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Art History

Art History opens your eyes

The discipline of Art History, an essential field in the Liberal Arts education, studies the visual cultures of diverse peoples, places, and times and explores both their contextual differences and certain thematic commonalities. Emphasizing critical, historical, and linguistic skills, as well as creativity and innovation, Art History offers a bridge between traditional, language-based fields in the humanities and the creative worlds of art, architecture, and performance. Typically building a historical framework for the materials they examine, individual courses in Art History teach close visual analysis as well as analytical skills that encourage a critical and inquiring approach to visual experiences. They also help students develop a language for articulating these experiences in both oral and written form. The Department of Art History at Dartmouth encourages all students to become conversant with the special properties of images, which are becoming an increasingly important mode of communication in the 21st century.

The Rome Foreign Studies Program

Every spring a group of Dartmouth students travels to Rome for a term to study art and architecture in context. Learn more about the Rome Foreign Study Program...