Dear Colleagues, Students, Alumni, Auditors, and Friends,
I hope that you have all had a good summer wherever your research or interests have taken you. I also hope that you return reinvigorated for the year ahead. We have much in store for you!
I am delighted to extend a special welcome to our newest students as well as all of you that are returning for another year in the Department of Art History. Each of you contribute to the vigor and vitality of our department and we look forward to another exciting year of learning with you.
We begin this new academic year with two new faculty members. I hope you will join me in welcoming Dr. Elaine Sullivan, Assistant Professor of African Cultural Studies, and Dr. Sunghoon Lee, Visiting Assistant Professor in Global Early Modern Art.
We will be offering a variety of exciting and new courses in fall 2024. These include Jennifer Pruitt’s “The End of the World,” Tania Kolarik’s “Witches, Ghosts, and Ghouls,” Sunghoon Lee’s “Global Baroque Art,” and Jill Casid’s “Queer Art and Visual Culture” (the first time this course has been offered completely online).
I’m very pleased to announce that Professor Anna Andrzejewski is our newly appointed Centennial Chair. As Centennial Chair, Anna has been incredibly busy this summer preparing for our Centennial Year celebrations.
From our inception in 1925 until now, the Department of Art History has sought to take a leading role in promoting visual literacy, paying careful attention to continuities and differences across time and space. The exploration of the ways in which art and visual and material culture are fully integrated into larger cultural histories and provide knowledge and insight that lead us to a better and brighter future.
We hope you will visit our Art History Centennial webpage often for information about and opportunities to participate in Celebrating 100 Years – Rethinking the Past and Shaping the Future.
My best wishes,
Kirsten Wolf
Professor and Torger Thompson Chair
Chair, Department of Art History
kirstenwolf@wisc.edu
MISSION STATEMENT
Through our innovative research, teaching, and outreach activities, the department takes a leading role in promoting visual literacy, emphasizing careful attention to continuities and differences across time and space. Examining expressive media, from archaeological artifacts to new media technologies, we explore the ways in which art and visual and material culture are fully integrated into larger cultural histories. In our specialized focus on images, objects, and the built environment, we promote critical and creative approaches to analysis, problem-solving, writing, and visual communication in a variety of media. Through interdisciplinary collaborations, we aim to encourage aesthetic, historical, economic, and ethical questions in order to produce new knowledge, sophisticated readers, engaged writers, critical viewers, and confident cultural citizens who are well prepared to thrive in global society.
Our strengths lie in the great breadth of our faculty’s areas of specialization and course offerings, the diversity of our approaches, the interdisciplinary emphasis of our research and teaching, and our engagement with curatorial and museum studies. The department pursues innovative research and offers engaging courses in a wide range of areas, including to name a few: American material culture; Contemporary art and theory; Chinese Art; Curatorial Studies; Early Modern European art; Islamic art and architecture; Japanese art; Medieval European art and architecture; Print Culture; Photography, Film, and Video; Vernacular architecture; Victorian art and material culture, and Visual studies and Critical Theory.
HISTORY
PRIDE IN PURPOSE AND ACHIEVEMENT
Founded in 1925 by the distinguished German scholar Oskar Hagen, Art History is a dynamic department that teaches and pursues cutting-edge research in the history of art, material culture, and visual culture, ranging from the prehistoric to the contemporary and from Africa, Asia, and Europe to the Americas. Through the 1970s, James Watrous, one of Hagen’s doctoral students, continued the department’s growth in size, scholarship, and significance. He fulfilled Hagen’s dream of building a museum as a laboratory for the Department of Art History. Today, Art History shares a handsome building with the Chazen Museum of Art and the Kohler Art Library. Here students pursue original research that draws on the resources of theses collections. In partnership with the Chazen and other local and regional museums, we offer our students rare opportunities to engage in hands-on learning about objects and the curatorial process through special exhibitions
- Each year, the Department of Art History serves more than 100 undergraduate art history majors and approximately 35 graduate students who are in various stages of their master’s and Ph.D. programs.
- We recruit students from throughout the United States, Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe.
- Art History graduates have continued their studies at the graduate level at other top schools.
- Art History graduates are pursuing a broad range of careers, including faculty and curatorial positions at major universities, colleges, galleries, and museums where they are making significant contributions through important publications and exhibitions.
- Our internationally recognized faculty have held prestigious fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum and Library, the Getty Research Foundation, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, and the Center for Advance Study in the Visual Arts.