Art History
The Art History program aims to provide student majors with a strong historical and theoretical understanding of the visual and material environment created by humankind. Art history is founded on the premise that artifacts embody, engage, and shape the beliefs and values of the persons, groups, and societies who made, commissioned, and used them. Students will learn to document and interpret changes in human society by taking works of art and other objects of material culture as their primary sources. They will also critically analyze and interpret written texts to help reconstruct and illuminate the contexts—social, economic, political, philosophical, and religious—in which artifacts were produced, used, and understood.
2025 Public Events
Check our News & Events page for details.
"Shifting Shelves — Libraries of the 19th-Century Islamic World"
Friday October 24, 1:30 p.m., Boger 115
Art History Faculty News
September 9, Tuesday:
Two of our veteran Art History faculty members received well-deserved recognition at the first Faculty Meeting of the 2025 fall semester:
· Joe Siry received a Faculty Leadership Award for his years of steady, thoughtful, and ethical leadership of many committees and academic units, including Advisory, Review and Appeals Board (RAB), Facilities, the entire faculty, and our own department.
· Phil Wagoner received a Commendation for Faculty Scholarship, acknowledging his decades of excellent and innovative scholarship related to the Indic and Persianate cultures of India's Deccan plateau in the late medieval and early modern periods.
The Department of Art and Art History is thrilled to welcome this wonderful news to launch the academic year. Our heartiest congratulations to Professor Siry and Professor Wagoner, two towering figures in the Wesleyan Art History Program!
The Belgian Friendship Building: A singular architectural landmark bridging western Europe and the American South
Was the Belgian Friendship Building in Richmond, Virginia really a gift of a colonial power to an HBCU, or was there more to the story? Read an interview by the University of Virginia Press with Professor Katherine Kuenzli and the co-authors of The Belgian Friendship Building: From the New York World's Fair to a Virginia HBCU and discover the fascinating facts of this tower, where divergent goals coexist within one form.