Focusing on the major methodologies in the alternative approaches to the study of art and culture, and history and social sciences, this intensive seminar introduces comparisons, contrasts, and commonalities. Following the initial joint session, this seminar is divided into two discrete segments. The first focuses on the variety of approaches that characterize the field of art and culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including modernism, symbolism (disguised and disclosed), feminism, deconstructionism, and semiotics. The second segment concentrates on the commonalities of academic investigation as well as historiography. The first two classes in this segment focus on the idea of method in history and the social sciences, with an emphasis on critical thinking, problem solving, and research. The remaining four classes examine the actual tools and practice of hands-on research and the conventions of scholarship.

Ori Z. Soltes, Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University; Professorial Lecturer in Theology and Fine Arts, Georgetown University