Art History
The Art History program aims to provide student majors with a strong historical and theoretical understanding of the visual and material environment created by humankind. Art history is founded on the premise that artifacts embody, engage, and shape the beliefs and values of the persons, groups, and societies who made, commissioned, and used them. Students will learn to document and interpret changes in human society by taking works of art and other objects of material culture as their primary sources. They will also critically analyze and interpret written texts to help reconstruct and illuminate the contexts—social, economic, political, philosophical, and religious—in which artifacts were produced, used, and understood.
Upcoming Public Events
2025 Lectures:
- Feb 11: Joe Scheier-Dolberg, Curator of Chinese Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Feb 17: Sabine Kriebel, Senior Lecturer, History of Art, University College Cork
Art History Faculty News
Two Feathers in A Cap for Art History Program: Current and Former Africanists Won Book Prizes at the 2024 19th ACASA:
- Assistant Professor Okechukwu Nwafor’s monograph Aso Ebi: Dress, Fashion, Visual Culture, and Urban Cosmopolitanism in West Africa (University of Michigan Press, 2021) was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2024 Arnold Rubin Outstanding Single Author Publication Award for excellence in scholarship on the arts of Africa and the African Diaspora.
- Professor Emeritus Peter Mark and his co-authors José de Silva Horta and Carlos Almeida won the Arnold Rubin Multi-Author Publication Award for excellence for their edited volume African Ivories in the Atlantic World, 1400-1900 (Centro de História da Universidade de Lisboa, 2021).
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