A few of the courses that I am prepared to teach follow, and a list of courses in preparation rests below them. You're welcome to request a syllabus, if you'd like.
Introductory Surveys and Lectures
Introduction to Art History I (Pre-history through Late Antiquity)
This course offers a survey of art from historical periods that students are often captivated by: prehistory to the fall of the Roman Empire. As there are few textual records from these eras, the interpretation of their material remains becomes a process—one which combines close-looking skills with archaeological, historical, and geological records—that can ignite students’ curiosity. What can artifacts like the Venus of Willendorf, sites like the great Necropolis of Varna, or sculpted depictions of mythic battles from the Great Altar of Pergamon tell us about how people perceived, navigated, adapted to, and changed a pre-Industrialist world?
Medieval Visual Culture
Medieval people constructed worlds of immense visual stimuli. From opulent jewels to ornate mosaics, to vividly illuminated manuscripts and the eventual revival of colossal sculpture, their communities were saturated with artistic profusion. How did such optically impressive things impact their viewers, and what intellectual habits—and institutional intentions—underwrote them? Taking a thematic approach, this course offers students an inductive venture through the major material and cultural trends of the medieval past. Regions of interest will include Western Europe, Northern Africa, the Eurasian Steppe, as well as the expanses of the Byzantine, and Islamic empires; and, further, students can expect guest appearances from the notoriously trans-geographical Vikings. Assignments are comprised of short writing assignments (in- and out-of-class), a written midterm exam, and a written final exam. The projected outcome is for students to have a general idea of how cultures expanded and catalyzed with one another as understood through material evidence.
A Material History of the Viking Age
Oft imagined as pioneers of medieval brutality, the Vikings have captivated the public eye since the nineteenth century. Yet, there was much more to these strangers from the far North than raiding and warfare: they travelled vast expanses of the globe, commingled with other communities, and produced elaborate works of art that were bound to unique cultural habits. This lecture-style course introduces students to one of the most remembered phenomena of the medieval past: the Viking Age. Using their material remains—architecture, jewelry, textiles, stone and wooden sculpture, objects inhumed in burials, and goods imported from afar that were augmented to fit into local trends—this course addresses, and clarifies, misconceptions about the medieval Scandinavian past. Further, it foregrounds how crafted objects were situated within the political and spiritual lives of these people, with particular emphasis on the role of the metalsmith.
Upper-Division, Seminar-Style Courses
Art and Imagination in the Middle Ages (previously offered as AD497A at SIUC)
Medieval communities produced an abundance of artworks that embodied, codified, and reflected their perceptions of reality. Complementing the religious beliefs and moral codes that were encrypted into these creations were memories, emotions, and cultural narratives that generated shared experiences within various groups of medieval viewers—all of which were tied to a fascinating mental faculty: the imagination.
Approaching the imagination as a continuum, this research seminar circumvents typical questions of style and patronage to instead urge students to consider the medieval viewer’s cognitive (and culturally-informed) contributions when experiencing art. Themes discussed will include depictions of violence, corporeality, animation, and—surprisingly—abstraction. Further, students will be invited to identify, analyze, and unravel the ways in which the medieval past is framed in modern art, popular culture, and other medieval-flavored media. The goal is to equip students with the academic skill sets (such as language/terminology and critical approaches to visual subject matter) to identify, discuss, and analyze medieval art from a reception and response theory perspective. It culminates in a research project that benefits the student’s scholarly growth and/or studio practice.
Monsters, Miracles, and the Macabre: Alterity in Medieval Art (previously offered as AD497A at SIUC)
Gaping maws that delineate the earthly from the Hellish, anthropoid statues that cry and bleed, and decaying skeletons that dance amidst the populations of royal courts… These are but a few examples of the numerous non-human entities that appear in the art of the Middle Ages. Contemporary viewers might find themselves intrigued and confused by such salient visuals: they initially appear to be products of a time devoid of rational thought and flush with fantastical hysteria. Yet, these odd images embodied complicated sentiments about difference, liminality, metaphysics, and the inevitable, leaving profound impressions on—and provoking impassioned responses from—medieval viewers.
This research seminar offers a foray into the strange, extraordinary, and grim works of art from the medieval period. Framing them as surviving remnants of broad and diverse cultural schemas, it asks: what was codified in representations of the monstrous, the miraculous, and the macabre? Were these images agents of fear, faith, wonder, or… something else? The projected goal is to equip students with the academic skill sets (such as language/terminology and critical approaches to visual subject matter) to identify, discuss, and analyze the intersectional issues that flavored medieval art and culture, especially forms of Otherness and marginalization.
Courses in Preparation
Introductory Surveys and Lectures
The Middle Ages in Popular Culture:
Beginning with the nineteenth-century medieval revival, venturing into the popularity of “Sword and Sorcery” narratives in pulp fiction novels, traversing the cinematic landscape, and ending with video games and tabletop role-playing games, this course asks students to interrogate how the medieval period is represented—or misrepresented—in popular media. Further, it asks students to consider what is at stake when the past is staged as something fantastical or extreme.
Byzantine Art:
This course introduces students to the art of the Byzantine Empire, which envisioned itself as the continuation—and true inheritor—of the Roman Empire’s legacy. Looking to the vestiges of pagan religion and Roman imperial life as they persisted on the visual landscape, it outlines how large-scale political, religious, and artistic changes can be slow and lapsing. Further, it asks students to question the power of images as social, political, and spiritual stimuli as we discuss the Byzantine image controversy that lasted from 726 to 843. Testaments from the Iconophiles, Iconoclasts, and Iconophages (!), as well as excerpts from popular literature from the period, will be among essential readings.
Seminars
Memory and Time in the Material World:
This seminar-style course eschews the boundaries of periodization to examine ancient ruins, modes of time-keeping, and commemorative practices across human history. With examples ranging from the Nebra Sky Disc (c. 1800-1600 BCE; Nebra, Germany) to Nicholas Vergette’s “Here” (1974; SIUC campus), it asks: how might we look to physical traces to understand the past and its construction in public (and scholarly) memory?
The Medieval Body:
Considers the theosophical, ontological, and scientific trends that informed and shifted representations (and perceptions) of the body across the Middle Ages. Material trends of interest include relics, reliquaries, and the veneration of saintly bodies; representations of corporeal suffering and violence; and depictions of anatomical difference.
If you've made it this far, you deserve a screenshot:
