Courses
500/600-level HADVC Seminar Courses (2025-2026)
FALL TERM
HADVC 400/600 (A01) – Theory and Methods in the History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
*3 (Fall term)
Thursday 9:30-12:20
Instructor: Lianne McTavish
This course provides participants with an introduction to theories and methods used in the study of the history of art, design, and visual culture. We will examine a range of approaches, covering both historical and contemporary examples. The material is organized thematically, according to the site of meaning emphasized by the method (i.e. the site of representation, site of production, and site of reception). The course emphasizes the practical application of different approaches, including forms of embodied research, while noting how diverse methods can both produce and obscure knowledge. Prerequisite: Consent of Department. Students are normally expected to have successfully completed one 300-level HADVC course with a minimum grade of B.
HADVC 411/511 (A01) – Thomas Bewick and the Representation of Animals
*3 (Fall term)
Tuesday 14:00-16:50
Instructor: Betsy Boone
The Art Gallery of Alberta (AGA) has in its collection holdings over 830 wood engravings by master printmaker Thomas Bewick, created for publications in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These books and prints depicting animals provide artists, designers, and historians today with an opportunity to think about the presentation of animals and our relationship to them in the past and in the contemporary moment. Some classes will take place at the AGA’s off-site storage facility, where staff from the museum will introduce us to the original works of art. Prerequisite: Consent of Department. Students are normally expected to have successfully completed one 300-level HADVC course with a minimum grade of B.
WINTER TERM
HADVC 403/503 (B01) – The Early Modern Body
*3 (winter term)
Thursday 12:30-15:20
Instructor: Lianne McTavish
Scholars increasingly examine how early modern bodies were produced in a range of representations, including literary texts, medical engravings, theatrical performances, and portraiture. The study of these bodies has become a distinctive field of inquiry, and this upper-level seminar introduces students to its major debates and dominant themes, with an emphasis on visual articulations of the body. Artists interested in issues of embodiment will benefit from comparisons between contemporary and historical forms of bodily experience and expression. Prerequisite: Consent of Department. Students are normally expected to have successfully completed one 300-level HADVC course with a minimum grade of B.
HADVC 412/512 (B01) – EcoArt China
*3 (winter term)
Tuesday 1400-16:50
Instructor: Lisa Claypool
How does art make the world? We will explore work by artists who capture and convey struggles with Western capitalist-scientific rationalities that have prefigured the end of the world; critically, their artwork also embodies the emotions and imagination lodged in our human and more-than-human ecologies that open us––all of us, across the planet––to possibility for renewal. We will analyze brush-and-ink paintings, oil paintings, paper cuts, photographs, new media, interactive design, and video work that engages with crises of extinction, environmental destruction, and social injustice. Prerequisite: Consent of Department. Students are normally expected to have successfully completed one 300-level HADVC course with a minimum grade of B.
HADVC 456/556 (B01) – Contemporary Indigenous Art
*3 (winter term)
Wednesday 14:00-16:50
Instructor: Erin Sutherland
This course will explore practices by Indigenous artists based in Turtle Island from the 1990s to present. With a focus on themes of indigenization, visual sovereignty and decolonization, this course will introduce students to a broad range of contemporary Indigenous art. Prerequisite: Consent of Department. Students are normally expected to have successfully completed one 300-level HADVC course with a minimum grade of B.