The mission of the Art History program is to offer a broadly based, interdisciplinary program in the visual cultures of the world. To this end we have full and part-time specialists in American, Asian, and European art. Our goal is to serve the serious art history student by preparing undergraduate majors to be competitive in applying to master’s programs, at excellent graduate schools.

Courses address a range of media (painting, sculpture, architecture, graphic arts, performance, popular arts) as well as the staging of art at different sites (museums, public venues, and other exhibitionary spaces). The program thus focuses on creativity and culture at both the individual and community/civic levels. Faculty critically examine gender and sexuality, nationhood and national identity, colonialism, race and ethnicity, popular culture and its audiences, identity politics, pedagogy, the politics of cultural institutions, and global culture in a post-modern age. To these ends, the faculty employ semiotics, deconstruction, and ethnography.