Art History

Engaged Art History

Engaged Art History takes what you’re learning in your courses and puts it into practice through internships, research, study away, winter term, career exploration, and beyond.

Here’s a sampling of recent projects, field experiences, and post-graduate destinations for art history majors.

RISE at Oberlin
Research. Internships. Study Away. Experiential Learning.

Ways Art History Majors Rise

Research

  • The Afro-Portuguese Saltcellar and the Loango Coast Tusk in Dialogue with Global Art History: Finding Pre-20th Century Globalization in Ivory (Honors)
  • Treasure as Spolia in the Basilica of San Marco (Honors)
  • Disability as Curatorial Methodology: A Reconsideration of Sight and Art Museum Practices (Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and Honors)
  • By Us For Us, the Significance of Counter-Archiving to Decolonizing Contemporary Art Spaces (Honors)
  • Tombstones as Witnesses: A Crosscultural Study on the Yangzhou Latin Tombstones (Honors)

Internships

  • Mass MoCA, North Adams, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
  • Brooklyn Museum, Jewish Museum, Museum of Modern Art, PS1, The Frick Collection, Whitney Museum, NYC
  • Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis
  • Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland
  • SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, N.M.
  • Silverlake Conservation, Los Angeles

Study Away

  • Institute for Study Abroad-Butler University, University of Havana, Cuba
  • Center for University Programs Abroad (CUPA), France
  • CIEE Arts and Sciences Program in Legon, Ghana
  • Associated Kyoto Program (AKP), Kyoto, Japan
  • Butler’s Institute for Study Abroad, Oxford University

Experiential Learning

  • Art history students work closely with the Allen Memorial Art Museum’s collections. For “African Art in Museums: From Collection to Display,” students curated the permanent display. Students produce a published and online catalog with essays and photographs to accompany the Senior Studio Exhibitions.

First Destinations of Recent Art History Majors

  • Positions:
    • Curatorial fellow/intern: Brooklyn Museum
    • Dallas Museum of Art
    • Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
    • Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Studio Museum, NYC
    • National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC
    • Project manager for in-house arts program: Elsewhere
    • Production assistant: National Public Radio
  • Graduate Schools:
    • MA/JD in cultural property law, Rutgers University
    • JD: CUNY, Denver, Fordham, Lewis & Clark, Michigan, Stanford
    • Rare book librarianship, Indiana University
    • MA, Harvard Graduate School of Design
    • MA, sustainable business and communities, Goddard College
    • MA/PhD art history programs at Bryn Mawr, Courtauld Institute, CUNY, New York University, Northwestern, Stanford, Williams, University of Chicago, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, Yale
  • Fellowships:
    • Fulbright to Italy, art history research
    • Fulbrights to teach English in Côte d’Ivoire, Germany, South Africa, and Taiwan