A red thread--a conceptual stitch--connects us to the past and leads us to the future, marking out a pattern that has guided our program since its inception. We are a faculty dedicated to both historical research and theoretical speculation: to needling history with theory. Practitioners of art history, we are also tailors of gender studies, the poetics of writing, the erotics of art, religious studies, post-colonial thought, the matter of race, the impact of class, the touch of paint, the portrait as sign, the indexicality of the photograph, the embodiment of emotion, the body in play, architecture as performance, technologies of power, psychoanalysis as method, the artifact unburied. Each of us picks up the red thread in a different way, pulling it through different works of art and interlacing it with our expertise. We strive for a textile that is knowingly balanced, taking seriously the pleasures of looking as well as the rigor of scholarly analysis.
We ask our students to pull their ideas across historical periods, while at the same time attending to the specificity of different cultural moments. Our goal is to train students in the nuances of how form is content, not only in the art analyzed and the written texts studied, but also in their own writing. In our classes and seminars, students are encouraged to find their own voice, as well as to hear the voices of others. We seek to dissolve the antinomy between writing and vision, as we inspire our students to look and read closely--to find the design, to isolate the weave--and most of all to discover a pattern and passion that is all their own.