hauntings, and the apparitional in particular social or cultural contexts.

Javanese shadow theatre, Bedouin love poems, and American community life are but a few of the sociocultural worlds that anthropologists have effectively studied and written about. This is no easy task, given the substantial difficulties involved in understanding and portraying the concerns, activities, and lifeworlds other than one’s own. Despite these challenges, ethnographic research is generally considered one of the best ways to form a nuanced and contextually rich understanding of a particular social world. To gain an informed sense of the methods, challenges, and benefits of such an approach, students will try their hands at ethnographic research and writing. In fall, each student will be asked to undertake an ethnographic research project in order to investigate the features of a specific social world—such as a homeless shelter, a religious festival, or a neighborhood in Brooklyn. In spring, students will craft a fully realized piece of ethnographic writing that conveys something of the features and dynamics of that world in lively, accurate, and comprehensive terms. Along the way, and with the help of anthropological writings that are either exceptional or experimental in nature, we will collectively think through some of the most important features of ethnographic projects, such as interviewing others, the use of field notes, the interlacing of theory and data, the role of dialogue and the author’s voice in ethnographic prose, and the ethical and political responsibilities that come with any attempt to understand and portray the lives of others.

There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarity. —Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is one of the most important thinkers and writers of the 20th century. His many writings and innovative concepts, which continue to be discussed and debated today, are of pressing relevance for the contemporary moment, marked as it is by themes of technological and aesthetic transformations, political violence, and histories of exile and displacement. The purpose of this intensive seminar will be to delve into the textures of Benjamin’s life—from his childhood years in Berlin to his final days in France and Spain—while considering the diverse and intricate formations of Benjamin’s thought and writing. For this inquiry, we will be drawing from a number of biographical, historiographic, political, literary, and anthropological lines of analysis to gain an incisive sense of his groundbreaking writings on film and photography, literature and translation, concepts of history, and the politics of culture. Along the way, we will connect Benjamin’s thought to other significant writers and philosophers, including Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida. We will focus on a number of key texts authored by Benjamin, including Berlin Childhood around 1900, The Arcades Project, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” “The Task of the Translator,” “The Storyteller,” and “On the Concept of History.” In engaging with these and other challenging texts and giving thought to Benjamin’s life and death more generally, students will develop a richly informed understanding of the life and thought of this singularly compelling person while coming to terms with the haunted histories of the 20th and 21st centuries.

This year-long seminar offers an introduction to histories of modern and contemporary art through two distinct themes: place and space. In fall, we will explore the place of the Hudson Valley through the category of Hudson River School landscape painting, asking how Euro-American artists portrayed ideologies of imperialism, settler-colonialism, and Western expansionism through the genre of landscape. We will also explore how Indigenous and Black artists have defined place, land, and embodiment as counter-histories to the dominant, white, western norm. Along the way, we will ask broader questions such as: What can art tell us about humans’ relationships to land and environment? How does art shape our understanding of climate crisis and the Anthropocene, or how humans have indelibly altered the earth? In spring, we will explore the category of sculpture in relationship to the body, light, and touch; the pedestal, the space of the museum, the monument, and the public sphere; commodities and everyday objects; and photography, video, and film. Our aim will be to explore how sculptures and installations shape how we perceive objects, sites, and spaces in the world. We will also research the Sarah Lawrence College archives to write about public sculptures past and present on campus. This course will introduce students to the skills of close reading, visual analytical writing, and archival and library research. Assignments may include visual analysis essays, reading responses, peer reviews, and collaborative digital humanities projects. Conference projects will entail writing a long-form research paper or presenting your research in an alternate format, such as a podcast or online exhibition. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and small-group activities that will include field trips to area museums, introductions to campus resource, and research sessions. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

This course will explore the powerful architecture, sculpture, and painting styles that lie at the heart of the creation of Europe and the idea of the West. We will use a number of strategies to explore how expressive narrative painting and sculpture and new monumental architectural styles were engaged in the formation of a common European identity and uncover, as well, the artistic vestiges of diverse groups and cultures that challenge that uniform vision. These are arts that chronicle deep social struggles between classes, intense devotion through pilgrimage, the rise of cities and universities, and movements that could both advocate genocide and nurture enormous creativity in styles both flamboyant and austere, growing from places as diverse as castles and rural monasteries to Gothic cathedrals. The course will explore those aspects of expressive visual language that link works of art to social history, the history of ideas, and political ideology.

Focusing on Europe and its intersections with the Americas, Africa, and the Caribbean, this course will explore how artists in the long 19th century responded to the economic, political, and social upheavals of modernity and imperialism. We will look to artists depicting plantation economies, sanitizing the slave trade, and abolitionists forging a new visual rhetoric to depict bodily freedom and personhood. We will consider how artists reveled in capitalist spectacle, leisure, and entertainment, including through the nascent medium of photography. We will also grapple with how realism and materialism became tools to voice politics amidst revolution and nationalism, social inequality, and the rise of the bourgeoisie. Readings and lectures will introduce the movements of neoclassicism, romanticism, realism, impressionism, aestheticism, and neo-impressionism— and dig deeper to take up questions of collective and individual; center and periphery; gender, race, class, and sexuality; and land, landscape, and industry. This lecture-seminar hybrid will also entail field trips to area museums.

This seminar in art theory and curatorial practice will explore ecological aesthetics in the era of anthropogenic climate change. The course’s guiding question will be: What forms might an aesthetic experience of nature take when it no longer privileges the human observer but, rather, cultivates an equality and reciprocity between all forms of life? Possible answers will be drawn from recent work in critical theory, Black studies, Indigenous studies, queer theory, continental philosophy, and science and technology studies. Case studies on the work of selected contemporary artists will complement the theoretical frameworks under consideration. The course’s topics will include: post-Enlightenment aesthetics of nature, biopower, vitalism, post- and antihumanisms, plant philosophies, bacteria and fungi studies, and deep time. The course will also incorporate a curatorial practicum that will allow students to participate in the production of an on-campus exhibition exploring ecological themes. In addition to exercises on exhibition writing, model making, and art installation, we will meet with artworld professionals working at museums in the New York area.

The visual arts and architecture constitute a central part of human expression and experience, both growing from and influencing our lives in profound ways that we might not consciously acknowledge. We will explore intersections between the visual arts and cultural, political, and social history with the goal of using art-history methods and theories to deal critically with works of art. This course is not a survey; rather, it will include a limited number of artists and works of art and architecture, which students will learn about in depth through formal analysis, readings, discussion, research, and debate. We will endeavor to understand each work from the point of view of its creators and patrons and by following its changing reception by audiences throughout time, including the ways in which those changes evoke political and social meanings. To accomplish this, we will need to understand some of the languages of art. The course, then, is also a course in visual literacy: the craft of reading and interpreting visual images on their own terms. We will also discuss a number of issues of contemporary concern; for instance, the destruction of art, free speech and respect of religion, the art market, and the museum.

This course will be about how we perceive objects, sites, and spaces in the world. We will look closely at how modern and contemporary critics and artists have defined the medium of sculpture in relation to the body, light, and touch; the pedestal, the museum, the monument, and the public sphere; commodities and everyday objects; and photography, video, and film. We will begin with how theorists and writers described sculptural perception in the Enlightenment and beyond, consider the legacies of neoclassicism and the fraught status of sculpture in modernism, and conclude our story with large-scale installations in contemporary art. Along the way, we will explore sculptors remaking the category of sculpture by upsetting expectations for a stable object and blurring the boundaries between public monument and private encounter; using reproducible media to display their objects in the public realm; and making objects that incorporated commodities, functional things, bodies, raw matter, and detritus. The course will touch on discourses of neoclassicism, modernism, race and cultural memory, surrealism, minimalism, site-specificity, installation, feminism, and participatory art. Exploring a range of focused case studies—whenever possible through works in person—this course will ask what a 20th-century sculpture was and how it operated in the public realm. This lecture-seminar hybrid will also entail field trips to area museums.

A number of contemporary politicians would have us believe that Medieval Europe was an almost uniquely Christian place and that the other two Abrahamic religions—Judaism and Islam—were fleeting and insignificant forces in the development of Europe and the Mediterranean. The arts, however, tell a different story. It is not a story of a utopia of tolerance and understanding, nor is it one of constant hostility and opposition between religious groups. The arts, instead, reveal multiple different ways that relations between different religious groups are constructed in societies, in times of war and peace, and in times of tension and productive interaction between different religious groups. The works we will explore are fascinating and historically revealing. The themes will be traced in mosques, churches, and synagogues; in palaces and gardens; in paintings, costume, and luxury arts, seeing how rich the act of grappling with difference can make a society. To understand these relations, we will also explore theories of interaction and question some of the ways in which religious difference has been characterized in the arts in the past.

Geospatial data is information associated with locations on the surface of the Earth and can include a variety of different types of data used in environmental science, such as sample collection locations at a field-study site, the areal extent of a forest biome, or the output generated by global climate models. The analysis of geospatial data also allows social scientists to identify disparities in access to natural resources or exposure to pollutants and hazards and has been critical to the study of environmental justice. This course provides an introduction to foundational concepts in physical geography and geodesy, cartography and geostatistics, along with practical experience in geospatial data analysis using open source Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software. Although we will focus primarily on environmental applications, the skills learned in this course can be utilized in many natural and social-science disciplines, as well as to help you avoid getting lost!

At a time when digital, three-dimensional (3D) space has saturated our visual vocabulary in everything from design and entertainment to gaming, now more than ever it is important to explore the interface of this space and find methods for unlocking its potential. This will be an introductory course for Maya, the industry-standard 3D modeling and animation software. We will learn the fundamental approaches to environment building, 3D modeling, character creation, character rigging, and keyframe animation. This course will also provide a comprehensive understanding of the important process of rendering, using texturing, lighting, and staging. We will explore how all of these processes may culminate in narrative-based animations, alongside how 3D constructions can be exported into everything from film projects to physical media. Great emphasis will be placed on experimentation in navigating between digital and physical processes. Exercises and assignments will be contextualized through lectures and with readings of both historical and contemporary creators in the field.

This course will focus on the concepts of character-design development as a preproduction stage to animation. Students will gain knowledge in drawing by learning formal spatial concepts in order to create, both visually and conceptually, fully realized characters. Through the development of character boards, model sheets, beat boards, and character animatic projects, students will draw and conceptualize human, animal, mechanical, and hybrid figures. Students will research characters in their visual, environmental, psychological, and social aspects to establish a full understanding of characterization. Both hand-drawn materials and digital drawing will be used throughout the semester. Students may use their choice of drawing software, based on their own experience and skill level. Students will have access to the animation rooms with a variety of software options, including Storyboard Pro, Harmony, Photoshop, Illustrator, and editing software Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premier. Students new to digital drawing will work in Storyboard Pro software; students with personal access to Procreate may also use this iPad-based art studio software. Assignments and projects will include character boards, model sheets, and animatics. There will be daily character drawing exercises, structural anatomy demonstrations, basic digital drawing concepts, and empirical perspective drawing discussions throughout the semester. This is a labor-intensive drawing course, which requires a commitment to developing drawing skills. Good drawing demands time, commitment, and intelligence. The final conference project is a concept-based, fully-developed character animatic. Knowledge from this course can be used to create and enhance animations; to establish a character outline for an interactive media project; or to help in developing a cast of characters for game design, graphic novels, or narrative film.

In this course, students will develop animation and micro storytelling skills by focusing on the process of creating frame-by-frame digital drawings and keyframe movement for animation. This course will serve as an introduction to both the professional digital software Harmony by Toon Boom and the process of digital drawing and character movement. Instruction will include line style, visualization, character development, continuity, timing, and compositing. All production steps required to develop simple, 2D digital animations will be demonstrated and applied through exercises aimed at the production of a single animated scene. Students will develop and refine their personal style through exercises in digital animation and assignments directed at increasing visual understanding. Students will learn about body mechanics and motion flow in the development of animated characters and backgrounds through techniques that include walk cycles, rotating forms, transformations, holds, smear frames, squash and stretch, weight, and resistance. Additional instruction will include techniques in pencil-test animation, camera and layer animated movements, color palettes, and lip syncing. This course will provide students with a working knowledge of the emerging and highly efficient software Harmony, recently adopted by the film and television animation industry. The final project will involve each student's production of a single, refined animated scene.

Our existence lies in a perpetual state of change. An apple falls from a tree, clouds move across expansive farmland, blocking out the sun for days; meanwhile, satellites zip around the Earth, transmitting and receiving signals to our cell phones. Calculus was invented to develop a language to accurately describe the motion and change happening all around us. The ancient Greeks began a detailed study of change, but they were scared to wrestle with the infinite; so it was not until the 17th century that Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, among others, tamed the infinite and gave birth to this extremely successful branch of mathematics. Though just a few hundred years old, calculus has become an indispensable research tool in both the natural and social sciences. Our study begins with the central concept of the limit and proceeds to explore the dual processes of differentiation and integration. Numerous applications of the theory will be examined. Weekly group conferences will be run in hands-on workshop mode. This course is intended for students interested in advanced study in mathematics or sciences, students preparing for careers in the health sciences or engineering, and any student wishing to broaden and enrich the life of the mind. 

In recent decades, dialogues among architects, designers, psychologists, and neuroscientists have markedly increased in frequency, leading to the creation of a new field of interdisciplinary study: neuroarchitecture. The formation of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture in 2002 intensified and facilitated these communications across disciplinary boundaries. The architecture-neuroscience conversation is productive in both directions. Advances in contemporary understanding of the neural dynamics of constructive perception can inform architects; for example, mapping of neural pathways can provide points of access to the variety of largely unconscious processes that contribute to humans’ responses to the built environment. On the other hand, consideration of the complexities and specificities of buildings created by architects, engineers, and builders encourages neuroscientists and psychologists to advance their understandings of how a host of cognitive and emotional processes are integrated. The study of the responses of brains and bodies to buildings brings together work on sensory perception, attention, emotion, imagination, memory, planning, spatial navigation, aesthetics, and language. We will listen in on these lively architecture-neuroscience conversations by sampling from the wealth of new cross-disciplinary writings, such as Ann Sussman and Justin Hollander’s Cognitive Architecture: Designing for How We Respond to the Built Environment and Michael Arbib’s When Brains Meet Buildings: A Conversation Between Neuroscience and Architecture. A vital component of this course will be furthering the conversation by applying the concepts discussed in our readings to our own lived experience of the built environment. Many of the examples presented in weekly lectures will come from the instructor's experiences with the cities of New York and Edinburgh. The examples that students bring to our weekly seminars will draw on their own lived experience of diverse environments. Throughout the semester, we will explore how the design of healthy, sustainable buildings can enhance well-being.

Cities are shaped not only by official policies and infrastructures but also by the informal and everyday interactions that blur boundaries—between legality and illegality, local and global, self and other. This seminar will explore informality as a defining feature of urban life and globalization, examining how people navigate unregulated economies, build informal networks of care and survival, and redefine cosmopolitanism through daily acts of negotiation, adaptation, and contamination. Using a transnational and ethnographic lens, we will look at how informal economies—street vending, unregistered housing, underground labor networks—shape cities from the margins. We will also examine cultural and social "contaminations"—where urban residents of different class, racial, ethnic, and migratory backgrounds encounter and transform each other’s ways of life—sometimes in conflict, sometimes in collaboration. Rather than viewing informality as a "problem" to be solved, we will investigate how it can be a form of survival, resistance, and even innovation. Key themes include the role of informal housing and precarious urbanism, as seen in slums, refugee camps, and do-it-yourself architecture, as well as the dynamics of street economies and alternative labor structures. We will explore how migrant communities shape transnational place making; the politics of food, music, and everyday cultural hybridity; and how public space is governed, contested, and informally negotiated in cities. These intersecting themes highlight the ways in which urban life is constantly being reshaped through both structural constraints and human agency. Readings will include works by Teresa Caldeira, Asef Bayat, AbdouMaliq Simone, Ananya Roy, and Saskia Sassen, alongside ethnographic case studies of cities in Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, and North America. Students will conduct ethnographic fieldwork— exploring the informal landscapes of urban spaces, neighborhoods, and/or digital communities around them—as part of conference work. These projects can culminate in ethnographic essays, photo essays, digital maps, or multimedia storytelling. This course is designed for students interested in urban studies, migration, globalization, and the sociology of everyday life. No previous background in sociology is required, but students should be ready to engage in active field observation, lots of fieldnote writing, discussion, and critical and creative thinking.

More often than not, sports and the arts are seen as two distinct fields with little in common. Those interested in international sports events rarely pay attention to international arts events and/or world expos, and vice versa. News organizations and mainstream media overall accentuate their differences. In this course, we will connect these frequently separated fields to parse out their identicality and differences. Through a close examination of international sports, expos, and biennales, we will tease out what they share, as well as how and where they depart from each other. We will start with Raymond William’s The Sociology of Culture, following it up with writings by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu on sports and the arts. We will build on these texts by reading specific accounts of historical and contemporary events, as well as interrogating visual materials. All three international events are normatively represented as sites of leisure and consumption. Going beyond these twin dimensions, an examination of their underlying practices of production will enable us to see the centrality of money, work, and labor in each of these activities/events. This examination will then allow us to interrogate the claim that art is “superior” to sports and, instead, see the relation of each to politics and market forces. In this vein, we will examine their relationship to gentrification, nationalism, tourism, and corporate power, as well as to their ability to serve as sites of resistance and as critique of local, national, and global inequities. In other words, we will see these events in terms of their multiplicity of meaning, complexity, and contradictions. Among possible conference topics, students could examine specific international events and their relationship to local sites, peoples, or politics; undertake analyses of media coverage; examine policy perspectives and justifications for location choices and/or the re-making of space; and/or examine these events, individually or collectively, in relation to issues of class, gender, race, and/or nation.

This course will guide students through woodworking, metal, and casting with a focus on material history, function, and meaning. Introductory exercises in each material will be paired with inquiry into the value of working with wood, metal, water (casting), earth (clay), and fire (metalworking). We will look at the historical use and prevalence of material, including craft and modernism, to more ecologically conscious contemporary art. We will examine the sourcing and supply lines of material and their impact, practical uses, and weaknesses while completing weekly exercises to familiarize students with tools, materials, and approaches to working in built form.

The traditional Western house is subdivided into smaller spaces and rooms through social means. Such rooms embody a situated hierarchy set forth by the notion of the “paterfamilias” and “dominus,” or traditional heads of the family. The division of rooms and their functions reiterate this nuclear-family structure, furthering the separation from the outside world and of everyone within the house. This partitioning of space further defines private and public; and the shelter, protection, and safety that the home provides “is inseparable from the immense economic, technological, and political structures that produce it.” Therefore, the house is also intertwined with the “framework of political organization” in its physicality and its imbued implication of “labor, work, and political action.” This course is titled from an extended essay by Virginia Woolf and a Dogma-presented architectural exhibition, and corresponding exhibition catalogue, on domestic space. Students will research the house based on objects, aesthetics, and spatial tensions. These subjects are also connected to the financial aspect of the person or persons within the room and the house. The representation of these aspects will be key, as they bring up cultural norms and styles to counter these norms through design, making, and research. How do we represent the room today within political, economic, and social concerns? How do objects inform, shape, dictate, and influence our understanding of this room? What histories bring us to this point in time, where the room is prescribed to us through modernism? Lastly, how does this room relate to the rest of the house?

This course will look at typologies of labor with their embedded leisure and amenities used as tools for greater work output. Questions will arise regarding the work/life versus work/leisure paradigm and the blurred line between them. Counter-examples will include the festivals and fairgrounds as a site of leisure and the home that functions as a device of release from work; but is work still happening on these sites? Through readings and other media—drawing, collage, and mapping—students will identify the experiences in these materials, how they function with or against the norms of society, and what the future of these spaces linked to “play” symbolizes for them. What aspects of leisure are considered necessity versus desire, and what is the role of aesthetics in these spaces? Students will design an intervention of the chosen site as a means of critique, analysis, critical thinking, and conceptual design within our present political, social, economic, and climatic issues—which are inextricably linked to our production and reproduction, with labor and leisure at its core.

Over the last 50 years, ecofeminist artists have used means such as photography, performance, and community engagement as a way to approach ecological crises, using the body as a site of resistance, kinship, and violence. Methods such as deep listening, endurance performance, slow cinema, foraging and gathering, cartography, and communal urban gardens are just a few of the approaches of ecofeminist artists. These artworks address ecological issues of sustainability, extraction, and marginalization that impress both upon vulnerable bodies and the nonhuman world. Many of these works fall within an economy of care, which we will examine as gendered and racialized work. This course is an art class, with an emphasis on reading and discussion. This course will research and discuss artists whose work combines feminist and ecological themes. We will look, listen, and read seminal works and artists with a focus on primary sources, such as artist and theorist writings, artwork, and interviews, and with a goal in mind to synthesize and respond to this subject in our own works. Each week will introduce a new topic or category of ecofeminist methodology. Each week will include a discussion board and a thematic exercise. The course will culminate in a final project.

This course will guide students through woodworking, metal, and casting with a focus on material history, function, and meaning. Introductory exercises in each material will be paired with inquiry into the value of working with wood, metal, water (casting), earth (clay), and fire (metalworking). We will look at the historical use and prevalence of material, including craft and modernism, to more ecologically conscious contemporary art. We will examine the sourcing and supply lines of material and their impact, practical uses, and weaknesses while completing weekly exercises to familiarize students with tools, materials, and approaches to working in built form.

This course will be an open-ended exploration of the links between drawing and sculpture. Students will explore drawing as a means of communicating, brainstorming, questioning, and building. Assignments will promote experimentation and expand the ways in which we use and talk about drawing by interrogating an inclusive list of materials. The course will consider unusual forms of mark making, such as lipstick left on a glass and a tire track on pavement. Each student will cultivate a unique index of marks, maintaining his/her own sketchbook throughout the course. The course will provide contemporary and historical examples of alternate means of mark making, such as John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Ana Mendieta, Robert Smithson, Fred Sandback, Gordon Matta-Clark, David Hammons, and Janine Antoni, among others.

This course will examine and produce a range of work—from the journalistic to the critical, from the practical to the mystical, from the factual to the fictional—in the vast landscape of arts writing. We will write short pieces along the lines of liner notes, catalogue copy for gallery shows, and short reviews. We will approach long reviews, critical essays, and deep and subjective interior meditations on our experience of artists and their work by reading broadly across time. Topics may include, but are not limited to: Samuel Johnson on Richard Savage; William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge on themselves; Friedrich Nietzsche on Richard Wagner; Theodor W. Adorno via Thomas Mann on Beethoven’s Opus 111; V. S. Naipaul on Gustave Flaubert; Amiri Baraka on Billie Holiday; Virginia Woolf on Thomas Hardy; Glenn Gould on Barbra Streisand; Mark Strand on Edward Hopper; Rosalind Krauss on photography; Susan Sontag on Leni Riefenstahl; Jean-Luc Godard on Nicholas Ray; Pauline Kael on Sam Peckinpah; the art criticism of Donald Judd; and contemporary phenomena such as fan fiction, crossovers, and alternate universes made up of familiar literary characters. Students should feel confident in their familiarity with one or two art forms, broadly understood, and should expect, along with the reading, to write several small and two larger (7-12 pages) pieces to be presented to the entire class. Conference work will comprise research projects on those artists or works of art, or both, that students, in consultation with the instructor, decide on as their special province.