Category: Archive courses

This course explores a methodology for identifying, describing and ascribing value to American material culture over three centuries utilizing the lens of one category of American decorative arts, furniture. American furniture is regularly an important component of collections within American art and history museums, as well as general museums, cultural centers, historic house museums and living history restorations and complexes. Participants in this course will develop a familiarity with the history, evolution, and significance of American furniture from 1620 to 1920. The methodology employed will consider the physical, historical, aesthetic and cultural importance of furniture. To a lesser degree, it will place furniture within the broader context of American decorative and folk arts, and the study of American material culture in general.
Contact Dylan High at highd@uw.edu for an add code.

A graduate seminar but advanced undergraduates may enroll with the permission by the instructor.

Feminism and Visual Theories
(1 credit, C/NC)
Instructor: Kathryn Topper (Classics) and Sarah Levin-Richardson (Classics)
Time Schedule [link forthcoming]
Meeting Dates:
All sessions meet in CMU 218D.
Monday, May 2, 3:30-5 pm
Monday, May 9, 3:30-5 pm
Monday, May 16, 3:30-5 pm
Monday, May 23, 3:30-5 pm
This microseminar introduces students to some of the fundamental scholarship on feminism and viewership and its application to the art of ancient Greece and Rome. This material is designed to dovetail with Feminism and Classics VII: Visions, an international conference hosted May 19-22 by the Simpson Center for the Humanities and the Department of Classics, and its companion book-arts exhibit, Just One Look.
The first class session introduces the most influential scholarship on feminism and viewership, the next two sessions deal with the application of this scholarship in the study of ancient Greek and ancient Roman art respectively, and the last class is a reflection on the conference and exhibit. Topics to be explored include the gaze, ekphrasis, art and text, gender and sexuality, and reception, among others.
Questions? Contact Kathryn Topper (ktopper@uw.edu) or Sarah Levin-Richardson (sarahlr@uw.edu).

Course Meetings
Meets 3:30-5:20 pm on Tuesdays, January 8, January 15, January 22, and on Thursday, February 28. All sessions meet at the Simpson Center in Communications 202 or 218D.
Questions? Please contact Shields at js37@uw.edu
This microseminar introduces graduate students to a range of humanities careers and explores how the skills we acquire in earning a PhD can be used beyond the college classroom. We will draw on local resources (humanities PhDs working in various career contexts in the Puget Sound region) to mentor current graduate students. Students will consider what skills and values they want to cultivate in their work and what forms of employment might allow them to do so. They will participate in panel presentations and two half-day career shadowing sessions with their assigned mentors. The short-term goal is to encourage doctoral students to begin exploring a broad range of humanities careers beyond faculty positions.
Juliet Shields is Professor of English, Director of Graduate Programs for the English Department, and the organizer of a Next Generation Humanities PhD project of the Simpson Center for the Humanities. She is the author of Nation and Migration: The Making of British Atlantic Literature, 1765-1835 (2016) and Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745-1820 (2010).
 
 
 

Close reading and analysis of No texts in Japanese, with some attention to Kyogen. Discussion of categorization, structure, imagery, style, mode, theme, authorship, source material, theory, and problems of translation.

Winter 2021 | 1 credit (c/nc), open to graduate and undergraduate students
HUM 597A
Humanitarianisms Part II:
Comparative Humanitarianism
Cabeiri Robinson, Jackson School of International Studies & Anthropology
This micro-seminar is the second in a three-part series of micro-seminars offered in conjunction with the Sawyer Seminar series, Humanitarianisms: Migrations and Care through the Global South. This quarter’s micro-seminar explores otherthan- Western ideologies, movements, values, and beliefs that underlie a concern with the suffering of distant others. We will engage a genealogical study of humanitarianism that begins, not with European moral sentiments from the eighteenth century, but with the traditions, philosophies, and values—such as service, hospitality, giftgiving, or mercy—which preceded and perhaps influenced such moral reasoning. We ask: what other humanitarian logics shape when and how communities provide care and refuge to migrants or victims of emergencies? How do practices of care function as a part of daily experiences and ethical ideals of both care-givers and carereceivers? What kinds of moral reasoning regulate the recognition of suffering; what does caring labor look like; and how is it managed? This focus will allow us to consider vernacular humanitarianisms by exploring the new global humanitarian project as one founded on hybrid formations of the management of care—through practices that recognize human suffering, the labor and principles of providing care, and the transformations produced though exchanges of material and affective expressions of care.
Incorporating insights from the Middle East (Jordan, Syria, Egypt), Asia (Tibet, India), and Africa (Uganda), the readings and speakers in Comparative  Humanitarianisms address the ethical systems, logics, and rationalities of care that underlie everyday practices of humanitarianism as a form of caring labor across cultural and religious traditions in the Global South.
Learning Objectives
The participants will be able to locate their own research interests within cutting-edge scholarly discussions about humanitarian ethics and and practices of care in the Global South.
Requirements, Grading, and
Evaluation
Students will be asked to (1) participate in synchronous discussion sessions on the days noted below; (2) attend (synchronously or asynchronously) the webinars slated for the Winter 2021 Sawyer Seminar; (3) submit reading responses prior to each synchronous session. Grading will be based on participation in seminar discussions and short reading responses.
Course Meetings
January 14, 28, February 11, 25, from 3:30 – 4:30pm
Remote (Zoom) and Synchronous
For questions on this course, please contact Cabeiri Robinson, Jackson
School of International Studies & Anthropology, at cdr33@uw.edu.

Close reading and analysis of No texts in Japanese, with some attention to Kyogen. Discussion of categorization, structure, imagery, style, mode, theme, authorship, source material, theory, and problems of translation. Prerequisite: permission of instructor.

This micro-seminar explores the political importance of art in responding to the violence of dictatorship, war, and extractive economies. It is organized around the spring 2020 visits of four scholar-artists from Puerto Rico and Peru. Puerto Rican visual anthropologist and filmmaker Patricia Alvarez Astacio is an Assistant Professor at Brandeis University. Her films and written work critically explore the Peruvian alpaca wool supply chain analyzing how, through the intervention of development projects, Indigenous women arti- sans and their aesthetic traditions are interpolat- ed into “ethical fashion” manufacturing networks. In their individual and collective art projects, Peruvian artists and activists Karen Bernedo, Jorge Miyagui and Mauricio Delgado reveal the connections between ongoing colonial process- es, the political violence of the 1980s and 90s, and contemporary manifestations of gendered, racialized, and other forms of structural violence. Their collective Museo Itinerante Arte por la Memoria, a mobile museum for art and memory, won the 2014 Prince Claus Award for “outstanding achievement of visionaries at the front-line of culture and development.” The seminar will meet four times and explore the power of art in uncovering and contesting the hidden foundations of violence. We will explore how art can create and sustain political and cultural counternarratives that resist racial capitalism, patriarchy, and the ongoing marginalization of Indigenous peoples in Peru. We will read texts that address the particular context of Peru, as well as broader theoretical works about art, cultural agency, memory, and politics.
Course Meetings:
Apr. 9, Apr. 23, May 7, May 21
10:30am – 12:00pm | Zoom (Synchronous)
Events (registration and related info forthcoming):
April 20 | Patricia Alvarez Astacio Screening & Discussion
Apr. 22 | Patricia Alvarez Astacio Visual Anthropology Workshop
May 18 |  Peruvian Artists Panel Discussion
For questions about this course, please contact MarÍa Elena GarcÍa at meg71@uw.edu.