Affiliated faculty develop interdisciplinary approaches to the study of images in their courses.
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ARTH 343: Inventing Canada through Art
Professor: Erin Silver Course Description: This course investigates the role that art has played in constructing ‘Canada’. Canada’s unique art histories are rarely taken up in canonical writings, despite the wealth of historical and contemporary practices and what artists offer in articulating…
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ARTH 344: Contemporary Conversations about Art in Kanata/Canada
Professor: Erin Silver Course Description: A “conversation” infers the sharing of ideas between two or more individuals, and aptly reflects how contemporary Canadian art might be conceived of as an ongoing dialogue without clear beginnings or endings, nor a distinct set of styles, mediums, or…
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ARTH 345: History of Photography: Archive, Spectacle, Reality
Professor: Jillian Lerner Course Description: This lecture explores artistic, social, and political dimensions of photography, from the nineteenth-century to the present. How do photographic practices shape our assumptions about art, reality, fiction, history, or memory? How do they…
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ARTH 348: Visual and Digital Media Theory
Professor: Jillian Lerner Course Description: A thematic examination of media theory, focusing on developments in photography, digital interfaces, and technologies of seeing. Considers lens-based media as strategies for exploiting, navigating, and adapting to the environment, but also as…
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ARTH 382: Is Art History Queer?
Professor: Erin Silver Course Description: On December 1, 2010, news broke that the Smithsonian would be pulling a work from an exhibition on display at the National Portrait Gallery. The groundbreaking Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture was being hailed as the first…
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ARTH 383: Queer Partnerships in Art & Art-Making
Professor: Erin Silver Course Description: In her 2010 memoir Just Kids, writer, artist, and musician Patti Smith chronicles two decades of collaboration with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, from their meeting in New York City and the beginning of their romantic relationship in the late…
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ARTH 386: Art and Ecologies
Professor: Jillian Lerner Course Description: This course explores the critical and reparative possibilities of art and photography as ways of perceiving and responding to ecological crisis. We will investigate how aesthetic practices can perpetuate the harms of extraction or model ways…
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ARTH 443: Seminar in Canadian Art: Art and Activism in Canada
Professor: Erin Silver Course Description: This seminar will critically examine activist art histories in Canada, from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. With a particular emphasis placed on rethinking land in relation to histories of art in Canada, we will…
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ARTH 480: Paris - Field Study in Nineteenth-Century Art
Professor: Jillian Lerner & Nikki Georgopulos Course Description: This immersive summer course takes students to study nineteenth-century visual culture in the museums and built environment of Paris. Offered in English, this hybrid seminar will combine online preparation…
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ARTH 543: Studies in Canadian Art: Queer Episodes in Canadian Art
Professor: Erin Silver Course Description: The Massey Report of 1951 promoted the cultivation of a distinctly Canadian culture to bolster Canada’s international identity, and propelled the development of several government-sponsored cultural initiatives, such as the Canada Council for…
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HIST 201: History Through Photographs
Professor: Kelly Midori McCormick Course Description: How has photography changed the way that we understand and study past historical events? This course explores how historians can learn to “read” images and how photographic images change our relationship with the past. During the first…
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HIST 585: Topics in Cultural History
Professor: Kelly Midori McCormick Course Description: This interdisciplinary course explores the role of photographs as evidence, testimony, documentation, and their role in constructing ideas about criminality in the 19th and 20th centuries. This history of photography amplifies perspectives…
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VISA 440: Advanced Photography
Professor: Althea Thauberger Course Description: Photography practice in the context of contemporary art. Interdisciplinary connections to other media will be encouraged. In this section, students will undertake a hands-on study of selected photographic artworks in the collection of UBC and…
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VISA 470: Art and the City: Berlin field course in contemporary art and cultural theory (Advanced Special Studies I)
Professor: Althea Thauberger Course Description: Over the last two centuries, after being the location of the conference where European leaders formalized colonies and division in Africa, and while experiencing immense socio-political turmoil and transformation, the city of Berlin…