ARTH 398 Special Topics in Art and Society: Art, War and Revolution

• Instructor: Manar Abo Touk

This course examines how artists, writers, and communities across the globe have responded to moments of war and revolution, asking what it means to represent conflict, resistance, and survival through creative practice. While “war art” has often been associated with battle scenes, state commissions, or documentary photography, and “revolutionary art” with propaganda or heroic imagery, this course challenges those narrow definitions by exploring a wide range of cultural expressions that take shape before, during, and after "conflict".

Moving beyond depictions of violence and political propaganda, we will consider diverse forms of cultural production from painting, photography, and installation, to prison literature, street art, music and protest chants as well as everyday acts of resistance. Course materials draw on art history, cultural studies, and critical theory, engaging case studies from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that include anti-colonial struggles, civil wars, revolutions, and grassroots movements for social justice.

Students will examine how art intersects with politics, documents violence, and helps communities imagine alternative futures. We will ask: Who produces war and revolution art? For whom? In what spaces and media? And how do creative practices shape our understanding of conflict beyond official narratives? By the end of the course, students will be able to analyze diverse artistic responses to war and revolution across historical and cultural contexts.