1 March 2012 | CAA2012, Career, Conferences, Teaching
This stimulating panel was presented at CAA and chaired by Laura J. Crary of Presbyterian College and William Ganis of Wells College. Three well-crafted papers addressed aspects of teaching art history at a college with no art history department per se, but in which art history is an important component of education. Lisa DeBoer of [...]
24 February 2012 | CAA2012, Career, Conferences, Photography, Teaching, Theory
The Los Angeles Convention Center is massive. Despite its girth, the College Art Association 2012 Conference occupies about one third of the center. There is no shortage of simultaneous interesting sessions, forcing attendees to choose carefully. The sessions I’ve visited thus far have been largely interesting, with some presenters generating more enthusiasm than others. “Deconstructing [...]
20 February 2012 | CAA2012, Career, Conferences, Current Events, Teaching, Theory
The schedule of sessions for the almost-here College Art Association Conference in Los Angeles is overwhelming. Thankfully the abstracts have arrived to help clarify some of the content. While attendees will undoubtedly seek out sessions that pique their personal and research interests, I would like to suggest five sessions which are likely to appeal to [...]
1 September 2011 | Books, Career
New books by favorite authors are piling up on my desk — Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo’s Political Art by Mieke Bal, Florence & Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science by Hans Belting, Queer Beauty and A General Theory of Visual Culture by the prolific Whitney Davis, The Passionate Triangle by Rebecca Zorach, [...]
7 June 2011 | Books, Career, Renaissance
When I learned of John T. Spike’s Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine after it was published last year, I immediately thought of Andrew Graham-Dixon’s 2008 book Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel, and Ross King’s Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling of 2003. While I admit that much of the publishing world remains obscure to [...]
13 March 2011 | Books, Career, Journals
The rise of peer-reviewed, online journals dealing with art history and visual culture, and not associated with an academic publisher, is an interesting development. Traditionally an academic press, complete with editorial board and a peer-review process, has lent a certain cache and reliability to the items it publishes, though this varies of course. These editorial functions [...]
24 February 2011 | Books, Career, Journals
Those of you still recovering from a marathon four days of conference-going earlier this month may wince at the notion of “100 Years of the College Art Association,” but in the hands of Susan Ball, it’s an appealing subject. She has just published a fine volume she edited on CAA’s history, “The Eye, The Hand, [...]
14 October 2010 | Career
I don’t have any data yet on how this year’s job market in art history is shaping up. Good-looking positions have been advertised at Princeton, Columbia, NYU, Penn, Stanford, Berkeley, Chicago, SAIC, USC, BU, Rice, Mt. Holyoke, and Reed, among other places. Follow the progress of those searches over at the Art History 2010-11 rumor [...]
1 October 2010 | Career
The NRC report’s data is often criticized as stale: it covers the 2005-06 academic year. Since then, numerous art-history departments have hired, stolen away, or put out to pasture one or more of their stars. The small size of most art-history departments makes them particularly sensitive to such shifts. For example, UC-Berkeley has just lost [...]
30 September 2010 | Career
After reading Jon’s interesting posts on the NRC rankings, as well as the nifty interactive tool from the Chronicle of Higher Education ($) that makes it easy to scan the range of data for each field, I would concede that many of the criticisms of the process and results are valid. Nonetheless, I would suggest that it’s [...]
29 September 2010 | Career
Let’s break down the NRC data a bit. Here are the top scoring art-history departments in various sub-categories: Research Activity (which is based on publications per faculty member, percent of faculty with grants, and awards per faculty member) 1. Columbia 2. Duke 3. Chicago 4. MIT 5. UC-Berkeley 6. Penn 7. NYU 8. Harvard 9. [...]
29 September 2010 | Career
[Update, 9/1/2011: the NRC revised its data.] The NRC has at long last released its “Data-Based Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States.” Here’s a first look at it. The data is from 2005-2006, fatally outdated say some critics. The NRC retorts, “most faculty have been at the same university in the same program [...]
14 September 2010 | Career
In The Guardian, art historian Marianne M Gilchrist writes: In December 1993, I got my PhD. I was 28 and passionate about art and history. I found it impossible to gain a toehold in academia: no one wanted my specialism and my first degree was in a different subject. Interviews for lectureships dried up after [...]
13 June 2010 | Career
I asked the Getty again if they planned to update “PhDs in Art History – Over a Decade Later” and heard back this time: [W]e are not considering any funding in this area at this time. Please feel free to view information about our current work http://www.getty.edu/foundation/message_director.html .
19 May 2010 | Career
Last week I emailed the Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education to ask if they had any plans to update their study PhDs in Art History – Over a Decade Later. I got a response today: We are delighted about your interest in our study. We would love to undertake another study, should [...]
11 May 2010 | Career
[Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of personal reflections by Oliver Shultz on the process of building a career in art history.] Last December, I along with hundreds of other aspiring art historians sent our graduate-school applications out into the void. In the instant after clicking submit, I couldn’t help but wonder [...]
16 April 2010 | Career, Conferences, Museums, Theory
Symposium: November 12–14, 2010 Banff International Curatorial Institute The Banff Centre Deadline: April 23, 2010 For information: http://bit.ly/c8d3b2
14 April 2010 | Career, Contemporary
In a recent issue of American Art (23:3), Joshua Shannon writes that the field of contemporary art history is now producing more job openings than “Nineteenth-Century Art and the Art of the United States combined – the two boom fields of a generation ago,” but that it is also changing rapidly. For starters, its center [...]
2 April 2010 | Career, Museums
The New York Times profiles nine emerging curators: Rajendra Roy, Hao Sheng, Jen Mergel, Alison Gass, Diane Waggoner, Scott Rothkopf, Diane Waggoner, Clara Drummond, and Samantha Rippner. MoMA film curator Roy says, “When I first heard they were looking for someone I was convinced I was NOT the person. I was too young, too out [...]
24 March 2010 | Career
Art history now has robust online rumor mills for jobs and salaries (now in their third year) as well as a place to discuss both, although there’s not as much to discuss this year, given the relative lack of openings. A few years back, The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote an article about such sites [...]
