CURRENT (Spring 2026)
HSAR 1180: The Body in Art: Asian and European Approaches
This lecture class, jointly taught by Prof. Quincy Ngan and Prof. Jacqueline Jung, introduces students to key images and methods of Art History through a wide-ranging, cross-temporal exploration of depictions of the human body in Asian and European arts. The course proceeds chronologically, with the instructors alternating weeks, so that the parallels and divergences in the approaches of artists from these different geographical and cultural areas will emerge in dialogue. The lectures encompass works made in diverse media (large- and small-scale painting, sculpture, print, performance, video) and for varying functions (secular and religious, public, private, and market-oriented), from deep antiquity through the present. We will see how artistic aspects such as composition, technique, materials, and expressive devices give shape to deeper cultural ideas about power, race, sexuality, gender, and the relation of the human to nature and the divine. Like traditional 1000-level courses, this class aims to introduce students to canonical works of art in various media and to key terms and concepts in the study of visual culture. Weekly discussion sections will take place in the Yale Art Gallery and other places on or near campus, so that students can gain confidence engaging with art at first hand, and bring insights from lectures and readings to bear on their encounters with art.
HSAR 6835: Medieval Art Travel Seminar: Chartres Cathedral
This advanced graduate seminar explores issues pertaining to the art and architecture of medieval Europe that can only be fully investigated on site. Readings, discussions, and short presentations by students in class meetings during the first half of the semester lay the theoretical and historical groundwork for a trip to Europe during spring break. Post-travel meetings will take up additional scholarly readings on the sites, and allow us to consider how our own encounters open up new questions and insights. Students will present original scholarship, based on their own research and first-hand observations, in presentations at the end of the term. Final papers of approximately 20 pages will be due at the usual time at the end of the semester.
The theme for spring 2026 is Chartres Cathedral: Art and Architecture in Gothic France. Our main focus in the great pilgrimage cathedral of Notre Dame in Chartres, which stands out for its almost complete retention of its late-twelfth and early-thirteenth-century architecture, sculpture, and stained glass. It is the best surviving example of an “integrated” Gothic church in France, and since the late nineteenth century has generated a deep, broad, and conceptually rich literature. We will spend three full days exploring that building, getting to know its many elements and levels both inside and out, the changing lighting conditions that affected its appearance over the course of the day, and the processional routes that moved liturgical objects through the (small) town. We will begin our trip with four days in Paris. There we will visit two key buildings that were important precedents for Gothic Chartres Cathedral: the abbey church of St-Denis and the newly restored cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. We will also visit the Sainte-Chapelle, an important point of comparison for the stained glass program. At the Louvre we will examine some of the sculptural capitals from the Chartres choir screen and other related works of sculpture and metalwork. The Musée de Cluny offers a treasure-trove of early and high Gothic monumental and luxury arts that will enhance our understanding of Chartres. Students will emerge with an excellent understanding of the range and sophistication of ecclesiastical arts in the French crownland at an explosive moment of artistic and architectural experimentation.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
UNDERGRADUATE COURSES
HSAR 150: Art and Architecture of the Sacred: A Global Perspective (F’24)
A wide-ranging, cross-temporal exploration of religious images, objects, and architecture in diverse cultures, from ancient Mesopotamia to modern Manhattan. Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, and various polytheistic traditions are represented. Thematic threads include the human body; transformations of nature; death, memory, and afterlife; sacred kingship and other forms of political engagement; practices of concealment and revelation; images as embodiments of the divine; the framing and staging of ritual through architecture.
HSAR 3271: Medieval People and Their Art, Mostly in Europe (F’25)
Survey of the art and architecture of medieval Europe through a series of especially influential men and women who commissioned, inspired, designed, and used it, from 4th century CE through the early fifteenth century. Each lecture focuses on a different person (from kings, queens, emperors; revolutionary monks and visionary nuns; ascetic saints and extravagant nobles), and demonstrates how their historically particular concerns, interests, and ambitions played themselves out in the visual culture they sponsored. Field trip to the Met Cloisters. HSAR 1150 is helpful, but not required.
HSAR 353/AFAM 353: Bodies, Senses, Representations: Medieval and Black Studies in Conversation (S’24) — Associates in Teaching seminar team-taught with PhD candidate Isaac Jean-Francois
This team-taught, cross-disciplinary seminar uses diverse sensory and medial paradigms to explore the very different yet surprisingly congruent figurations of bodily and racialized difference and selfhood in the cultural productions of medieval Europe (ca. 800-1500) and modern America. Extending forms of analysis that interpret visual, spatial, musical, and performance arts through a strictly historical lens, this seminar listens for the resonances between Medieval European definitions of personhood through bodily movements, sensations, and signs and Black Studies’ grappling with the aesthetic implications of racialization—how Black peoples are sensed in and make sense of the world. Even as it takes specific works of art, music, performance, and literature as focal points to teach students about particular forms of cultural production, the course offers students the chance to reflect on field-specific processes and languages of interpretation, and to think about the entanglements both of diverse peoples within particular historical contexts and also of the past with the present.
HSAR 373/HUMS 473/FREN 405/HIST204J: Notre Dame de Paris (S’25) — Humanities “Interpretations” seminar team-taught with Prof. Howard Bloch and Prof. Paul Freedman
Against the background of Gothic cathedral building in the High Middle Ages, we study from multiple perspectives the building of Notre-Dame within the teaching and preaching culture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with special focus on medieval Paris. Interdisciplinary materials include religious, literary, historical, and philosophic works alongside of music and the visuals—stained glass and sculpture—that are such an integral part of Gothic architecture. We also consider the history of Notre-Dame de Paris since the Middle Ages, especially Viollet-le-Duc’s nineteenth-century restoration, to be read alongside Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame of Paris, and in the context of the rebuilding and reopening after the fire of 2019.
HSAR 4421: Saints and Relics in Medieval Europe
In medieval Europe, the dead were always present, and none had a greater impact on visual arts, material culture, and architecture than the “very special” dead known as saints. This course examines the men and women whose holy lives and often spectacular deaths loomed so large in the Christian imagination, including biblical saints such as the apostle Peter and Mary Magdalene, early martyrs such as St Stephen and St Foy, and thirteenth-century celebrities such as Francis of Assisi and Christina the Astonishing. We look at how their stories inspired iconic and narrative representations in various media (textual and visual), and how their bodily remains, enshrined in various forms of reliquaries, forged communities of the faithful over centuries.
____________________________________________________________
GRADUATE SEMINARS
HSAR 593: The Body in Medieval Art (S’25)
This graduate seminar explores the manifold approaches to the human body in the art and culture of medieval Christian Europe (spanning ca. 500–ca. 1500 CE, though with an emphasis on the later end of the period). Through close consideration of works in various media—mediated to us through readings, digital images/renderings, and at least one excursion—we consider both the role represented bodies played in the social life and religious imagination of medieval communities and the implications such representations had for beholders’ sense of themselves.
The focus this term is on using primary sources—both textual and visual—to get at Western medieval understandings of bodies, with a special emphasis on saints and other holy people. We consider the importance of genre and convention in shaping representational possibilities and guiding patterns of expectation and response. At the same time, we attend to ways that the specificity of medium, display, and conditions of production and reception allowed for the creation of novelty and particularity in a given work. Using research tools distinctive to medievalists, such as the Index of Medieval Art, the Typologie des sources du Moyen Age occidental, and other reference works, and engaging together in close reading and visual analysis, we hone the skills that enable us to look at and listen afresh to works of medieval art, attending to their distance, strangeness, and surprise. Readings include Victricius of Rouen’s sermon In Praise of the Saints, the Passion of Sts. Perpetua and Felicity, the Passio and miracle stories of St. Foy in Conques, selections from The Golden Legend and vernacular stories that draw from it, the Lives of St. Francis of Assisi by Thomas of Celano and Bonaventura, the Life of St. Elizabeth of Thuringia and other materials from her canonization dossier, the Life of Christina the Astonishing and other writings by and about thirteenth-century charismatic women. Works of art include early Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna; the reliquary-statue of St. Foy in Conques and other vessels for body parts; French and German Gothic portal sculptures featuring scenes of martyrdom and other displays of expressivity and difference; the wall-paintings at San Francesco in Assisi; the Rothschild Canticles manuscript at the Beinecke; and various kinds of textiles that embellished living bodies.
HSAR 835: Medieval Art Travel Seminar (S’24)*
This advanced graduate seminar explores issues pertaining to the art and architecture of medieval Europe that can only be fully investigated on site.
The theme for spring 2024 is Boundaries, Borders, and Passages in Late Medieval Art and Architecture. The topic is two-pronged: it covers both empirical and historiographical content. On the empirical side, we consider the ways Gothic buildings themselves call attention to boundaries and passages—both internally and externally, horizontally and vertically—through their spires, stairways, screens, portals, and ephemeral embellishments such as winged altarpieces, textiles, and portable objects; both churches and castles, moreover, blur the boundaries between the secular and sacred domains that they purportedly distinguish. Late medieval paintings, too, often display a play with frames and boundaries that attests to a sensitivity to these architectural and spatial configurations. On the historiographical side, we see that the vast majority of late medieval buildings and their arts do not fall neatly into the geographical, chronological, and medial categories to which scholarship likes to assign things. The national boundaries we recognize today were not fixed in the Middle Ages, and the people who commissioned, fabricated, used, and wrote about architecture then did not distinguish period styles the way we do. Exciting things may happen when we art historians cross the boundaries that typically hold works of late medieval art apart and think about the passages that link them through time, place, and medium. The travel portion of the seminar charts an unconventional trajectory from Frankfurt, in the fifteenth century as now a wealthy trading center in the Middle Rhine region, through a series of sites in eastern and central France, to Barcelona, another mercantile and political hotspot. Along the way we visit important sites (buildings and museums) in Strasbourg, Dijon, Conques, Albi, Carcassonne, and Vic—always thinking of the changing environments we move through, and the responsiveness of the buildings to their own distinctive places and histories even as reverberate with each other.
*Photo at the top of this page features all the students in this class at Carcassonne