ARTH 4625 - Liquidities: Seascapes in Art and as History

(HB) (ALC-AS, HST-AS)

Spring. 3 credits. Letter grades only (no audit).

Co-meets with ARTH 6622.

K. Presutti.

This seminar explores readings in the “blue humanities” as they relate to art history, with a particular focus on the genre of the seascape as a means of framing human-oceanic, interspecies, and cross-cultural encounters. After establishing a theoretical basis in oceanic thought, we will explore the methodological potential such watery thinking offers for an art history attuned to cross currents, fluid interactions, and unsettled narratives. Though anchored in the Western perspective of the “seascape,” course readings will also be attentive to the long history of fluid models of identity and objecthood in diverse Indigenous cultures, and to the limitations inherent in the terrestrial bias of much Western scholarship.