Undergraduate Teaching
Professor Doherty’s undergraduate teaching has included a freshman seminar, “Things Come to Life: Explorations in Modern and Contemporary Art,” that brought students into conversation with artists and curators in New York and Berlin and investigated the aesthetic complexities involved when things (seem to) come to life in art, as well as the ethical complexities involved when works of art come to be regarded as (virtually) animate objects; upper-level seminars that have explored what is at stake in writing about art in philosophy, psychoanalysis, poetry, and fiction from Plato to Freud, Rilke to DeLillo; and survey courses on German art between the World Wars and from 1960 to the present. In Fall 2009, Professor Doherty launched a new core course for European Cultural Studies (ECS 301), and in Spring 2014 she taught, with Professor Peter Brooks, the capstone course for the Undergraduate Certificate in Humanistic Studies, HUM 470.
Graduate Teaching
Professor Doherty’s graduate seminars have addressed a wide range of topics in twentieth-century art, literature, and aesthetic theory, including: the significance of psychoanalytic concepts in art history and literary criticism, and vice versa; the art/anti-art problematic in Dada (co-taught with Hal Foster); theories and practices of montage; Rilke’s writings on art; and Walter Benjamin’s artwork essay (co-taught with Michael W. Jennings).
PhD Supervision
Dissertations in progress under Professor Doherty’s supervision include: Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, “The Disposition of Persons: Conventions of Pose and the Modernization of Figural Art, 1886-1912” (Art & Archaeology); Sabrina Carletti, “Xul Solar and the Formation of the Argentinean Avant-Garde: Sociability, Tactility, Language and the Revision of the Depicted Body” (Art & Archaeology); Erica DiBenedetto, “Drawing from Architecture: The Conceptual Methods of Sol LeWitt’s Art, 1965-1980” (Art & Archaeology, co-advised with Hal Foster). Professor Doherty also regularly serves on dissertation committees in the PhD program in History and Theory in the School of Architecture.
Dissertations completed under Professor Doherty’s supervision include: Christian Jany, “Scenographies of Perception: Recasting the Sensuous in Hegel, Novalis, Rilke, Proust” (German, 2015; co-advised with Claudia Brodsky); Lisa Lee, “Sculpture’s Condition / Conditions of Publicness: Isa Genzken and Thomas Hirschhorn” (Art & Archaeology, 2012); Sarah Eldridge, “Conceiving Generation: The Novel and the Nuclear Family Around 1800” (German, 2012; co-advised with Joseph Vogl); Annie Bourneuf, “The Visible the Legible: Paul Klee, 1916-1923” (Art & Archaeology, 2011); Sonja Boos, “The Archimedean Podium: Public Speeches in Postwar Germany 1953—1967” (German, 2008; co-advised with Barbara Hahn); Lynette Roth, “The Cologne Progressives: Political Painting in Weimar Germany” (History of Art, Johns Hopkins, 2008).