Academic Programs

The Center for the Arts in Society offers an interdisciplinary curriculum in arts in society. Each semester this involves a selection of Center courses taught by visiting scholars, designed to reflect the goals of the Center. These courses are open to all students and operate on a first come, first served basis. For students who choose to study arts in society in greater depth, the Center offers a minor program that may be completed through six Center approved courses and a monthly seminar. The approved courses include the Center's own as well as a list of various offerings across the University.

Read about the Arts in Society minor.

64100 Critical Arts Histories: Spaces, Publics, Power and YOU
     This course begins with several key questions:  what roles do the arts play in society in our own time and in past times?  Can the arts make an impact on social and political issues and if so, how?  If not, why not?  To explore these issues we will focus on selected examples of visual and performing arts, particularly those that attempt to critique dominant trends in society.  We begin by looking at the interconnected issues of public spaces, race, gender, power and representation.  Our point of departure is Europe, United States and Asia in the modern period as we work towards the further study of other temporal, cultural and geographical contexts.  We will use selected examples in order to interrogate our own positions and to challenge our assumptions as viewers, artistic producers and communities. This interdisciplinary course is designed to foster critical thinking that will create new perspectives on the arts and generate further questions about their place in history and in the world around us today. It is team-taught by Dr.Ting Chang and Dr. Matthew Reynolds.

      Dr. Ting Chang is an art historian who has previously taught at the University of Sussex in England and the University of Toronto and McGill in Canada. She has published on art collecting and display strategies in nineteenth-century France. Her book manuscript in progress examines certain European travelers and collectors of Asian art and the formation of museums of Asian artifacts in Paris, notably the Musée Cernuschi and the Musée Guimet, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her past teaching includes undergraduate and graduate courses in methodology, theories of collecting, collections, museums and exhibitions, late eighteenth-century European painting and visual culture, nineteenth-century European painting and postcolonial studies. Recent publications include: ‘Le Don échangé: L’Entrée des collections privées dans les musées publics au 19e siècle,’ in Monica Preti-Hamard and Philippe Sénéchal, eds., Collections et marché de l’art en France 1789-1848, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2006, pp.87-95; 'Hats and Hierarchy in Courbet’s The Meeting’, Art Bulletin, December 2004, pp.716-728; ‘Disorienting Orient: Duret and Guimet, Anxious Flâneurs in Asia,’ in The Invisible Flâneuse? Women, Men and Public Space in Nineteenth-Century Paris, Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough, eds., Manchester UP, 2006, pp.65-78; ‘Collecting Asia: Théodore Duret’s Voyage en Asie and Henri Cernuschi’s Museum,’ Oxford Art Journal, Spring 2002, pp.17-34.

     Dr. Matthew Reynolds has a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester, and M.A.s in Visual and Cultural Studies (University of Rochester) and Cinema Studies (San Francisco State University). Most recently he has been teaching at the University of California, Riverside, and the Otis College of Art and Design. He has curated film series and exhibitions for the Echo Park Film Center, the Getty Research Institute, the George Eastman House Museum of Photography and Film and other venues. Dr. Reynolds has written a number of articles in journals and chapters in books. During his fellowship, he will be working on a manuscript which expands on his doctoral thesis “Soft Focus: Glamour and the Hollywood Redevelopment Project,” which is an academic history of Hollywood, California as urban space and community, from the moment of the city’s inception in 1886 to the present day.

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Arts in Society Minor (AIS)

New Course - Spring 2008
The Art of Gentrification

AIS - Full Course Listing, Spring 2008

AIS - Sample Curricula

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