Art and Music History Course Offerings

Linked course titles have extended descriptions. Syllabi provided where available.

Course	Title	Day	Time	Instructor	Room	Syllabus	Description
HOA 106 M001	Art & Ideas II	TTH	12:30 PM-1:25 PM	Johnson, Sam			Register for one Discussion M002-M013; Section M001 will auto-enroll. Introductory overview of art and architecture from the renaissance through the present day that emphasizes how visual culture relates to historical and intellectual circumstances, societal values, technology, and diverse and changing identities. Repeatable 1 time(s), 3 credits maximum
HOA 106 M002	Art & Ideas II discussion	F	11:40 AM-12:35 PM	TA-			Register for one Discussion M002-M013; Section M001 will auto-enroll. Introductory overview of art and architecture from the renaissance through the present day that emphasizes how visual culture relates to historical and intellectual circumstances, societal values, technology, and diverse and changing identities. Repeatable 1 time(s), 3 credits maximum
HOA 106 M003	Art & Ideas II discussion	F	9:30 AM-10:25 AM	TA-			Register for one Discussion M002-M013; Section M001 will auto-enroll. Introductory overview of art and architecture from the renaissance through the present day that emphasizes how visual culture relates to historical and intellectual circumstances, societal values, technology, and diverse and changing identities. Repeatable 1 time(s), 3 credits maximum
HOA 106 M004	Art & Ideas II discussion	F	10:35 AM-11:30 AM	TA-			Register for one Discussion M002-M013; Section M001 will auto-enroll. Introductory overview of art and architecture from the renaissance through the present day that emphasizes how visual culture relates to historical and intellectual circumstances, societal values, technology, and diverse and changing identities. Repeatable 1 time(s), 3 credits maximum
HOA 106 M005	Art & Ideas II discussion	F	11:40 AM-12:35 PM	TA-			Register for one Discussion M002-M013; Section M001 will auto-enroll. Introductory overview of art and architecture from the renaissance through the present day that emphasizes how visual culture relates to historical and intellectual circumstances, societal values, technology, and diverse and changing identities. Repeatable 1 time(s), 3 credits maximum
HOA 106 M006	Art & Ideas II discussion	F	12:45 PM-1:40 PM	TA-			Register for one Discussion M002-M013; Section M001 will auto-enroll. Introductory overview of art and architecture from the renaissance through the present day that emphasizes how visual culture relates to historical and intellectual circumstances, societal values, technology, and diverse and changing identities. Repeatable 1 time(s), 3 credits maximum
HOA 106 M007	Art & Ideas II discussion	W	10:35 AM-11:30 AM	TA-			Register for one Discussion M002-M013; Section M001 will auto-enroll. Introductory overview of art and architecture from the renaissance through the present day that emphasizes how visual culture relates to historical and intellectual circumstances, societal values, technology, and diverse and changing identities. Repeatable 1 time(s), 3 credits maximum
HOA 106 M008	Art & Ideas II discussion	W	3:45 PM-4:40 PM	TA-			Register for one Discussion M002-M013; Section M001 will auto-enroll. Introductory overview of art and architecture from the renaissance through the present day that emphasizes how visual culture relates to historical and intellectual circumstances, societal values, technology, and diverse and changing identities. Repeatable 1 time(s), 3 credits maximum
HOA 106 M009	Art & Ideas II discussion	W	5:15 PM-6:10 PM	TA-			Register for one Discussion M002-M013; Section M001 will auto-enroll. Introductory overview of art and architecture from the renaissance through the present day that emphasizes how visual culture relates to historical and intellectual circumstances, societal values, technology, and diverse and changing identities. Repeatable 1 time(s), 3 credits maximum
HOA 106 M010	Art & Ideas II discussion	W	10:35 AM-11:30 AM	TA-			Register for one Discussion M002-M013; Section M001 will auto-enroll. Introductory overview of art and architecture from the renaissance through the present day that emphasizes how visual culture relates to historical and intellectual circumstances, societal values, technology, and diverse and changing identities. Repeatable 1 time(s), 3 credits maximum
HOA 106 M011	Art & Ideas II discussion	W	11:40 AM-12:35 PM	TA-			Register for one Discussion M002-M013; Section M001 will auto-enroll. Introductory overview of art and architecture from the renaissance through the present day that emphasizes how visual culture relates to historical and intellectual circumstances, societal values, technology, and diverse and changing identities. Repeatable 1 time(s), 3 credits maximum
HOA 106 M012	Art & Ideas II discussion	W	12:45 PM-1:40 PM	TA-			Register for one Discussion M002-M013; Section M001 will auto-enroll. Introductory overview of art and architecture from the renaissance through the present day that emphasizes how visual culture relates to historical and intellectual circumstances, societal values, technology, and diverse and changing identities. Repeatable 1 time(s), 3 credits maximum
HOA 106 M013	Art & Ideas II discussion	W	2:15 PM-3:10 PM	TA-			Register for one Discussion M002-M013; Section M001 will auto-enroll. Introductory overview of art and architecture from the renaissance through the present day that emphasizes how visual culture relates to historical and intellectual circumstances, societal values, technology, and diverse and changing identities. Repeatable 1 time(s), 3 credits maximum
HOM 125 M001	Introductory Music Theory I	TTH	9:30 AM-10:50 AM	Dubaniewicz			VPA course crosslisted with MTC 125, For Students With Little or No Music Theory Background - dept consent Elementary note reading, meter, intervals; diatonic harmony including key signatures, major & minor scales, triads, 7th chords and accompanying chord symbols. For non-music majors only.
HOM 125 M002	Introductory Music Theory I	TTH	12:30 PM-1:50 PM	Dubaniewicz			VPA course crosslisted with MTC 125, For Students With Little or No Music Theory Background - dept consent Elementary note reading, meter, intervals; diatonic harmony including key signatures, major & minor scales, triads, 7th chords and accompanying chord symbols. For non-music majors only.
HOM 126 M001	Introductory Music Theory II	TTH	3:30 PM-4:50 PM	Dubaniewicz			VPA course crosslisted with MTC 126, prereq HOM 125 Harmonic & melodic minor scales, compound intervals, modes, C clefs, symmetrical scales, dynamics, harmonic series, instrument transpositions, form, cadences, part writing. For non-music majors only.
HOM 166 M001	Understanding Music II	MW	2:15 PM-3:35 PM	Wang, Serena			Introduction to the art of music. Musical styles from early baroque to the 20th century, stressing the characteristic interests and achievements of each historical epoch. Assumes no prior musical knowledge.
HOM 166 M002	Understanding Music II	MW	3:45 PM-5:05 PM	Wang, Serena			Introduction to the art of music. Musical styles from early baroque to the 20th century, stressing the characteristic interests and achievements of each historical epoch. Assumes no prior musical knowledge.
HOM 166 M003	Understanding Music II	TTH	12:30 PM-1:50 PM	Wang, Serena			Introduction to the art of music. Musical styles from early baroque to the 20th century, stressing the characteristic interests and achievements of each historical epoch. Assumes no prior musical knowledge.
HOM 268 M001	European and American Music Since 1800	TTH	11:00 AM-12:20 PM	Cateforis, Theo			Pre-requisites: Any completed HOM or MHL class and able to read music. Crosslisted with MHL 268. Major trends and figures in art music in the United States and Europe since 1800. Topics include nationalism, neoclassicism, serialism, indeterminacy, and minimalism. Assumes basic knowledge of music.
HOM 285 M002	Introduction to World Music	TTH	9:30 AM-10:50 AM	Wang, Serena			Crosslisted w/ MHL 185. Introduction to world music in its social, political, and cultural contexts, with an emphasis on building listening and analytic skills. Intended primarily for music and music history and culture majors.
HOA 300 M001	ST: Radical Media	TTH	3:30 PM-4:50 PM	Innes, Maggie			The American interwar period was a time of crisis and transformation, marked by severe economic depression and social unrest but also the progressive reforms of the New Deal coalition and new understandings of art and culture. Turning to popular and mass-distributed forms such as the mural, graphic illustration, film, and photography, artists brought aesthetic experiences to a wider public than ever before. This course explores the dynamics of this cultural shift. How did artists’ embrace of popular forms change the stakes of aesthetic production? How did it change understandings of popular art? We will focus on the work of individuals, organizations, and institutions across the US and Mexico, with a particular emphasis on questions of media, distribution, and publics. Over the course of the semester, we will also place this work in dialogue with broader theoretical and political debates animating the period, including topics such as industrialization, diaspora, nationalism, realism, and abstraction.
HOA 300 M002	ST: 19th c. European Art	MW	12:45 PM-2:05 PM	Ray, Romita			Nineteenth-Century European Art introduces students to painting, sculpture, printmaking, architecture, decorative arts and photography in Western Europe in the long nineteenth century. We will cover key movements from Romanticism to Art Nouveau and examine the rise of International Exhibitions and public spaces like cafes, museums, and department stores. We will also look at the connected arts of dance and music and explore ground-breaking discoveries in the history of science and technology that gave birth to photography and early cinema. From time to time, we will go beyond Western Europe, to analyze how European imperialism influenced art and architecture in other parts of the world in the nineteenth-century—and we will think about how imperialism, and other nineteenth-century developments, continue to impact our world today. The nineteenth-century is everywhere on our campus: in the Hall of Languages, the university’s oldest building completed in 1873; in historic photographs in the Special Collections Research Center (SCRC); and in paintings, sculpture, photographs and prints in the Syracuse University Art Museum. Explore these nineteenth-century resources on our campus. Students will also have opportunities to visit the museum and the SCRC to study works of art for our class.
HOA 300 M003	ST: Art of Ancient Egypt and Nubia	TTH	11:00 AM-12:20 PM	Fitzgerald, Clare			This course looks at material culture of ancient Egypt and Nubia from the Predynastic through Roman periods (ca. 3500 BCE- ca. 300 CE), exploring how objects operated in the social, political, and religious fabric of these cultures across time. The class will first consider the lenses through which the ancient past has traditionally been viewed and the establishment of Egyptology as a field, then move into a thematic and chronological treatment of the ancient material itself, followed by a discussion of how that material has influenced modern and contemporary artists. Students will survey art and architecture throughout Egyptian dynastic history as well as engage with in-depth case studies on topics including the Pyramid Complex at Giza, cross-cultural interactions between Egypt and its neighbors, Deir el-Bahri and the reign of Hatshepsut, the artistic and religious revolutions in the reign of Akhenaten, the relationship between text and image, the artists’ village at Deir el-Medina, and the Nubian sites of Meroe and Gebel Barkal.
HOA 300 M004	ST: Survey of Latin American Art	MW	12:45 PM-2:05 PM	Carvalho, Denise			Survey of Latin American Art explores early modern and later contemporary art of Latin America (1930s to 2000s) through distinct countries, their major artists, art movements, concepts, and styles, their ideals and creative ways to challenge or give voice to their unique social and cultural traditions as they shifted through the centuries. Various influences define the paintings and sculptures of Latin American art. Early movements such as Constructivism in Uruguay and Expressionism in Brazil in the 1930s, for example, were influenced by artists traveling abroad. These artists were inspired and befriended leading artists abroad, as the Mexican Julio Ruelas, his work considered derivative, especially to the Belgian symbolist Félicien Rops. The Mexican Muralist Diego Rivera, for example, was inspired by exhibitions he saw in Paris and Italy, incorporating new expressive styles with his tropes of local indigenous and working classes. Early Pre-Columbian roots in the art of Mexico, Peru, and Guatemala were expressed by indigenous themes immersed with new concepts and stylistic practices. Learning about early and later economic and political shifts in countries such as Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, including major revolutions and their causes, will more richly allow us to reconsider these countries' specific ethnic backgrounds and their later class-related shifts. The artists and countries in our exploration with focus on Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile. Art movements in our study include Latin American Surrealism, Expressionism, Constructivism, Realism, Symbolism, Mexican Muralism, Kinetic Art, Geometric Abstraction, Neo-Concretism, Informal Abstraction, Later Expressionism, Pop Art, later forms of Surrealism, finalized by Contemporary Art. The book we will be using in the Survey is Latin American Art of the 20th Century, by Edward Lucie-Smith, Second Edition, Thames & Hudson, 2004.
HOM 300 M001	ST: Banned, Censored, Illegal: Music Before the Law	MW	12:45 PM-2:05 PM	Kaplan, Kyle C.			In response to our contemporary political landscape, scholars have increasingly attuned themselves to the deep connection between music and the ideals of social justice. As much as it can provide a vital form of protest against inequity or discrimination, the fact remains that music has been continually placed under judicial review and thus has raised multiple questions about its role and function within a rule of law-based society. This course considers the disparate ways that music itself has become a subject before the law, as well as the way we might draw upon our listening experiences to enrich our conceptualization of justice. By studying the legal mechanisms and cases that have rendered specific examples banned, censored, or illegal, we will consider the various socio-cultural anxieties that courts have sought to keep in check by regulating what we listen to or perform. To this end, topics covered will include music’s relationship to definitions of obscenity; moral and ethical values; drug use; social unrest; political violence; and conceptions of ownership.
HOM 300 M002	ST: Music and Competition: From Talent Shows to Reality TV	TTH	12:30 PM-1:50 PM	Kaplan, Kyle C.			While music is celebrated for its ability to bring people together, how well does this communal ethos hold up when making music becomes a competitive activity? Moreover, how can we even begin to judge something that is as varied and subject to individual opinion as a given song or performance? This course pursues these questions by considering the long and varied history of competitions that judge the composition and/or performance of music, as well as asking how these competitions reflect music’s fraught relationship with capitalist enterprise. Students will first consider issues raised by thinking about music and competition together including the tensions between art and sport; individual taste and mass popularity; amateurism and professionalism; entertainment and commerce. From this introduction, we will then approach a variety of competitions as case studies by looking to the different criteria and evaluative systems used to judge them. This will include events taken from the world of television (American Idol; Eurovision); art music (International Tchaikovsky Competition, Prix de Rome); as well as the host of activities that involve music and movement (marching bands, drumlines, ballroom dancing, ballet, figure skating).
HOA 312 M001	Art, Architecture, and the Supernatural	TTH	12:30 PM-1:50 PM	Mateo, Matilde			European art and architecture of the 11th and 12th centuries explored in their cultural, social, and artistic contexts.
HOA 320 M001	Italian Renaissance Art	MW	3:45 PM-5:05 PM	Cornelison, Sally			Survey of Italian art and architecture from c. 1200 to 1550 with an emphasis on style, patronage, artistic techniques, and the social, political, and devotional contexts of works by major artists and architects.
HOM 325 M001	Music in Latin America	TTH	2:00 PM-3:20 PM	Peñate, Cary			Music of Latin America in its cultural, historical, and political contexts. The course uses instruments, rhythms, and movements as starting points to explore issues of migration, urbanization, nationalism, race and ethnicity in Latin America.
HOM 396 M001	Writing About Music	TTH	3:30 PM-4:50 PM	Cateforis, Theo			Students learn to research and write about music for a variety of written genres and a wide range of audiences, both academic and public.
HOA 400 M001	ST: Theories of Photography	T	11:00 AM-1:45 PM	Innes, Maggie			meets w/ HOA 600, M001; 400 level Art/Arch Hist/Fine Arts Mjr/Mnr or instructor consent. What is a photograph? What is photography? While answers to these questions may seem self-evident, they have varied tremendously over time. This course surveys different models of photographic identity in twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought and examines how these models have shaped historical notions of photography's aesthetic, political, and social functions. A selection of historical and contemporary texts will introduce some of the central theoretical and interpretive questions and debates in the field.
HOA 400 M002	ST: The Global Plantation	M	3:45 PM-6:30 PM	Ray, Romita and Bryant, Joan			meets w/HOA 600, M002 and AAS 400/600, M001 Plantations thrive on monoculture cultivation to profit from plant commodities. Historically, they have been sites of enslaved and indentured labor, commercial production, and ecological disruption linked to colonial systems of extraction and exploitation. They were designed to regulate and control plants, humans, as well as non-human animals. As sites of multi-species encounters and of human and commodity flows, plantations have shaped a diverse spectrum of visual representations and material culture alongside a multitude of spatial imaginaries. These phenomena ground the seminar’s multi-disciplinary explorations of plantations in diverse parts of the world, including the American South, Caribbean colonies, South America, India, and Southeast Asia. They raise several questions that frame our inquiries about the corporeal, material, and spatial interventions in plantation landscapes. How were plantations carved out of forests? How has deforestation affected human and non-human animals on plantations? What patterns of power and displacement can be tracked through the laboring body? How has colonial knowledge-creation in plantation societies exploited and suppressed knowledge-systems of indigenous peoples and enslaved laborers? What forms of resilience and resistance might we trace within the various constructions of plantation landscapes? Research field trips to the Syracuse University Art Museum and the Special Collections Research Center will facilitate our examination of plantation visual and material culture and documentary sources. Students will engage letters, registers, laws, rare books, prints, drawings, paintings, and objects related to plantation practices. A guest lecture in April 2024 by Professor Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Princeton) titled, “Plantation Imaginaries: Art and Medicine in the Colonial World,” has been organized in conjunction with this seminar.
HOM 400 M001	ST: Latina Divas in Hollywood	TTH	11:00 AM-12:20 PM	Peñate, Cary			meets with HOM 600, M001 This course examines selected Latin American and Latina female performers (e.g., Lupe Vélez, Dolores del Rio, Carmen Miranda, Selena, J-Lo) appearing in Hollywood beginning in the early twentieth century and considers their representations on screen. Early stars such as Vélez and del Río gained popularity in an era of discrimination, widespread ignorance of Latin American cultures, and an inability to accept Hispanic residents of the US as full citizens. The ambivalent views of the public about Latin/o Americans are evident in the films that feature them, mediated to an extent through their representation by glamorous, light-skinned women. Over time, the mixture of Latin American immigrant populations in major US cities has heightened levels of hybridity in “Latin” music, much of which now attracts the attention of major recording labels and streaming services. An examination of Hispanic divas in US films provides insights into how film stagings of popular genres such as mambo, salsa, cumbia, Tejano, and reggaeton perpetuate stereotypical constructions of gender while financially supporting the popular music industry. A comparison between filmic performance and cultural precursors in opera, literature, art, and theater further illustrates the ways that historical narratives perpetuate stereotypes of exotic women throughout history.
HOM 400 M002	ST: Sex, Music, and Intimacy	MW	3:45 PM-5:05 PM	Kaplan, Kyle C.			This course addresses two separate but interlocking questions central to queer and feminist music studies: 1. How has music been used to represent sexual and intimate experiences? 2. What kinds of intimate and sexual experiences are engendered through listening or performing music? We will first consider the multiple ways that sex and intimacy have been musicalized through a range of transhistorical and transcultural examples. Once students have gained familiarity with music’s basic structures and representational strategies, we will then turn to the vibrant, interdisciplinary body of scholarship on intimacy to explore how musical experience can enrich or challenge these conversations. Thus we will not only question the different ways intimacy has been used as analytic framework within sundry queer and feminist projects, but we will also consider how music affords intimate relationships that are alternatively public, private, virtual, transnational, transhistorical, and even collective.
HOA 500 M001	ST: The Dutch and the World	TH	2:00 PM-4:45 PM	Franits, Wayne			Art History majors and grads only This seminar explores the dramatic impact upon art and culture (in both positive and negative terms) of the global economic reach of the Dutch Republic during the seventeenth-century. Primarily due to the activities of the Dutch East and West India Companies, Dutch merchants were actively trading with and, at times, exploiting, much of the “known world” in the seventeenth- century--even Antarctica. As a result, a veritable plethora of goods of all sorts reached the shores of the Netherlands with profound consequences both for the Dutch themselves but also for the regions and countries from which these goods had been imported. Specifically, the seminar will examine the artistic and cultural ramifications of the seventeenth-century Dutch mercantile presence in the Americas, Africa, the Ottoman empire (centered in modern-day Turkey), Persia, India, Batavia (modern-day Indonesia), China and Japan. The seminar will consist of a combination of lectures and group reading discussions and will culminate in reports by the participants. Students who are not undergraduate art history majors or M.A. candidates in art history must have the instructor’s permission before they can register for this course.
HOA 512 M001	Islamic Palaces of Spain	W	12:45 PM-3:30 PM	Mateo, Matilde			Art/Arch Hist/Fine Arts Mjr/Mnr and Grad Students only, or instructor consent Exploration of the Islamic palaces of Spain from the Middle Ages to the present with a focus on the Alhambra, its evolving material design, meaning, and representations in various media.
HOA 600 M001	ST: Theories of Photography	T	11:00 AM-1:45 PM	Innes, Maggie			meets w/ HOA 400, M001 What is a photograph? What is photography? While answers to these questions may seem self-evident, they have varied tremendously over time. This course surveys different models of photographic identity in twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought and examines how these models have shaped historical notions of photography's aesthetic, political, and social functions. A selection of historical and contemporary texts will introduce some of the central theoretical and interpretive questions and debates in the field.
HOA 600 M002	ST: The Global Plantation	M	3:45 PM-6:30 PM	Ray, Romita and Bryant, Joan			meets w/ HOA 400, M002 and AAS 400/600, M001 Plantations thrive on monoculture cultivation to profit from plant commodities. Historically, they have been sites of enslaved and indentured labor, commercial production, and ecological disruption linked to colonial systems of extraction and exploitation. They were designed to regulate and control plants, humans, as well as non-human animals. As sites of multi-species encounters and of human and commodity flows, plantations have shaped a diverse spectrum of visual representations and material culture alongside a multitude of spatial imaginaries. These phenomena ground the seminar’s multi-disciplinary explorations of plantations in diverse parts of the world, including the American South, Caribbean colonies, South America, India, and Southeast Asia. They raise several questions that frame our inquiries about the corporeal, material, and spatial interventions in plantation landscapes. How were plantations carved out of forests? How has deforestation affected human and non-human animals on plantations? What patterns of power and displacement can be tracked through the laboring body? How has colonial knowledge-creation in plantation societies exploited and suppressed knowledge-systems of indigenous peoples and enslaved laborers? What forms of resilience and resistance might we trace within the various constructions of plantation landscapes? Research field trips to the Syracuse University Art Museum and the Special Collections Research Center will facilitate our examination of plantation visual and material culture and documentary sources. Students will engage letters, registers, laws, rare books, prints, drawings, paintings, and objects related to plantation practices. A guest lecture in April 2024 by Professor Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Princeton) titled, “Plantation Imaginaries: Art and Medicine in the Colonial World,” has been organized in conjunction with this seminar.
HOM 600 M001	ST: Latina Divas in Hollywood	TTH	11:00 AM-12:20 PM	Peñate, Cary			meets with HOM 400: M001 This course examines selected Latin American and Latina female performers (e.g., Lupe Vélez, Dolores del Rio, Carmen Miranda, Selena, J-Lo) appearing in Hollywood beginning in the early twentieth century and considers their representations on screen. Early stars such as Vélez and del Río gained popularity in an era of discrimination, widespread ignorance of Latin American cultures, and an inability to accept Hispanic residents of the US as full citizens. The ambivalent views of the public about Latin/o Americans are evident in the films that feature them, mediated to an extent through their representation by glamorous, light-skinned women. Over time, the mixture of Latin American immigrant populations in major US cities has heightened levels of hybridity in “Latin” music, much of which now attracts the attention of major recording labels and streaming services. An examination of Hispanic divas in US films provides insights into how film stagings of popular genres such as mambo, salsa, cumbia, Tejano, and reggaeton perpetuate stereotypical constructions of gender while financially supporting the popular music industry. A comparison between filmic performance and cultural precursors in opera, literature, art, and theater further illustrates the ways that historical narratives perpetuate stereotypes of exotic women throughout history.
HOA 757 M001	Art History Symposium Project	M	9:30 AM-12:15 PM	Johnson, Sam			All main campus candidates for the M.A. degree in art history participate in the Symposium Project in their final semester of study. This 3-credit-hour course gives graduate students experience in the research, writing, and oral presentation of a substantial and original scholarly work. The Symposium Project requires intensive expenditure of effort and time, both in scheduled class meetings and in private consultations with faculty advisors.