ART 301 - Recent Writing About Art

This team-taught course will introduce students to innovative examples of recent art-historical scholarship, spanning a broad geographical and chronological range of topics. Texts will be read with an eye to understanding the methods currently engaged within the discipline of art history and its allied fields to interpret visual and material artifacts. While open to all students with the prerequisites, it is also a required course for all declared art history majors in their junior year. A major task of this seminar is to prepare majors in their junior year design and research a topic, compose and annotate a bibliography, and write and revise a 20-page research paper by the end of the semester. The experience of writing this paper, which will serve as the junior qualifying exam in art history, will prepare students to write their senior art history thesis. At the end of the semester, students are also expected to produce a draft of their thesis proposal.

Unit(s): 0.5
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Prerequisite(s): ART 201  and one 300-level course in art history or studio art
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Repeatable for Credit: May be taken up to 3 times for credit.
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

• Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
• Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
• Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).