Topics explore themes and problems, often reflect current research interests of the instructor, and supplement regular curricular offerings. Detailed descriptions of current and future offerings available in 416 Doe Library.

In the early modern world, mobility was a defining condition. The monsoon system facilitated not only the circulation of ships but also the movement of languages, religious practices, technologies, and cultural forms across the Indian Ocean and into continental interiors. Porcelains from Jingdezhen appeared—modified and recontextualized—in the bazaars of Malacca; Coromandel textiles clothed diverse populations in Batavia; and cloves and nutmeg, once localized commodities, provoked global conflicts that redrew imperial boundaries. In their circulation, objects acted as agents in remaking the world. This seminar takes such objects as points of entry into the transcultural dynamics of South and Southeast Asia in the early modern period. Each week, one object—a carved ivory crucifix, a fragment of chintz dyed with indigo and madder, a pearl harvested from the Gulf of Mannar, or a nutmeg seed once prized above gold—will anchor our inquiry. We will trace their trajectories through the Bay of Bengal’s commercial centers, the markets of Makassar and Manila, the Dutch warehouses of Batavia, and the Jesuit missions of Ayutthaya. These case studies will frame broader questions: How did technologies of making contribute to the production of aesthetic value? In what ways did commodities generate political rivalries or intimate entanglements? How might objects be understood as participants in history rather than as passive remnants of it? Drawing on postcolonial theory and global art history, the seminar foregrounds the instability of the categories through which such objects have traditionally been studied. Our aim is not to impose order but to analyze the unruly capacities of artworks to disrupt aesthetic systems, to seduce and unsettle, and to reveal the entangled processes of cultural exchange.

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