The landscape--as sublime, hospitable, desolate, and/or entertaining--in 19th-century American photography and painting.

In this seminar we will study the historical, art-historical, and experiential dimensions of American landscape.  For the first several
sessions, we will discuss readings of primary and secondary sources and images that these readings inform, looking with special
interest at mountains, desert or wilderness environments, and tourist attractions. Among the questions we will ask are:  What has
the experience of landscape meant across the American past?  What has it meant as constructed in photographs and paintings?
What has it meant in our own lives?   Among the resources that we will draw on are such museum installations as the landscape
paintings at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the photographs of the American west by Carleton Watkins on
temporary exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Students will be responsible each week for 2-page reflection papers on an aspect of the required reading and will be expected to
participate fully in class discussion.  The culminating project of the course will be a research paper on a specific geographical landscape,
in the process of which each student will present an oral "progress report" in one of the last four sessions of the semester.   The final
research paper, due on December 15, will be 15-20 pages and will include illustrations, footnotes and bibliography.