Between Art, Craft, and Industry: Textiles and Migration in New England The rise of textile mills in Vermont towns in the nineteenth century—including Middlebury, Winooski, and Burlington—spurred the movement of people, who went to work in the mills in search of economic opportunity. In this course will consider how the shift from home- to factory-produced textiles incited both voluntary and forced migrations, and transformed how we think about woven fabrics, which often straddle the line between art, craft, and industry. We will also examine and write about primary sources, including images, textiles, and texts, and we will experiment with and study different textile-making technologies. Through hands-on projects and community outreach, we will explore the ways that textiles and textile-making forge connections to home and place.

Vermeers's World: 17th-century Dutch Art in a Global Context The artists of the so-called Dutch “Golden Age”—Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer, Frans Hals, and many others—are best known for their portraits of wealthy Dutch citizens, landscapes of the local countryside, and scenes of domestic merry-making. The widespread popularity of images of local people and places, however, obscures the significant global activities of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century. This course will reexamine the works of these well-known Dutch artists by placing them in the context of global trade and colonialism.  We will consider works in a range of media—including paintings, prints, books, textiles, and ceramics—that pictured and mediated diplomatic, social, and economic negotiations between the nascent Dutch Republic and the cultures it encountered across the globe.

An Introduction to Global Visual Culture This course is an introduction to the visual cultures of the world, with an emphasis on how images, objects, and monuments are made, experienced, exchanged, and used by groups of people with diverse religious, socio-economic, and cultural backgrounds. We will focus on themes that have been taken up by different cultures and adapted over time, such as monumentality, the sacred, embodiment, science, and technology. Through a close study of these themes, we will consider how materials, cultures, and histories are transformed and negotiated through making and viewing works of art. In the process, we will challenge the art historical canon by shedding light on marginalized periods, regions, and artworks.

Senior Thesis Research Seminar In this course students will conceive, undertake research, and plan the organization of their senior thesis in art history or senior museum studies projects.  Seminar discussions and workshops will focus on research strategies, conventions in art historical writing, project design, and public presentation skills. (HARC 0301; Approval Required) 3 hr. sem.

Baroque Art in a Global Context Baroque art and architecture flourished in the courts of seventeenth-century Europe before spreading to the Americas, Asia, and Africa in the wake of global trade, colonialism, and religious proselytizing.  In this course we will examine how this style of art and architecture was recontexualized and transformed when it came into contact with preexisting traditions overseas. Readings and discussions will compare artistic production across cultures by focusing not only on the forces that contributed to the broad reach of the Baroque, but also on the persistence of local artistic styles, which were challenged and nurtured by sustained intercultural contact. 3 hrs. lct.

From Velázquez to Cabrera: The Arts of Spain and the Spanish Americas In this course we will examine the art and visual culture of Spain and the Spanish Americas from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth century.  We will consider the impact that religion, politics, and patronage had on artists working in Spain and the Viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, focusing especially on how visual traditions, iconographies, and practices were reshaped when they crossed the Atlantic. We will also consider how—in the wake of global trade and exploration—contact between Amerindian, African, Asian, and European artisans transformed artistic production, patronage, and collecting practices throughout the Iberian world.

Art, Colonialism & the Digital Humanities The field of Digital Humanities (DH) combines computational or digital technologies with humanistic research. In this course, digital humanistic inquiry will provide the lens through which we examine the artistic, textual, and archival legacies of European colonialism from the early modern period (late 15th through 18th centuries) to the present. Our focus will be on the visual and material culture of the Spanish, Dutch, and English empires, which included paintings, prints, illustrated texts, ceramics, and textiles, among many other items. Readings for the course will interrogate the structural inequities of power engrained in these sources—many of which persist in museums and other cultural institutions today—alongside recent scholarship in the digital humanities. Students will learn to think critically about the emerging “digital cultural archive,” while also acquiring the skills to create their own digital projects.

Ways of Seeing In this course we will focus on the various methods and theories that can enrich and deepen our understanding of art, architecture, and visual culture. Students will hone their analytical skills, both verbal and written, often with recourse to objects from the College Museum and the campus at large. In general, this seminar will develop students’ awareness of objects of culture broadly construed, and sharpen their understanding of the scope and intellectual history of the field.  To be taken during the sophomore or junior year as a prerequisite for HARC 0710 and HARC 0711.

Data Science Across Disciplines In this course, we will gain exposure to the entire data science pipeline—obtaining and cleaning large and messy data sets, exploring these data and creating engaging visualizations, and communicating insights from the data in a meaningful manner. During morning sessions, we will learn the tools and techniques required to explore new and exciting data sets. During afternoon sessions, students will work in small groups with one of several faculty members on domain-specific research projects in Sociology, Neuroscience, Animation, Art History, or Environmental Science. This course will utilize the R programming language. No prior experience with R is necessary. ENVS: Students will engage in research within environmental health science—the study of reciprocal relationships between human health and the environment. High-quality data and the skills to make sense of these data are key to studying environmental health across diverse spatial scales, from individual cells through human populations. In this course, we will explore common types of data and analytical tools used to answer environmental health questions and inform policy. FMMC: Students will explore how to make a series of consequential decisions about how to present data and how to make it clear, impactful, emotional or compelling. In this hands-on course we will use a wide range of new and old art making materials to craft artistic visual representations of data that educate, entertain, and persuade an audience with the fundamentals of data science as our starting point. NSCI/MATH: Students will use the tools of data science to explore quantitative approaches to understanding and visualizing neural data. The types of neural data that we will study consists of electrical activity (voltage and/or spike trains) measured from individual neurons and can be used to understand how neurons respond to and process different stimuli (e.g., visual or auditory cues). Specifically, we will use this neural data from several regions of the brain to make predictions about neuron connectivity and information flow within and across brain regions. SOCI: Students will use the tools of data science to examine how experiences in college are associated with social and economic mobility after college.  Participants will combine sources of "big data" with survey research to produce visualizations and exploratory analyses that consider the importance of higher education for shaping life chances.  HARC: Students will use the tools of data science to create interactive visualizations of the Dutch textile trade in the early eighteenth century. These visualizations will enable users to make connections between global trade patterns and representations of textiles in paintings, prints, and drawings.

Carrie Anderson

Reviews and ratings for Carrie Anderson at Middlebury College.Carrie Anderson teaches Textiles/Migration/New England, Vermeer's World, Intro to Global Visual Culture and more.  Explore top rated instructors and find the best for you.Is Carrie Anderson good ? Find out on MiddCourses.

This class was fun and insightful. Professor Anderson clearly knows what she is talking about and is enthusiastic about the subject. She is a very fair grader. The two papers and three short quizzes were not hard; they only required studying for a few hours right before. Overall, a good class; I would recommend! 

I had such a great experience taking Vermeer's world. Carrie Anderson is the best, her lectures are effortlessly captivating and interesting, you can get away with reading a bit of the assigned readings for class. There were a few main projects and quizzes but you knew exactly what was expected and had ample time to complete. Would highly recommend this class!

Super interesting class if you are interested in the content (Dutch art). If not, maybe not so engaging. There is a collection of quizzes throughout the semester in typical art history fashion. There is also a group visual analysis essay and a final paper on your own. Fair grading.