StudyQA — Bachelor: Art history — Northwestern University

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Description Contents Requirements Funding

Art history studies the arts and architecture of the world from antiquity to the present. As art historians, we consider objects and buildings from multiple perspectives including but not limited to their visual and physical characteristics, their aesthetic and historical contexts, their use of technology and their relationship to science, and their ideological or social function. We also study individual artists or makers, cultural institutions, audiences, and intercultural exchanges. Because the field is inherently interdisciplinary, it is often in dialogue with work done in other departments such as anthropology, philosophy, political science, history, literature, film, performance, theater, and theories of race, gender, class, and sexuality.

A major in art history is designed to provide knowledge of a geographically and historically diverse corpus of art and architecture, as well as the related cultural practices of the societies that produced and encountered them. As a key component of a liberal arts education, the study of art history emphasizes informed and critical looking, reading, writing and speaking. With its broad historical, cultural, geographic, and methodological range, it meets the needs of burgeoning specialists while it also offers an excellent formation for those who intend to specialize in other areas including business, education, international relations, law, medicine or politics. Those interested in the "classic" art history careers will generally find that museum (curatorial) work often requires at least a master's degree, while college and university teaching and research require a Ph.D. The major is an essential platform to those degrees.

Fall 2017

First-Year Seminar
Introduction to Ancient Art
Introduction to Modernism
Medieval Art III: Gothic
Global Early Modern Art and Architecture
19th-Century Art I
Media Theory
New Media Art
Materiality of Art and Archeology

Winter 2017

First Year Seminar: Wall of Respect and Chicago’s Mural Movement
Introduction to Asian Art
19th Century Art II
Studies in Middle East and North Africa: History and Fantasy in Islamic Painting
Undergraduate Seminar: Expanding Medieval: West Africa’s Age of Empires and the Trans-Saharan Trade
Undergraduate Methods Seminar
Undergraduate Seminar: Archaeology and Nationalism

Spring 2017 (tentative)

Introduction to Latin American Art
Introduction to European Art
East Asian Architecture
Destroying the Past
Special Topics in American Art: Remembering the Civil War
Undergraduate Seminar: Art, Ecology, and Politics
Undergraduate Seminar: Picasso

Requirements

Common Application or Coalition Application*
Official secondary school transcript and school report
Counselor recommendation
At least one teacher recommendation
Official SAT or ACT scores†
Official TOEFL or IELTS scores (ONLY international applicants whose first language is not English or whose schooling has not been in English)
Recommended: two SAT subject tests
Nonrefundable application fee of $75 or fee waiver
Early Decision Agreement (ONLY Early Decision applicants)
Midyear transcript (ONLY Regular Decision applicants)
Music audition (ONLY School of Music applicants)
Required for home-schooled applicants: 3 SAT subject tests