PhD seminars

ARTH 809 Art History and Its Methodologies: Plant-thinking and the Discipline of Art History

• Instructor: Dr. Cynthia Hammond

What is the relevance of “plant thinking” for art history, architectural history, and visual culture? This course takes the stance that plants – long treated as decorative, peripheral, and (in architecture) a design afterthought – are in fact active agents in history, culture, and in the production of meaning and form. The Anthropocene (a contested term) has created the current era of climate disaster and unprecedented species loss; unsurprisingly, contemporary artists across the world are foregrounding vegetal presences and processes in their work. But plants have figured in the arts of almost all world cultures throughout history. Could the “botanical emergence” in contemporary art and criticism (Giovanni Aloi) illuminate an ontology of vegetal life and interconnectedness in histories of art and architecture?

This seminar looks in and outside our discipline for answers to this question: Indigenous, Black, and global south perspectives speak to multispecies entanglements; queer and feminist artistic practices centre plants as sites of collaborative creation and care; plant-thinking scholars pose challenging questions about the residual primacy of the human in the Humanities, while recent science delves into plant sentience, communication, community, and mutualism.  

The urgency of thinking about, collaborating with, and learning from plants is upon us. We live with extreme weather, the uneven social and economic effects of climate change, and the shameful failure of governments worldwide to resist the capitalist machinery that is grinding towards ecological devastation. Plant-thinking is a small counterbalance to such tragic realities and powerful forces. But it is also perhaps the most important. Potawatomi Nation member Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “In some Native languages the term for plants translates to 'those who take care of us.'” 

ARTH 803 Thematic Questions: New Diasporics: Current Discourses on Diaspora and Migrancy

• Instructor: Dr. Alice Ming Wai Jim

This seminar examines the evolving narratives of diaspora and migrancy in contemporary art, emphasizing recent theoretical and methodological developments in the field. Participants investigate the relationships between artists, their diasporic identities, and the socio-cultural landscapes that shape their creative practices. The concept of the new diasporic extends beyond traditional understandings, encompassing the lived experiences and evolving identities of communities living outside their ancestral homelands. Once used primarily to describe Jewish dispersion (and later extended to Greek and Armenian dispersions), diaspora now operates within a larger semantic domain that includes terms such as immigrant, expatriate, refugee, guest worker, exile, overseas or ethnic communities, and equity-seeking and equity-deserving groups. Shaped by global migration, digital networks, and new collectivities and political imaginaries, these emergent, plural, and hyphenated identities challenge established paradigms of place and belonging. Through seminar discussion and close analysis of artworks, exhibitions, and critical texts, participants examine how contemporary artists navigate themes of migration, displacement, and cultural hybridity, working through deterritorialized frameworks and decolonizing methodologies. The course addresses fundamental questions of identity and belonging, interrogating the profound, uneven impacts of geopolitical forces, transnational movements, and shifting cultural borders on artistic expression and cultural sovereignty. By engaging with diverse case studies, participants will gain insight into how transnationalism, individual agency, and modes of cultural production influence and redefine artistic narratives, generating new forms of cultural expression that displace colonial centres and unsettle national canons. This seminar invites participants to reflect on the complexities of diaspora and migrancy, fostering a nuanced understanding of contemporary art’s role in shaping—and being shaped by—the contested circuits of global cultural exchange.