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.

Art Response to Political Strife: Contemporary Arab Art In what ways can artists protest war? What are the possibilities for creating art during times of conflict? How do artists respond to the memories of a violent and divisive recent past? These are some of the questions we will examine in this course, with a focus on contemporary artistic practices in the Arab world. Considering a range of media—documentary and experimental film, installation and conceptual practices, painting, photography, and monuments, we will ask how artists living in Beirut, Baghdad, Damascus, Jerusalem, and Algiers are able to confront the traumas of the past, intervene in contemporary socio-political realities, and imagine a different future.

Photography and the Ethics of Witnessing In this course we will consider photography as an eyewitness to violence and human suffering and the ethical position of the viewer. What does it mean to regard the pain of others? Can there be beauty in violence? Can a photograph alone speak truth? Can photographs initiate empathy or spark activism? Are we so bombarded with images of violence that we are immune to their power? To explore these questions, we will examine a series of case studies, from photography’s earliest documentation on the battlefield to contemporary examples of drone imagery used to wage war from a distance. We will also consider contemporary artists who integrate documentary photography into their practice as a form of resistance.

Modern Art (1789-1960) This course surveys key international artists, movements, and aesthetic debates beginning in the late eighteenth century and into the mid-twentieth century. In a period characterized by urbanization, industrialization, and mass politics, we will ask how modern art produced, reflected, exaggerated, or challenged the effects of modernization. In particular, we will focus on how this historical moment of unprecedented nationalism, imperial expansion, post-colonial liberation, and cold war alliances forged a global modernism.

Art, Migration, and Museums Can artists and museums respond to the current refugee crisis? The 21stst century has witnessed the undeniable prevalence of the refugee, the migrant, and the politically displaced — categories produced by global capitalism’s uneven distribution of resources. Against this reality, artists and curators engage with representations of the disposed. In this course we will consider how the art world integrates the figure of the refugee into the traditionally reified space of the museum and examine the possibility of art to transcend barriers and generate empathy and solidarity. Possible topics include art programming and refugee integration; museum responses to the migrant crisis; migration and repatriation; boycott and divestment efforts. This course is part of the Public Humanities Labs Initiative administered by the Axinn Center for the Humanities.

Art and Protest Can art serve as a means for resistance and political change? Can art only call attention to social inequalities or can it initiate systemic change? What is the difference between propaganda and activism? In this course, we will examine these questions through close analysis of works dating from the French Revolution to the contemporary moment. We will consider a range of strategies across diverse geographies. We will also examine curatorial strategies to critique the cultural assumptions of museums and recent efforts to boycott museums’ financial ties and political complicities. This course is held in conjunction with the Middlebury College Museum of Art and students will have the opportunity to work closely with the current exhibition.

Photography in the Middle East In this course we will survey 19th and 20th century photographs of the Middle East. We will consider indigenous studios as well as European and U.S. photographers and artists who traveled to the region and circulated their photographs as visual knowledge of distant cultures, peoples, monuments, landscapes, and experiences. Looking at a range of genres, we will examine how photographs visually construct notions of race, gender, class, religion, and cultural otherness. Students will work with original photographs in the collection at the Middlebury College Museum of Art.

Realism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism (1850-1905) In this course, we will examine three prominent artistic movements that evolved in France during the second half of the 19th century. This historical moment witnessed the emergence of a bourgeois industrial society and the rise of Parisian modernity. Looking at artists such as Courbet, Manet, Monet, Cassatt, Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin, we consider how these figures artistically engaged with the rapidly changing urban landscape, new scientific theories of color and optics, and France’s growing colonial empire. In doing so, we will explore the ways in which the race, gender, and class inform social concepts of the time around the artist and the model, labor and leisure, and modernity and primitivism.

Orientalism and the Visual Arts In this course we will consider the relationship between visual culture and the politics of knowledge. Comparatively examining a series of cross-cultural encounters in modern and contemporary art, we will ask how knowledge is visually codified, labeled, and displayed. The course will begin with a reading of Edward Said’s Orientalism. We will then examine a series of case studies in order to identify and compare strategies of both “representing the other” and “speaking back.” We will address notions of exoticism, cultural difference, authenticity, and native authority with a particular focus on the ways in which the visual arts construct notions of race and gender and difference in representations of the Middle East, and more specifically, the Arab world.  Case studies, drawn from the late eighteenth century until today, will be focused in the discipline of art history and the geographical regions of primarily the Middle East and Africa, as well as Europe and the U.S. 3 hrs sem.

History of Photography In this course we will survey the history of photography from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century to the present. From its inception, the photograph created a global network of circulation as art, document, and portable knowledge. Moreover, photographs have been historically deployed across a number of disciplines, including science, medicine, criminal studies, law, journalism, anthropology, and the visual arts. Organized along chronological lines and looking at case studies in Europe, America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, the course will consider a range of genres, formal strategies, and contexts for photography. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which photographic images are mobilized to produce knowledge and disrupt conventional ways of seeing in the service of science, social reform, political activism, and aesthetics. Students will have the opportunity to work first hand with the photography collection at Middlebury College Museum of Art.

Senior Thesis: Research and Writing This course is a continuation of HARC 0710 which consists of ongoing, supervised independent research, plus organizing, writing and presenting a senior thesis. (HARC 0301 and HARC 0710).

Photography of the Middle East In this course, we will work closely with Special Collections and the Middlebury College Museum of Art to survey 19th and 20th century photography of the Middle East. We will consider indigenous studios as well as foreign photographers who traveled to the region and circulated their photographs as visual knowledge of distant cultures, peoples, monuments, landscapes, and experiences. Looking at a range of materials, including travel photography, studio portraits, and government- and commercially-commissioned photographic albums, we will examine how photographs visually construct notions of race, gender, class, religion, and cultural otherness. We will then turn to the ways in which contemporary artists are archiving historical photographs and appropriating them in contemporary practices.

WWI and Its Legacies in Art and Photography “We will glorify war,” declared the Italian poet Marinetti in the 1909 Futurist Manifesto. For Marinetti and his fellow writers and artists, military conflict held the promise of restoring a decadent Europe. Meanwhile, the new technology of photography was being deployed across the Ottoman Empire by European governments to document a declining empire with vast territory up for grabs. The outbreak of World War I, however, soon exposed the grim realities and failed promises of modernity and technologies of warfare. In this course we will consider how art and photography in Europe, America, and across the Ottoman Empire documented, portrayed, and confronted World War I, and the colonial and aesthetic legacies of the first industrialized global war in today’s world. This course is part of the Public Humanities Labs Initiative administered by the Axinn Center for the Humanities.*

Sarah Rogers

Reviews and ratings for Sarah Rogers at Middlebury College.Sarah Rogers teaches Intro to Global Visual Culture, Contemporary Arab Art, Photo and Ethics of Witnessing and more.  Explore top rated instructors and find the best for you.Is Sarah Rogers good ? Find out on MiddCourses.

Professor Rogers is such a compelling professor! While her style is predominantly lecture based, I never felt bored or that I wanted to tune out for a second. Every lecture was something new and exciting, and she really shows how art is embedded into so many other disciplines. Exams take a significant amount of preparation but if you do that then you should be good to go! There were 3 exams throughout the course that took less time than the typical class period (~20-40 minutes). The perfect class for anyone with any kind of interest in art, Professor Rogers covers so much and does such a great job at doing so. I would take a million more classes with her if I was not graduating!

Professor Rogers is passionate about the material which makes for interesting lectures. There's a lot of reading involved in the course but nothing unreasonable. The exams are fair and only include information from lectures/readings. 

Sara Rogers is a great professor with a clear passion for what she has to teach. We move fast and ist can be hard to do all of tehr eadings, but all confusion is clarified with clear and fascinating lectures.