Aesthetics Out of Bounds is a series of free public lectures being offered at Carnegie Mellon University during the fall 2005 and spring of 2006. Sponsored by a grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the series features a distinguished group of internationally recognized scholars who will come to Pittsburgh to discuss the plastic,visual, and performing arts in multiple historical contexts. Drawing scholars from the United States and Europe, the series will chart out new directions in the fields of aesthetics, arts historiography, critical theory and visual culture for a broad and intellectually engaged audience.

Speakers will also contribute to a concurrent yearlong seminar on the topic of "arts histories" — an approach that deliberately situates particular types of art or experience in multiple and perhaps conflicting historical, ideological or disciplinary frames.