Art History

This course provides a chronological introduction to the history of Western art from the early Renaissance to the present day. It explores critically the major movements that shaped art throughout these periods.

This course focuses on the cultural, historical, and critical contexts of art. It thematically explores aspects of visual art, material culture, art markets, museum studies, repatriation, and issues around decolonization, all within a broader study of art history and visual culture.

This course surveys the history of art in Canada from its beginnings to the 1960s within its historical, social, political, and cultural contexts and considers the ways in which art history and its narratives function. Topics include: the art of Canada's Indigenous peoples; topographical and portrait traditions in the Colonial period; landscape painting and the idea of Nationhood; mysticism and nature in Canadian painting; art and democracy; formal experimentation and the urban space in the art of the Inter-War Years; the development of Canadian sculpture; modernism in Canadian painting; Quebec art, politics, and the Church; and the development of abstraction.

This course offers a history of women in art and society, from the Medieval period through to contemporary culture. Drawing on social history,feminism and its implications, and the representation of women and gender in the visual arts, this course provides a better understanding of the situation of artists within different social, regional, and global contexts.

This course provides students with an applied understanding of museum and curatorial practices. Students have an opportunity to engage in a directed study with a community museum, art gallery, arts centre, cultural or heritage centre, or archive, to develop a deeper knowledge of how these institutions, and their related professions, operate and function.

This course focuses on affinities between printed and cinematic narrative forms, introducing students as well to some of the principles of semiotics, and to the place of film theory within the context of cultural studies more generally.

This course focuses on aesthetics and the philosophy of art, drawing on both the history of philosophy (including figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Nietzsche) and on contemporary theories about art. Topics may include the problem of defining art, the role of art and the artist in society, the experience of the sublime, and the nature of aesthetic judgment and taste.

This course introduces the artistic, architectural, and archaeological monuments of the Roman world from the eighth century BC to the fifth century AD. It traces Roman art and architecture from its early origins under Etruscan influence through to the periods of the Roman Republic and Principate. It engages monuments and artifacts within their political, economic, religious, intellectual, and social context. This approach provides a framework for a more comprehensive understanding of art and artistic movements in their diachronic development.