Art History Major: Introduction

We are delighted to welcome students into the Art History program. Our faculty seeks to foster a dynamic, challenging, interactive environment in which there is lively and open exchange among faculty and students while maintaining intellectual rigor.

The discipline of Art History encompasses the study of artistic endeavors of peoples around the globe. Individuals often choose to study art history to satisfy a deep curiosity about how art communicates the ideas of a culture. In many ways, works of art and architecture are visual documents with which we can recapture other peoples' experience of the world. That makes the field of art history interdisciplinary since art historians recognize how politics, literature, economics, religion, science, and other cultural factors affect the making of art.

As professional art historians, we seek to understand the context of art - how art fits into larger cultural histories. We employ a broad spectrum of critical strategies to explore the diverse roles played by these artifacts. In our publishing, in our presentations in public venues, and in our teaching, we formulate reasoned analyses and interpretations of works of art and architecture as they relate to their historical and cultural circumstances.

In recent decades, the discipline of art history has expanded from a narrow study of the fine arts to the wider and more inclusive fields of visual and material culture. Different perspectives, including feminist, postmodern, postcolonial and contemporary theories, have also reinvigorated art historical writing. In effect art history stands at the center of wide-ranging discourses on past and present visual cultures.

In our program, we make every effort to nurture your interest in art. You will be exposed to the breadth of art history in the fields of Asian art, Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque period, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the twentieth century and contemporary art. Each of our faculty specializes in one of these areas and will teach you about the developments in the visual arts. Your study in art history will be guided through advanced levels of vocabulary and principles to specialized methods of scholarly inquiry. You will be able to situate your degree in art history within a cross-cultural humanistic education, and our program enables you to learn about art history as an academic discipline and as a profession.