Humans and the Heavens: Drawing the Skies from Babylon to Today

Undergraduate / Graduate

This interdisciplinary Arts and Humanities course explores how human beings have made meaning through scientific and artistic engagement with the skies while providing students with the tools to participate in those traditions through creative visual arts projects. Through lectures, studio exercises, readings, and discussions, students will examine how cultures have encountered the heavens as sites of artistic inspiration, philosophical reflection, and scientific inquiry from Babolynian star lists and medieval Islamic illustrated manuscripts to modern sci-fi "alien-scapes" and contemporary art. Students will develop skills to draw objects in distance focusing on perception, observation, and perspective techniques. They will also learn practical skills to navigate the night sky with ancient and contemporary tools such as planispheres, astrolabes, binoculars, and mobile apps, and they will artistically engage with their observations. In this way, students will adapt and continue the historical traditions that they study to explore their own place in the cosmos.