Art is the historical heritage of every country and culture. Study of the visual arts leads us to understand important issues of our civilization, issues that form the core of a comprehensive liberal arts education. Art history is the academic discipline that studies this heritage and interprets it for our and future generations as part of our common humanistic legacy. To achieve this goal, art history combines historical analysis with a special concern for artistic expression. By nature multi-disciplinary, it adopts methods and tools from a wide range of fields such as history, literature, linguistics, the social and political sciences, gender and film studies, anthropology, and psychology among others.

         Department of Art History at the University of Delaware is dedicatedThe to education and research in the history of the visual arts. It has an established national and international reputation as the home of leading specialists in the field. It is also a hub for accessing important art centers in the Mid-Atlantic region. With special strengths in American and European art and architecture, the Department offers an expansive coverage of the arts and culture of historical periods internationally, from Greco-Roman antiquity to the present. Broader geo-cultural fields are covered as well, such as Chinese, Latin American, and African art.
At the heart of the Department’s prominence is its distinguished faculty. Representing specialties ranging from ancient to contemporary art, faculty members have been recognized by way of prestigious awards, such as National Endowment for the Humanities and John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowships.  Art history graduate students have won fellowships from the National Gallery’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), the Smithsonian Institution, and the Luce Foundation. Graduates from our department hold positions at MIT, the Metropolitan Museum, the Frick Collection, the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Museum at Princeton University, the National Gallery, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the University of Virginia. 

         The Department benefits from the presence of important collections within the campus and beyond. These include the Paul R. Jones Collection of African American Art and the University Gallery and, in the immediate vicinity, the Winterthur Museum and its world-class library; the Hagley Museum dedicated to American material culture; and the Delaware Art Museum with its internationally famous Bancroft Collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings.  The University’s nodal position in the North-East corridor, between New York and Washington, makes major museums and collections easily accessible to art history faculty and students. Among them are the National Gallery and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington; the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum,  Guggenheim Museum and MoMA, in New York.

         Within the University, a unique constellation of related departments and programs enhance the Department’s instructional scope and educational mission. A selection includes the Winterthur Program in Art Conservation, Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, Center for Material Culture Studies, Center for Historic Architecture and Design, and program in Museum Studies.

         The Department of Art History is committed to undergraduate education for majors and non-majors and to training graduate students who will be competitive at the higher reaches of our discipline as educators, museum curators, and scholars dedicated to research.

.