Department of Art History
School of Architecture and Allied Arts

Undergraduate degree: B.A.
Undergraduate minor

Beyond the Frame

The Department of Art History offers courses and degree programs that provide a broad perspective for understanding art, history, and culture as well as a basis for critical judgment of individual works.

Faculty members teach courses on art and architecture in the following areas or traditions:

• American
• Ancient (Greek and Roman)
• Central Asian
• East Asian (Chinese and Japanese)
• Islamic
• Medieval
• Modern
• Pacific Islands
• Native American
• Renaissance-Baroque

You’ll be introduced to art traditions in courses focused on specific topics—small classes encourage lively discussion. In addition, the department offers you special courses on critical methodology. You’ll study of art and cultural objects first-hand at the UO’s two museums: the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and the Museum of Cultural and Natural History.

The undergraduate program in art history can lead you to career opportunities in the business world, art museums, and galleries, as well as to graduate studies in art and art history.

Sample Courses

• Art and Politics in the Ancient World looks at the use of art and architecture by leading figures and states to shape and express the political environment and ideologies of the ancient world from Egypt to Rome
• History of Photography examines photography from the early 19th-century to the present, including the aesthetics of the medium, its relationship to painting and the graphic arts, and its social role
• Japanese Buddhist Art focuses on the types and periods of Buddhist art and architecture in Japan, including painting, sculpture, gardens, monastic buildings and plans, ritual implements, and calligraphy with an emphasis on form and function
• Italian Renaissance Art explores painting and sculpture from the Renaissance and analyzes them in terms of style, iconography, theory, and social context

Student Work

Gretchen Stolte is interested in rock art and has taken advantage of the interdisciplinary nature of that study, exploring anthropology, geology, and mapping. Stolte traveled to Australia on the Amy and Ross Kari Travel Grant scholarship to intensively study aboriginal art and pictographs.

Art history major John Murphy was a recipient of the Wilma Wittemyer Scholarship and a member of Mortar Board and the Art History Association. His Honor's College thesis is on the Jesuits of South America. “I am interested in the art that was produced in the missions, particularly the sculpture that was made mostly by indigenous craftsmen, under the tutelage of the Jesuit priests.” One of the best things about the Art History department is the energy of its faculty, he says. “I found that to be pretty infectious….I invariably find myself getting really into what they are doing because they are so passionate about it.”

Selected Faculty Work

Associate Professor James Harper's research on the art of the Renaissance and Baroque periods focuses on several intersecting fields, like the intersection of art and politics. Harper examines how European artists imagine and represent the Ottoman Empire and its peoples.

Professor Jeffrey Hurwit specializes in the history of art and culture in Archaic and Classical Greece. He approaches art as an expression of culture, and situates it within its historical, philosophical, and social contexts.

Assistant Professor Deborah Hurtt’s research explores the architecture of the mid-twentieth century, particularly with respect to how diverse conceptions and practices of the modern affect issues of political and cultural identity as well as subsequent understandings of the postmodern.

UO course catalog information on art history

Program banner photo credit: Martin Beek