Art History Department Chair
Claudia Swan

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A Message from the Department Chair

Welcome to the Northwestern University Department of Art History. Our top-ten, nationally ranked department offers undergraduates the option to major or minor in art history; the Ph.D. program is open to graduate students from diverse backgrounds. Because Art History is inherently interdisciplinary, every student will find something of interest in our curriculum. In our courses, you may renew and deepen a prior interest, or engage with totally new material.

We offer a wide array of courses on four levels. Our 100-level seminars introduce freshman students to a diversity of topics; students in recent seminars studied black aesthetics in the U.S., art commissioned by the Medici Family in Renaissance Florence, and contemporary architecture in the Chicago area. Our 200-level introductory courses cover the arts of the world: North America, Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean, Asia, Europe, and World Architecture; recent new courses address new media of art since the 1960's including virtual realities and encompass the Pacific Rim. Our 300-level offerings hone in on more specific areas. Many of them are open to ambitious students without prerequisites. Our graduate seminars on the 400-level are keyed to Ph.D. students in Art History and related disciplines. Undergraduate honors in Art History gives majors the opportunity to work closely with faculty; honors students write an extensive research paper over several quarters. Our courses are often linked to exhibitions and other events at the Art Institute of Chicago, NU's own Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, and other Chicago-area art institutions.

The faculty includes widely published scholars who specialize in the arts of the United States, Europe and Asia, and questions of Theory and Interpretation. Our particular areas of strength are the art and architecture of 19th-century Europe, the art of Early Modern Europe (with emphasis on art and science, the arts of Asia, and 20 th century art). Five new faculty researching the arts of America, France after colonialism, the African Diaspora, Byzantine art and contemporary Japanese art offer a broad range of classes. Each summer our first-year graduate students attend a special course abroad organized around special collections and archives. Professor Hans Belting (Hochschule fuer Gestaltung, Karlsruhe, Germany, 1993-2002), eminent historian of Medieval and Early Modern European art, taught the department's 2004 graduate summer course in Berlin; Ann Marie Yasin, Assistant Professor of Ancient Art, led the summer 2005 course in Rome; Holly Clayson directed the course in Paris, summer 2006; and Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson led this summer's course in Kingston, Jamaica.

The department's commitment to diverse perspectives and voices is reflected in an extensive schedule of lectures, workshops, colloquia, and conferences. The production and the practice of art history has become a global phenomenon in the 20th -21st centuries and our department works to redefine and transcend traditional geographic, chronological, and technical boundaries of the field. The department has added new staff to digitize department collections, transform teaching and study methods, and develop 3-D collections of art.

Claudia Swan
Department Chair