POLS 496 Aesthetics and Politics

This is a senior-level seminar that treats aesthetics not as a side concern of art history but as a terrain where political power, ideology, and the very definition of "the political" get fought out, from Burke's response to the French Revolution through fascist spectacle and Soviet avant-gardes to the simulation logics of the digital present. You'll work through dense theoretical readings, write response papers and a term paper, and unpack case studies in two open-book midterms and a final, learning to argue about how taste, image, and form do political work. It assumes you're comfortable with political theory at an upper-division level, and it's the kind of elective that sharpens how you read everything else, propaganda, design, social media aesthetics, long after the course ends.