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Department information
Art history affirms and explains the importance of visual acuity and historical perspective
for a critical engagement with images, artifacts, and built environments. We use objects to understand history and culture, and history and culture to understand objects.
Students earning a BA in art history explore the varied roles of objects, creators,
audiences, and patrons in diverse cultural contexts around the world and in a range
of periods, from antiquity to the present. The skills art history majors develop in analyzing visual objects and written sources adapt to a wide
range of future pursuits. Majors improve their abilities to write clearly, speak articulately,
and carry out detailed research, preparing them broadly for post-college life, including
art-related careers, graduate studies in many fields, and other personal, civic, and
professional endeavors.
Below are the departmental learning goals mapped to college-wide student learning goals.
I. Knowledge
The student will gain:
- familiarity with the terminology necessary for the historical study and discussion of objects
- global and historical breadth of knowledge about objects and their creators, audiences, and cultural contexts
- knowledge of the creative process, including the possibilities and limitations of various media, acquired through the direct experience of making art
II. Abilities
The student will be able to:
- recognize and understand different methodological approaches to analyzing objects
- communicate persuasively in both writing and speaking
- reason persuasively, i.e., present a thesis, support that thesis with visual and historical evidence, and come to logical conclusions
- formulate insightful questions about objects and answer them through research and creative thinking
III. Values and perspectives
The student will graduate with:
- an understanding of the agency of visual representation and experience in both the past and the present, and an interest in the diverse values and ideas evident in the visual expression of different cultures and periods
- a recognition of objects as experienced in particular environments (including original and intended locations as well as museums and galleries), and the limits of working with reproductions
- a respect for and willingness to engage productively with modes of visual expression and experiences that are unfamiliar (whether temporally, geographically, or culturally)
- an ability to apply habits of critical seeing and historical and cultural awareness to visual experiences in everyday life beyond the classroom
Established by Dr. and Mrs. Stuart Eigen and by the College on the recommendation of the Department of Art History to an outstanding art history major. Awarded to a senior whose academic and co-curricular record demonstrates an exceptionally varied range of notable achievements related to the major.
Recipients:
- 2026: Emily Lin
- 2025: Eloise Dreesen
- 2024: Lila Saunders
- 2023: Eve K. Kreshtool
- 2022: Elizabeth Anne Cumbo
- 2021: Julia Katharine Lawless
- 2020: Yuwen Jiang
- 2019: Monica D. Andrews
- 2018: Helena Meier
- 2017: Olivia Tyson
- 2016: Bailey Threatt
- 2015: Allison Jeanette Green
- 2014: Layla Durrani
- 2013: Hilary Knecht
- 2012: Bryn Schockmel
- 2011: Hillary Reder
- 2010: Frances Gubler
- 2009: Heather Gilchrist
- 2008: Rebecca Perry, Meredith Mowder
- 2007: Sarah Mintz
- 2006: Caitline Hinz
- 2005: Diane Woodin
- 2004: Rebecca Pristoop
- 2003: Stephanie Green
- 2002: Sarah Rubin
- 2001: Anna Piperato
- 2000: Hillary Shugrue
- 1999: Abigail Guay
- 1998: Elizabeth Clemen
- 1997: Tala Klinck
- 1996: Jonathan Kauffman
Awarded by the Department of Art History to a student who completes an outstanding project in an art history course. Nominees may be from any class year and do not need to be art history majors. The deadline for project submission is in late March or early April. Completed projects are preferable; those still in progress should be nearing final form. Winners are encouraged to present their projects at Academic Festival.
Recipients:
- 2026: Lauren Attwell, "Ancestry Ink"
- 2025: Madelin Aho, "Art and Industry: The Hyde Collection and the Finch Paper Company"
- 2024: Sophia Mehta, "At Home and in the Museum: The Journeys of Two Patara"
- 2023: Sasha M. Fishstein, "Resisting the Wheels of Modernity? A Critical Study of Mingei Theory From the 1920s to the 2020s"
- 2022: Julia Helen Smith, "The Ethics of Altering Vintage and Antique Items"
- 2021: Zhoutong Han, "Panda Unexpressed"
- 2020: Alicia Sandoval Vadillo, 淩e-Thinking Ana Mendieta: Essentialism, Liminality, and Performance�
- 2018: Laila Morgan, "The Pregnant, Birthing, and Postpartum Body in Modern and Contemporary Art"
- 2016: Mary Cleary, 淔abricating an Image: How Mary Stuart, Isabella d橢ste, and Other Women of the Renaissance Used Dress to Assert Agency�
- 2015: Grace Aretsky, "A Fate Worse than Death: Dynamics of Disclosure in the Art of the AIDS Crisis"
- 2014: Colleen Hochberger, "Art, Law and Power"
- 2013: Kathryn Moynihan, "An Introductory Unit to Lakota Beadwork: Usage, Importance, and Changing Perceptions Over the Past Two Hundred Years"
- 2012: Hannah Kagan-Moore, "Portrait of the King: Gabrielle d'Estrees and One of Her Sisters, the Duchesse d'Villars, in the Bath as Self- Fashioning at Sixteenth Century Fontainebleu"
- 2011: David Serotte, "Sugarcoated Subversion: Drag and Disindentification In Kalup Linzy's Lollypop"
- 2010: Linnea Kniaz, "Josef Alber's Photographs: A Contradictory Representation of Bauhaus Architectural Ideals"
- 2009: Emily Schenkein, "Penetrating Gazes: The Paradox of Andreas Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Farbica"
- 2008: Emily Jones, "The Other Side of the Tracks: Twentieth-Century Urban Planning and Pittsburgh's North Side"
- 2007: Laura Beshears, "The Politics of Pain: Meanings of Masochism in Contemporary Chinese Art"
- 2006: Caitlin Woolsey
- 2005: Christina Bruno, "Appease, Defeat, Adore: Interpreting Sanchi Stupa 2"
- 2003: Molly Porter, "Images of a Queen: The Adaptive Iconography of Elizabeth 1"
- 2002: Elisabeth Manzi, "Ernest Fenollosa and Arthur Wesley Dow: Orientialists Ahead of Their Time"
- 2001: Ruth Battaglia, "Transforming Mariana: John Everett Millais, Tennyson, and the Victorian Woman"
- 2000: Laura Burns
- 1999: Ben Affleck
- 1998: Lauren Knopf, "My Sole Negation"
- 1997: Emily Greenwood
- 1996: Sarah Boyd