Triumphal Arches: Titus to Ai Weiwei

This seminar will address the many questions posed by arches—an outdated, certainly problematic, and yet everpresent monumental genre—by studying the main extant instances from Roman antiquity and by tackling their historical permutations and parallels up to today. Covered themes include: the arches’ relationship to movement and mobility; arches as boundary markers and as connectors; their diffusion in non-architectural media; the semantics and the pragmatics of the arcuate form; violence, victory, sublimation, and memory. Graduate students from all departments, as well as advanced undergraduates, are most welcome to apply.