If you google the word “Renaissance,” on the image tab, you’ll find yourself exclusively in Italy. Smarthistory would like to do something about that. The Expanding Renaissance Initiative (ERI), is a new Andrew W. Mellon-funded project from Smartistory to expand the boundaries of art history in the classroom—in this case specifically the early modern period....
Rewarding close looking We wouldn’t ask students to read an outdated translation of Dante or to read the Inferno with one-quarter of the words missing. Students would obviously be short changed, their sense of the beauty of Dante’s poetry would be obscured. They might come away wondering what all the fuss was about, why the...
This is the introduction to a four-part series of posts authored by Smarthistory’s Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Naraelle Hohensee. The rest of the series will appear on this site over the following week. “What’s visible becomes thinkable, and what’s thinkable becomes doable.” —Timothy Snyder In 2003, when Colin Powell went to the United...
This is the second in a four-part series of posts authored by Smarthistory’s Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Naraelle Hohensee. The series will appear on this site over the following week. How must the discipline of art history change, what are the assumptions it must relinquish, and what ideas must it embrace in order...
This is the third in a four-part series of posts authored by Smarthistory’s Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Naraelle Hohensee. The rest of the series will appear on this site over the following week. “I cannot decolonize myself, but I can decolonize my methods.” —Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel In 1987, the artist Alfredo Jaar provoked furor...
This is the last in a four-part series of posts authored by Smarthistory’s Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Naraelle Hohensee. “We are moving from an era of scholarship based on the individual author of the “great book” to an era of scholarship based on the collaborative authoring possibilities of the “great project.” —Anne Burdick,...