Office of Academic Programs

"To go to class by way of a museum filled with distinguished works of art is a privilege never to be slighted—
and never to be taken for granted."

                                    —Professor Wolfgang Stechow, 1959

For Oberlin College Faculty    For Oberlin College Students    For Other College/University Groups

Primarily a teaching institution, the Allen Memorial Art Museum believes the study of original works of art is an indispensable part of a liberal arts education. The museum's comprehensive holdings chronicle the history of art in a variety of cultures, presenting an exceptional resource for teaching, learning, and research.

We are committed to developing interdisciplinary programs that support the Oberlin College curriculum across both the Arts and Sciences and the Conservatory of Music. By cultivating dynamic partnerships with the scholarly community at Oberlin and beyond, the AMAM Academic Programs Office enables faculty and students to use the museum in new and innovative ways.

Whether through museum-based courses, the student docent program, Print Study Room visits, or Art Rental, we invite you to explore the connections between your own research or teaching and the AMAM collection.

Download the AMAM's Academic Programs brochure which provides detailed guidelines for and examples of teaching with art across disciplines.

Download the AMAM's Policy for the Use of the Wolfgang Stechow Print Study Room.

Visiting the Museum with your class The Office of Academic Programs offers visits to see works on view in the galleries, as well as visits to the Wolfgang Stechow Print Study Room to look at prints, paintings, or small art objects not currently on display. Print Study Room visits are comparable to a lab session in the sciences: a private setting where faculty and students can closely examine and discuss works. Curatorial staff and student assistants often help with the development and leading of class visits. Class Visits (click for more): Getting Started? In an initial meeting with the Curator of Academic Programs, faculty can discuss their learning goals for a museum visit and establish potential approaches and criteria for the selection of artworks to be viewed. Faculty can prepare for the museum visit by consulting the AMAM's online collection database (eMuseum) prior to meeting with the curator. Working together, the faculty and curator will compile a list of relevant works and develop a lesson plan. Viewing Sessions (click for more): In conjunction with student assignments, faculty may request special viewing sessions, which are limited to two-hour time slots and 10 objects. To schedule a viewing, please contact the Curator of Academic Programs at least two weeks in advance. Use of Curatorial Files (click for more): Students and faculty may request access to the curatorial object files for research purposes by contacting the Curator of Academic Programs at ext. 58645. Appointments must be made at least 3 business days in advance and are limited to one hour. Please know that many of the files contain historical letters and documents and must be handled carefully and only when necessary.

Examples of Recent Oberlin College Class Visits: Explore ways in which courses from across the College and Conservatory have used original works of art. History (click for more): Professor of History Steve Volk collaborated with the AMAM to organize an exhibition of post-revolutionary Mexican prints and paintings. These works served as primary materials for his class The Mexican Revolution: Birth, Life, Death. "I've long enjoyed the look on the faces of students in my Mexican Revolution seminar when they stand in front of the AMAM's superb collection of prints by Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros," he says. "What they see in a flash is what I have been working toward for most of the semester: the Revolution, one of the 20th century's most dramatic political upheavals, was also intensely personal, with each individual experiencing it in a different way." English (click for more): English professor Laura Baudot's class "Wits, Rakes, Madmen, and Jane" explores modes of literary production in 18th-century Britain, following four character types across different literary genres and traditions, including the novel, poetry, satire, and drama. For one of their six museum visits, students in the class viewed William Hogarth's satirical modern moral series, The Rake's Progress, along with works that depict a relationship between debauchery and scientific inquiry. In another visit, students examined parallels between different styles of portraiture and novelistic approaches to individual subjectivity. Russian (click for more): Dr. Maia Solovieva's Russian Cross-Cultural Communication class prepares students for meaningful interactions with native Russians by exploring, in her words, "new ways to teach the 'unspoken' idiom of the deep cultural symbols that communicate a given people's values, beliefs, and attitudes." Instead of representing culture as a mix of facts unrelated to one's own personal experiences, she seeks to offer more challenging means of obtaining 'cultural' knowledge based on self-reflective class assignments. Drawing parallels between 'reading' art and interpreting cultural signs, her students reflect on a self-portrait by Marc Chagall, which offers a visual key to the Russians' distinctive understanding of concepts like time, space, family, home, and history. FYSP (click for more): Conservatory professor Charles McGuire's class on Symphony in Cultural Thought and Practice introduces students to the history of the symphony in the period 1780-1914. Over the course of the semester, they visit the museum three times to discover the larger artistic contexts of the symphony and to gain a more concrete understanding of some of the abstract concepts they encounter in the classroom. Students view art objects that provides visual metaphors or pictorial equivalents to the three broad categories that define the aesthetics of the symphony in the period: the sublime and the beautiful; the grotesque and the picturesque; and the infinite and the nostalgic. Politics (click for more): Professor Maren Milligan's class on the Politics of Middle East and North Africa covers topics such as colonialism, ethnic identity, gender, economic development and conflict, and in the first week of the semester, her students gather in the museum to discuss Edward Said's Orientalism. A carefully chosen selection of nineteenth-century artworks from the collection presents a visual inventory of the different aspects of Orientalism discussed in Said's book and further offers an accessible entry point into theoretical concepts studied in class. Biology (click for more): Biology professor Taylor Allen's class on Animal Physiology explores the function of the body, from the molecular level to the organismal level. Students in the course meet at the museum twice, first for a session that focuses on fostering visual literacy skills (essential to any scientist who works with visual data) and then for a session on the biology of love. In this session, students view and analyze various artistic representations of love, from lust and jealousy to stable pairing, and further discuss the physiological processes and their physical manifestations as pictured in the artworks. Students also consider how strong emotions are portrayed in the East and the West and whether these depictions align with emerging scientific understanding of the biology of love. Cinema (click for more): Professor of French and Cinema Studies Grace An's "National Traditions, Global Horizons" French film course visits the museum to explore the ways in which cinema drew upon other visual arts. Museum sessions are supplemented by readings in critical theory and a written assignment that requires students to use works in the museum in conjunction with short films screened in class to discuss the transition from still photography to moving pictures. Music Theory (click for more): Conservatory professor Brian Alegant brings his "Music Theory IV - The Twentieth Century" students to the museum to "expand their minds" (as he puts it) and show them visual art movements contemporaneous with the music they are studying in class. They also view prints by the composer and artist John Cage, whose musical compositions were influenced by visual media and whose visual art often blurred the distinction between musical score and artistic representation. Hispanic Studies (click for more): Lecturer in Spanish Barbara Sawhill prepares non-native speakers for the rigors and rewards of conversing and communicating in a Spanish-speaking environment in her Communication & Conversation course. She asks her students "Are you the same person when you speak in another language?" Her class then visits the museum to discuss identity and likeness in self-portraits by artists in the collection in preparation for writing, in Spanish, their own verbal self-portraits. Technology in Music (click for more): Students in Professor Peter Swendsen's Advanced Electro-Acoustics course come to the museum twice, first to study images of literal and metaphorical storms and then images of vessels. The visual depictions serve as a resonant approach to musical composition assignments based on these concepts.

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