Bachelor of Arts in Art History
Study of the history of art cultivates a deep understanding of humanity's fundamental impulse to create. The history of art traces how artists across all time periods and geographical regions confront their environment and society, and thereby produce artifacts of lasting resonance and insight into the cultural practices of their age. Such acts of visual expression find diverse articulation across a wide range of media, including architecture, sculpture, painting, photography, graphic arts, film, performance and video.
A global perspective is fundamental to our curriculum. In association with the Rose Art Museum, the department also provides extraordinary resources for the study of twentieth-century and contemporary art.
The art history major emphasizes the modes of inquiry it shares with other fields that analyze cultural activity, such as semiotics, social history, psychoanalysis, and gender studies, as inflected through its unique competency in visual analysis. Through the range of courses undertaken, the student is encouraged to develop a focus that reflects their own intellectual and personal interests.