Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi: Confronting the Discipline, Preparing Graduate Students

In conceiving the fall 2020 course and ways to meet its objectives, I reflected on the pros and cons of teaching the writings of the same white men who had filled the methods seminar I took as a graduate student. I had read texts by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Heinrich Wölfflin, Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, and others.¹ Pairing such “classic” texts with critical evaluations by more recent authors presented a possible intervention, but that approach would still maintain the centrality of familiar white men and uphold the notion that any art history must center itself on European and Euroamerican cultural production and priorities. I acknowledge that some texts may be viewed as foundational for certain fields within the discipline, yet peripheral or irrelevant to others. To orient students toward the importance of field diversity and the separate but no less critical matter of scholar diversity within the discipline as integral to any future-facing art history, I omitted from the syllabus many common texts. I asked students to consider the specific historiographies and frameworks they and other scholars might need to support their research on a particular topic. And I encouraged students to think about how recognition of different scholarly points of reference—even within a field or discipline—might require one to write with more specificity and clarity in order to engage an intelligent and curious but not necessarily informed reader. 

As I reflected on other approaches to graduate methods courses people had shared with me, I realized that methods courses can help graduate students think critically about the work of art historians and also offer more capacious views of what art history has been, is, and can be. I learned about one course designed around discussion of an individual book each week to invite students to think about how a book is constructed and another course centered on a weekly empathic discussion of a single art historian’s approach to their research.² Inspired by the different designs, I dedicated a few weeks of ARTHIST 590R to the study of award-winning books by art historians and tried to encourage empathy in critique. I also began the semester with Emily Clark’s “Ten Proposals for a More Ethical Art History: An Undergraduate Perspective” to signal my commitment to reimagining the discipline and subverting hierarchies. I aimed to prime students to contemplate the past, present, and future of art history, and whether there is one art history or many art histories, while also urging us to think about possible benefits and drawbacks of historical versus future-facing lenses.³

An effort to allow for different art histories need not mean disavowing the history of art history. Readings for the fall 2020 seminar included work by Donald Preziosi as well as Georges Didi-Huberman, Carlo Ginzburg, Keith Moxey, and Linda Nochlin. I assigned these readings early in the semester to highlight the foundations and twentieth-century development of the discipline in the US.⁴ I asked students to think about the relevance of the history of the discipline to their own fields of study and to keep in mind the trajectories of thought critical for their specific areas of specialization. I reiterated that thinkers in different fields within the discipline may consider as foundational different texts and approaches.

Other assignments on the syllabus featured the intellectual outputs of Sara Ahmed, John Baines, Carolyn Dean, Elena FitzPatrick Sifford and Ananda Cohen-Aponte, and Steven Nelson.⁵ Seminar participants thought together about the whiteness of art history and its institutions, different meanings of the term art as well as inclusions and exclusions various definitions entail, and the ways in which certain voices have been and continue to be highlighted or silenced in narratives about art and its histories. Participants in the 2021 iteration of the course considered the same themes but with some adjustments to the assigned texts.⁶ Subsequent assignments on the fall 2020 syllabus alternated between award-winning books published within the last decade by art historians focusing on arts from beyond Europe and Euroamerica, and investigations into various art-historical institutions and modes of inquiry, including computational analysis. For the fall 2021 iteration of the course, I still assigned several books, but I replaced one of the titles on the 2020 syllabus with the set of articles published in The Art Bulletin’s December 2020 issue on art history with or without borders.⁷ The collection of fresh texts by authors working in a variety of fields prompted generative discussion about different scholarly approaches for the study of art and art history.

While the desire to move beyond the discipline’s Eurocentric past and realize productive new futures extends beyond the US, it also feeds back into American institutions. In September 2018, a group of scholars in Dakar, Senegal, set about imagining what art history would look like if experts in the discipline no longer assume Europe and Euroamerica as its center. Art historian Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi helped organize the Condition Report 3 On Art History in Africa, an event “[aimed] to reconfigure the parameters and potential of art history in Africa.”⁸ But the conversation Nzewi helped foster is not limited to the African continent. In March of 2019, New York’s Museum of Modern Art—long a bastion for defining modernism in art in terms of Europe and Euroamerica—announced its hiring of Nzewi as its first Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator in the museum’s department of painting and sculpture. Addition of Nzewi to the museum’s curatorial team contributes to the institution’s effort to present more global views of modern art to museumgoers.⁹

Of course, art history exists outside of universities and museums as well, and critical and thoughtful engagement in public discussions can inform art-historical practice and public policy. Eager for students in the fall 2020 iteration of the methods seminar to think about public attention to art and architecture as well as to reflect on the possible relevancy of their own work in popular spaces and other domains, I asked students to scan art- and architecture-related news stories each week. Students contributed their own selections to a weekly news sheet they circulated among all art history faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students at Emory. Students in the course also hosted weekly online discussions of news items covered in that week’s news sheet. In these activities, students realized the potential for building community during a time when COVID-19–related university restrictions limited opportunities for in-person exchange. Recipients of the weekly news sheet expressed enthusiasm for the student-generated overviews, though students in the seminar subtly but clearly signaled that the responsibilities felt onerous.

I dropped the newsletter assignment from the fall 2021 syllabus, yet, I still sought to support students in reflecting on their own interests in art history, and I encouraged them to work to identify their core commitments as thinkers and as people. Participants in the fall 2021 iteration of the methods seminar devoted a few minutes during almost every class meeting to the topic of finding purpose. I urged students to embrace their core commitments as guides to help them make decisions throughout the PhD program and when they face job markets in the future. We also talked about the current state of the markets, a topic that can provoke anxiety among students and faculty.

American PhD students and programs in art history experience the now decades-old imbalance between the number of PhDs in art history awarded in any year and the number of tenure-track jobs available in the discipline.¹⁰ In a 2016 report submitted to the Mellon Foundation on twenty-five years of doctoral education in the US, Robert Weisbuch and Leonard Cassuto assert that “close to half of all humanities students will not achieve tenure-track positions, and only a fraction of them at research universities.” The coauthors further observe that “the structure of doctoral education often presupposes a faculty career rather than developing forms of expertise with versatile applications across social sectors.”¹¹ They propose structural changes in graduate programs informed by present realities.¹² Art historians and other humanists may lament the lack of tenure-track positions for people who earn PhDs, and we may yearn for different circumstances. However, an unwillingness to accept the reality of the situation will not change it, and our current graduate students operate in current conditions.

For many tenured art historians, the situation for current graduate students may diverge significantly from their own experiences as graduate students. In her 2020 study on sixty years of art history dissertations with a focus on dissertations completed between 2002 and 2018, art historian Nancy Um points at huge shifts in the hiring landscape.¹³ Um hints at a more robust and then waning academic job market for art historians during the latter half of the twentieth century, when many senior faculty in today’s art history departments earned their graduate degrees. The sharp rise in PhDs awarded in art history in the first decades of the twenty-first century that Um tracks combined with the continued decline in tenure-track positions results in demand for tenure-track positions that far outstrips supply. Publicly available data for one art history department in the US shows that an estimated 25 percent of its students earning PhDs between 2010 and 2020 secured tenure-track positions by the fall of 2020. Outside of academia, job opportunities have also been limited. An estimated 21 percent of PhD graduates from the same program during the same period landed positions in government, galleries, libraries, archives, or museums by the fall of 2020.¹⁴

Attentive to the current state of job markets for graduates of American PhD programs in art history and desirous to signal the utility of art-historical thinking in many different realms, I included in the fall 2020 syllabus a range of works that brought scholarly concerns to larger publics. We read Sarah Vowell’s 2006 Assassination Vacation and Sarah Elizabeth Lewis’s May 2020 New York Times opinion “Where Are the Photos of People Dying of Covid?” We also listened to an episode of Jill Lepore’s podcast, The Last Archive. We talked about the ways in which the multimedia works draw on scholarly methods and make the approaches accessible to non-specialists.¹⁵ For the fall 2021 syllabus, I retained Lewis’s essay but opted to assign one of Lepore’s New Yorker articles about evidence instead of her podcast episode. The shift from meeting twice a week in the fall of 2020, when instruction happened online, to meeting once a week for in-person instruction in fall of 2021 left insufficient time to read Vowell’s book in the later course. Nevertheless, throughout the fall 2021 semester, participants in the seminar talked about public-facing scholarship and the state of job markets for PhDs in art history. We also devoted significant time to reading and thinking about data literacy and computational methods as competency in both realms may benefit individuals who search for jobs in universities, museums, or other areas.¹⁶

Competitive job markets and financial insecurity have contributed to the growing rates of stress and anxiety observed among graduate students within the past decade, but they are not the only factors.¹⁷ Concerned about mental health and well-being of students and faculty, I considered ways to incorporate best research-based practices for mental well-being into the ARTHIST 590R syllabus and overall course design. Since 2017, I have become increasingly committed to creating courses that encourage participants’ attention to their whole selves. Even prior to the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic, universities recognized increased mental health challenges on their campuses. The challenges have become more pronounced since the spring of 2020.¹⁸ Our institutions are now also explicitly asking us to develop programs designed around best research-based practices for mental health and well-being.¹⁹

In March 2017, my sister Jane Patricia Gagliardi served as the director of the psychiatry residency training program at the Duke University School of Medicine, and she brought me to a plenary session of the American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training (AADPRT) conference. Presenters in the session addressed mental and emotional well-being among trainees. The time and attention dedicated to the topic surprised me as I could not recall having ever witnessed similar conversations among professionals in art history or other humanistic disciplines. My sister explained that the incidence of death by suicide is higher among medical doctors than it is among the general population and that national accreditation agencies were focusing on the importance of learner well-being and emotional health.

Aware that people who earn PhDs in art history are not immune to death by suicide or other mental health issues, I experienced dissonance, especially when I considered that human experiences and meaning making are central to the humanities. I wondered how art history and other humanistic disciplines could become more engaged in discussions about the experiences of their own practitioners, the meaning of our work, and our overall well-being.²⁰ Since the spring of 2020, the convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and a longer-standing but often less acknowledged pandemic of systemic injustice has made more acute the need to develop graduate programs and professional practices to foster mental well-being. Efforts to address systemic injustice, like efforts to promote mental well-being, require us to identify past harms, address them, and cultivate inclusive communities of belonging in which each individual can show up as their authentic self without fear.

My informal exchanges with other humanists as well as mental health professionals have alerted me to difficulties in attending to student well-being. Some faculty may view the effort as the unnecessary coddling of students. Similarly, faculty may recall little or no displays of concern for their whole selves and overall well-being from their academic mentors during their own training. Yet, efforts to improve systems require making changes, especially in light of shifting job markets and different societal realities. Faculty and their attempts to support graduate students in their programs will benefit from acknowledging the additional pressures on graduate students and working in appropriate ways to mitigate the growing rates of mental health challenges across our campuses.²¹

In ARTHIST 590R, I endeavored to introduce students to research-based strategies to cultivate personal well-being. Episodes of The Happiness Lab, a podcast Yale psychologist Laurie Santos launched following the overwhelming success of her spring 2018 course Psychology and the Good Life, appear on the fall 2020 and fall 2021 syllabi for the course.²² The episodes sparked discussion about how to approach graduate studies and live fulfilling lives. According to Santos, our happiness or lack thereof stems in part from the reference points we use to gauge our being in the world, and she urges us to reflect on the ones we use and determine whether we might reframe our perspectives. Santos says that when we encounter difficulties, we should acknowledge the difficult emotions. In addition, instead of thinking only about positive outcomes, we should imagine and prepare for challenging situations so we can navigate difficulty when it arises and achieve our goals. In the final episode of the first season of the Happiness Lab, Santos argues that internal rewards rather than external evaluations bring joy, and she recommends that we look for personal meaning in the things we do.

Even though I did not include the entire first season of the Happiness Lab on the fall 2021 syllabus for ARTHIST 590R, I contemplated ways to translate Santos’s findings into the course design. I worked with students to identify and discuss challenges, including difficulties in present job markets and overall well-being on our campuses, in an effort to support students in preparing for and navigating those difficulties. I made it clear to students that I do not hold professional expertise in mental health and wellness and that I am not in a position to assess, diagnose, or treat. However, as a humanist, I have learned to celebrate diversity in human experiences and to create connections across difference. I bring what I have learned to ARTHIST 590R and to other courses, and I now strive to align course design with best research-based practices for well-being. For example, I have changed my grading parameters to emphasize process over outcome, scheduled wellness pauses, and devoted time in class to student-led discussion of strategies students have tried or would like to try in order to promote their own well-being.²³

Calls to tell different narratives, engage with broad perspectives, and expand understandings of art to involve people from all over the globe are calls to attend to the diversity of human experiences and creativity. As we realize future-facing art histories that encompass more perspectives and are less hidebound to the past, occupational horizons for graduates of art history programs may broaden. And as art historians work more and more to listen to and learn from people in different places and in different positions, we may see and assess art and its histories from new angles. We may also intensify our connections with others, an element critical to the well-being of ourselves and the people with whom we interact. We cannot know what the future holds, but we may uncover other disciplinary, occupational, and holistic benefits if we work across hierarchies and other boundaries to realize more diverse and humane futures.

For the introduction to this three-part article, click here; to read Faith Kim’s contribution, click here; Chelsy Monie’s contribution can be found here; and to read the conclusion, click here.