Yale Daily News

After facing significant pandemic restrictions and a professor deficit, the Art History department is planning to return with expanded in-person course offerings next year.

With reduced pandemic restrictions this year, the Art History department has moved classes back into the University Art Gallery and Center for British Art, along with other Yale collections. But over half of the department’s tenure-track professors have been on leave during the 2021-22 academic year, keeping the department from offering its usual range of courses and taking full advantage of museum access. For the next academic year, as faculty numbers return to their normal levels, the department hopes to meet and exceed its past breadth of course offerings.

“We’re building on our strengths, and expanding our course offerings, which I am sure will have a great appeal for majors and non-majors alike,” said Milette Gaifman, chair of the department. “We’re particularly excited about the return to in-person classes at the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art, as well as the sessions and seminar at the Institute for the Preservation of Culture on West Campus.”

The 2021-22 academic year saw a significant reduction in campus COVID-19 restrictions. For the Art History department, this meant drastic changes to class structure and logistics. When restrictions were at their height the prior year, the department, which has historically made use of the University’s art and archive collections, had to alter the focus of its classes from physical art objects to digital ones.

Jacqueline Jung, a history of art professor and the department’s director of undergraduate studies, said that it was “really difficult” to teach fully virtual art history classes. Jung, who teaches the large survey course “Introduction to the History of Art: Sacred Art and Architecture,” had to redesign her spring 2021 course for a pre-recorded, asynchronous format. Importantly, discussion sections had to change, too.

“Discussion sections are really essential to this and other 100-level classes because [they] are really grounded in our on-campus collections,” Jung said. “Not being able to walk through the gallery space was really, really difficult. I was meeting with the teaching fellows every week to design programs where [students] could use . . . photos and images of objects in the collection that students could go back on their own and look at.” 

Some students, like Marianna Sierra ’23, took leaves of absence because of these changes to class structure during the 2020-21 academic year. Sierra said that she took a leave in order “to make sure my class time was spent with the physical objects and in the gallery spaces.”

This fall, Jung taught the same course in a hybrid format. Though lectures were pre-recorded, the course integrated the kinds of gallery visits that were a staple of many of the department’s pre-pandemic courses.

“It was absolutely wonderful to be able to bring the students back into the gallery and have them move around the works of art even though it was not open to the public and the hours were more restricted,” Jung said. “The gallery was incredibly accommodating and they worked with me and with so many other [faculty] who needed those resources to make [their courses] work.” 

Professor Morgan Ng, who joined the department this fall, has also found ways to integrate technology into his teaching even with the return to in-person learning.

Ng studies Renaissance architecture and visual culture, so much of what he teaches requires more than just observing stand-alone artwork. Ng discussed using 360-degree panoramic images and Google Maps in his classes to supplement more traditional artistic media.

“So many of the artworks that we often study in Italian Renaissance courses, such as Raphael’s frescoes, are often sort of seen flat in isolation when in fact they’re deeply interlinked with the mosaic pavements, the ceilings and so on and so forth,” Ng said. “So it actually has enriched some of our teaching to look beyond even our collections to think about the broader tools available.” 

But, even though classes have been in person this year, the department has faced another challenge: low numbers of faculty on campus. 

Out of 17 ladder faculty members in the department, nine — more than half — are currently on academic leave, reducing the number and variety of courses offered. 

According to Jung, the high number of faculty on sabbatical is due to the postponement of leave during the earlier part of the pandemic. But the faculty deficit also came during a surge of interest in art history courses.

“The physical numbers of people wanting to take classes is higher [and] our numbers of faculty have been lower,” Jung said. “So this has definitely led to an unusual sense of people really clamoring to get into full classes.”

According to Ng, the department has historically held mostly small classes, so the increase in interest this year posed a challenge. 

“I [think] that COVID-19 had something to do with this [surge in interest],” Ng said. “After such a long period of virtual teaching and dematerialized engagement with life, art history, being a field deeply engaged with the physicality of objects . . . [might have become] suddenly attractive to students who have been sapped of that opportunity for such a long time.”

But for the most part faculty don’t believe the enrollment “mosh pit,” as Jung called it, will continue. Departmental faculty who have been away this year will return to teach courses next semester, and Jung and Ng both noted that the department will have more expansive course offerings in the fall.

New courses to be offered in the fall include “London Art Capital: Black Death to Brexit,” “The Body in Indian Art” and “In, Out, and Back: African Art Collection, Exhibition, and Restitution.”

The History of Art Department is located at The Jeffrey Loria Center for the History of Art at 190 York Street.