Teaching
 

SEMINAR IN NORTH AMERICAN INDIGENOUS ART

The course examines the historical entanglements and developments of complementary but distinct visual cultures in the southwestern United States, central Mexico, and Yucatan. It traces the role of art history and archaeology in defining specific historical styles and cultural cannons and their political mobilization through travel, popular writing, and exhibitions in the construction and contention of national and regional identities. It discusses varied Indigenous responses to European religious and cosmological thought and their appropriation in strategies of resistance and resilience against European and American colonization and neo-colonization.

CASE STUDIES IN MUSEUM & GALLERY EXHIBITIONS

This is an exploratory course that cuts across some of the main debates in museology to address diverse epistemological, sociological, and anthropological issues. The implications of these issues will be explored in relation to a wide number of exhibitions and projects in museums in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The subjects of this course range from the effect of neo-liberalism on museum exhibitions; the epistemological redundancy of some museum practices; the implications of virtual reality for physical object narratives; the effects of indigenous agency on institutional practices, nomadic aesthetics and identities, comparative versions of modernity, and skeptical approaches to empiricist based museum studies.

ADVANCED SEMINAR IN CRITICAL MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY 

Museum methods question the very possibility of any unitary or overarching theoretical perspective or methodological strategy that can be described as specifically ‘museological’. The course critically explores various museological approaches, using specific institutional examples wherever possible,  to reveal the assumptions that underlie many of the core discourses that constitute museum and gallery practices and that define their relationship to the construction and contestation of national and regional identities and concepts of ‘patrimony’.  Through provoking a critical attitude towards museums and museology, the course seeks to provide participants with some of the critical tools to develop new genres of exhibitions and modes of public engagement.