• The Art History Department studies the forms, functions, meanings, and theoretical underpinnings of the visual arts broadly construed to encompass such activities as performance, construction, and installation as well as painting, sculpture, photography, and architecture.
  • The department considers works of art in historically and culturally specific ways, situating them within systems of belief, habits of visual literacy, practices of self-formation, social and political ideologies, patterns of sacred and secular discourse, assumptions about intentionality and authority, and currencies of global and transnational exchange.