2025-2026 Academic Year

Fall 2025

FYSM 100 First-Year Seminar
The First-Year Seminar (FYS) introduces students to Dickinson as a "community of inquiry" by developing habits of mind essential to liberal learning. Through the study of a compelling issue or broad topic chosen by their faculty member, students will: - Critically analyze information and ideas - Examine issues from multiple perspectives - Discuss, debate and defend ideas, including one's own views, with clarity and reason - Develop discernment, facility and ethical responsibility in using information, and - Create clear academic writing The small group seminar format of this course promotes discussion and interaction among students and their professor. In addition, the professor serves as students' initial academic advisor. This course does not duplicate in content any other course in the curriculum and may not be used to fulfill any other graduation requirement.

ARTH 102 Introduction History of Art
This course surveys art of the European renaissance through the contemporary period. Art will be examined within the historical context in which it was produced, with attention to contemporary social, political, religious, and intellectual movements. Students will examine the meaning and function of art within the different historical periods. In addition, students will learn to analyze and identify different artistic styles.

Spring 2026

ARTH 205 Creativity, Innov, Discovery
Why did astronomers draw the stars? Why did art students dissect cadavers? Is "art" made by AI really art? This course will consider these questions and others as we investigate the relationship between the visual arts and the sciences in Europe and North America from the 17th century to the present. We will examine how paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and photographs facilitated and/or responded to innovations in the fields of astronomy, biology, chemistry, anthropology, criminology, engineering, and medicine. We will also pay significant attention to art's role in the development of racist and queerphobic pseudo-sciences. Together, we will come to understand how artists and scientists worked together to create our modern world. Science majors welcome.

ARTH 391 Global Avant-Gardes
In this course, we will seek to critically examine and decenter the European avant-garde by locating its attendant movements within a global context. We will begin by developing a theoretical grounding for our conception of the avant-garde: what do we mean when we use the term "avant-garde," and what associations do we attach to it? We will then explore a series of key movements traditionally associated with the European avant-garde and situate them in relation to contemporary global correlates. Topics will include the reception of Symbolism and Surrealism in the Middle East; Cubism in Mexico; Dada and the Japanese Mavo movement; the development Bauhaus ideologies in Germany and India; Constructivism between Russia and Latin America; and Socialist Realism in the USSR and its "Third World" periphery. Drawing on canonical texts and recent interventions in postcolonial theory, we will tend to these nodes of mutual artistic and ideological exchange and identify points of dissonance between these movements to arrive at a deconstructed image of avant-garde movements from the mid-nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth century.