Department of Visual and Performing Arts

Art History, B.A.

Curriculum

What you’ll study

In your first year, you’ll explore the field and develop your eye. As a sophomore, you’ll start moving into seminars and deeper engagement with specific periods. Junior year — when many students also study abroad — is a time for independent research and writing for public audiences. Senior year brings the capstone and, for students with a 3.4 GPA or higher, the option to pursue a two-semester honors thesis.

As an art history major, you’ll complete at least 11 courses — ten in art history and one in studio art. The program offers courses in ancient, medieval, Renaissance/Baroque, Modern and Contemporary, and non-Western art. You’ll take courses across all of these areas.

Catalog

Courses

Major map

Featured courses

ARTH 120

Byzantium, Orthodoxy, and the Medieval Mediterranean World

This course will examine the art and architecture of Byzantium from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries as a chronological narrative inflected by interactions amongst the myriad cultures of the Mediterranean.

mid twentieth century moderism art AfriCOBRA

ARTH 143

Art from 1940 to 1970: Modernism and Its Discontents

This course traces the disintegrating confidence of mid-twentieth-century modernism, examining how movements like neo-Dadaism, pop art, minimalism, land art, and AfriCOBRA critiqued modernism and postwar society.

ARTH 234

Art and Architecture of the Ancient Americas

Through case studies and field trips to local museums, you’ll examine how certain societies of the early Americas created objects and buildings that gave meaning to their sense of self, community, and world.