From social media posts, to film, to political advertisements, to the built environment around us, we live in a world saturated with visual imagery. In Art History, we study how monuments, art, and architecture actively structure our experiences.
Apply for the Guarisco Scholarship!
Courses in Art History equip students to understand and articulate how and why art objects communicate, and to read and understand our built environment. Making sense of new and unfamiliar images, understanding how images and places work on the people experiencing them, understanding how images, objects and environments make contact with diverse and distinct audiences, are all essential skills for navigating and reshaping the world in which we live
Our course offerings cover multiple cultures across the globe and are diverse across time and place.
We invite students to consider the art and architecture of the Americas under colonial Spanish rule, the history of European art and architecture over centuries, to consider the thinking and problem solving that shaped Modern and Postmodern art and architecture, to encounter the history and techniques of global film practice, to understand the celebration and critique of consumer culture through art, and to discover the lasting impact of the art of Asia on our global imagination.
We often travel to regional and national art collections and have a strong relationship with the University Art Gallery and the University Archives.
You can do all kinds of things with a degree in Art History, the skills it teaches you, and the questions you learn to consider as part of your degree. Some recent graduates of the Art History program at Sewanee have gone on to:
The Peter V. Guarisco merit scholarship in Art History provides support to senior Art History majors for a year of tuition and a post graduate career preparedness experience. Candidates are eligible to apply for the scholarship during their junior year with the announcement of the scholarship recipient made at the end of March. The scholarship recognizes excellence in coursework, writing, and engagement with questions of art history. This scholarship will expand students’ access to art works, scholarly materials, and locations for Sewanee Art History majors studying local, national, or international topics.
Eligibility requirements: Declared Art History majors who have earned 64 semester hours (juniors) with at least a 3.0 in Art History classes may apply here. Applications should be received no later than March 8, 2023. Apply here, and make sure that you are logged into your Sewanee email address.
This course introduces religious artworks of Japan from the sixth century to the present day. Following a chronological sequence, the course examines artwork from Buddhist, Shinto, and Christian belief systems, and investigates two-dimensional works, sculpture, and architecture. Students explore topics such as the relationship between ritual practice and the visual arts, images of heaven and hell, hidden icons, relics, and interactions of sacred and secular in the visual realm.
This seminar charts the development of pop art in North America and Europe between 1960 and 1973, investigating why art made by a diverse group of artists, using a variety of aesthetic techniques, is labeled "pop." Lectures and discussions explore stylistic, social, and political issues raised by pop as well as features that diverse pop practices show in common—including the use of ready-made imagery, photography, text, and performance. The seminar concludes by tracing pop art's influence on work from the late 1970s to the present.
This course emphasizes the relationships and interactions between Spain and the other Western European countries as well as Spain as a cultural and artistic bridge between Europe and North Africa and between Europe and the New World. It includes visits to museums, monuments, and cultural institutions in Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Morocco with special attention to art collections, collecting, and their origins. This course is available only through the Sewanee Semester in Spain program.
Mishoe Brennecke received a B.A. in art history and English from the University of the South. She earned an M.A. in art history at Columbia University New York and a Ph.D. in art history from University of New York. She teaches courses in American Art, nineteenth century European art, and British art, as well as the survey of Western Art I and II. She is also the Sewanee representative for European Studies, an interdisciplinary study-abroad program sponsored jointly by Sewanee and Rhodes College.
Dr. Miller's research has been funded by a Fulbright Fellowship, Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship, and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, among others. She has published in the Journal of Japanese Studies, TransAsia Photography Review, Impressions, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA), Nursing Clio, and various public humanities projects and museum catalogues. She is co-editor and contributing author for The Visual Culture of Meiji Japan: Negotiating the Transition to Modernity (Routledge, 2021), and is currently finalizing her book manuscript, Envisioning the Empress: The Lives and Images of Japanese Imperial Women, 1868-1952 (expected 2023). You can find more information at her website: www.alisonjmiller.com. Dr. Miller teaches the survey of Asian art history, as well as courses in Japanese and Chinese art, Buddhist art, contemporary Asian art, and museum studies. She hails from Chicago, Illinois
Jeffrey Thompson is an art history professor and chair of film studies at Sewanee. He teaches courses in modern and contemporary art and film history. He received an M.A. in cinema studies from New York University and a Ph.D. in art history from Emory University (2006). He is a specialist in the history of conceptual art in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. His research interests include the history of photography, pop art, and graffiti focusing on issues like media, mass culture, and the politics of display and reception.
Leslie E. Todd received her PhD in Art History from the University of Florida. She works on early modern art history with a specialization in art of colonial Latin America. She investigates how early modern visual practice enacted and upheld the dynamic relationship between metropole and colony that defined Spanish colonialism in the Americas.
Studio Art Building 109, ext. 1256
On February 25, Dr. Alison Miller gave a talk on the 19th c literati artist Noguchi Shohin as part of the symposium Gender and Voice in Japanese Art, held at the Denver Art Museum in conjunction with the exhibition Her Brush: Japanese Women Artists. She also contributed an essay to the digital catalogue.
Dr. Alison J Miller will provide an introduction to Japanese woodblock prints of the 1870s and 1880s with a focus on how the images worked to create and reinforce social conceptions of Meiji values and ideals.
Assistant Professor of Art History Alison Miller has been awarded a Sainsbury Fellowship for Spring 2023. This award will require her to be in England for six months at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures at the University of East Anglia. This is a great opportunity and a highly prestigious award in the field of Japanese art history.
Dr. Yoshikuni Igarashi, Professor of History at Vanderbilt University delivered a lecture entitled Are we Allowed to see Beauty in the Face of Death and Destruction?: Ishiuchi Miyako's 'Hiroshima' and postwar Japan on March 30 in Gailor Auditorium. The event was sponsored by the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies; the Department of History; the Asian Studies Program, and the Women's & Gender Studies Program.
The Tennessee Williams Center provides unique, state-of-the-art facilities for students and faculty. Created with funds from the estate of Tennessee Williams himself, the center houses a fully equipped 175-seat theatre, a 60-seat studio theatre, a drafting and design studio, a dance studio, costume and scenery studios, and dressing rooms.
Along with performance venues, Sewanee also has several art and exhibition galleries on campus. The University Art Gallery, the Museum Gallery of Archives, and the Carlos Gallery house everything from contemporary art shows to archived work, featuring current students, accomplished alumni, and internationally acclaimed artists.
The roots of Greek and Latin and the power of their mythology helped propel Western civilization. Classics majors at Sewanee benefit from the study of Western civilization’s foundational languages and find that their influence extends to today’s world. From medical terminology and legal language to hard sciences and the English language itself, we are surrounded by the legacy of our intellectual ancestors.
