<p>what are some good undergrad art history programs. I hop to eventually apply for March at MIT but am wondering where i should go for undergrad to prepare me.</p>
<p>Johns Hopkins has a top 10 art history grad program and was ranked #1 by Chronicle higher education for art history research faculty productivity…</p>
<p>I’m a former art history major at Hopkins and I’ve taken a whole bunch of art history courses specialized in South America at Harvard university before.</p>
<p>The Baltimore Musuem of Art is located right on the Homewood campus and the Walters Art Musuem is located on the Mount Vernon/Peabody Institute campus of JHU. It’s like the similar set up the way it is at Harvard. You have faculty joint appointments that offer bi weekly class tours of art exhibits right on campus… I think it was really awesome and very cool.</p>
<p>I would also check out NYU, Columbia, Cal Berkeley, Michigan, Chicago, etc…and obviously Harvard. (Harvard’s Fogg museum is undergoing like… a 5-10 year renovation process. :omg: I found out because the former Director of Fundraising at the Fogg museum is a regular Hopkins lacrosse bluejays fan and spoke very highly of Hopkins’ art history program…)</p>
<p>NYU. Not only does the school itself have a great art history program, but you’re close to the Met, the MoMA, Guggenheim, Whitney, and the Frick. Could you ask for more?</p>
<p>As an addendum to Phead’s post, Hopkins recently created a major in Archaeology. Also of note on campus is the archaeological collection of over 8000 artifacts, which will be housed in the newly renovated Gilman Hall.</p>
<p>I disagree with Hillary about the superiority of NYU in art history. While its graduate program is easily the best in the country, most of those resources are not available to undergraduates. The IFA has its own courses, faculty, and campus and is entirely separate from the undergraduate art history major. At the undergraduate level, there are equally good or better options available (e.g. Penn or Columbia).</p>
<p>For universities, the NRC ranking is a good starting point:
[NRC</a> Ranking in Art History](<a href=“http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~jnewton/nrc_rankings/area1.html]NRC”>http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~jnewton/nrc_rankings/area1.html)</p>
<p>If you are particularly interested in a subfield, you might want to look over the lists of art history dissertations and see where students studied:
[caa.reviews</a> : Dissertations](<a href=“http://www.caareviews.org/dissertations]caa.reviews”>caa.reviews : Dissertations)</p>
<p>Among LACs- Williams (its AH graduates are known as the [“Williams</a> mafia”](<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/arts/legacy-one-college-s-long-shadow-looking-back-at-the-williams-mafia.html]"Williams”>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/arts/legacy-one-college-s-long-shadow-looking-back-at-the-williams-mafia.html)), Wesleyan, Bard, Skidmore, Hamilton, and Oberlin are particularly good.</p>
<p>While the undergraduate program may not be the strongest, there is no place better to be than in New York (in America) for studying art history. No, not even Chicago.</p>
<p>Hillary, I respectfully disagree. While NYC is indeed a wonderful place to study art history, other places can be equally valuable. The remarkable resources of Williamstown have already been noted.</p>
<p>In my own field of ancient art, several universities match or surpass the resources of NYU. Penn, for example, has more pieces of Egyptian art than the Metropolitan Museum and the Brooklyn Museum put together, as well as the largest collection of Israelite/Canaanite art outside of Israel. More importantly, the vast majority of the pieces in the Penn Museum were excavated by Penn and have a known provenience and provenance – quite unlike the NYC museums or similar museums like the Getty. The Brooklyn Museum recently had to make the embarrassing announcement that a huge chunk of its Egyptian collection is composed of fakes.</p>
<p>If a student wanted to study in NYC, I would recommend Columbia over NYU, where undergraduates would have access to the same museums but better professors.</p>
<p>Well I was looking the resources as a composite whole. Of course different regions will have specializations and will even surpass the resources of New York. Take for example Emory, which has an almost unbelievable collection of ancient Egyptian art.</p>
<p>But as a composite whole - spanning the history of art through the ages - I do believe New York is unbeatable. Perhaps not NYU, but the city itself.</p>
<p>NYU’s Art History department (meaning its faculty) is superior to Columbia’s. I think NYU is ranked number two behind Hopkins.</p>
<p>
That’s the kind of misguided thinking that results from relying on rankings instead of actually doing some research.</p>
<p>Art history rankings refer specifically to the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU, which has NOTHING to do with the undergraduate program. The undergraduate program has entirely different professors. At Columbia, however, undergraduates and graduate students are mixed and share the same professors in a top 5 department. That said, the undergraduate program at NYU is still quite good, and one could hardly go wrong there.</p>
<p>^Well… yeah I probably should have done more research on the matter, but to be brutally honest, I don’t know/care about Art History. I guess it was wrong to assume that the strength of the graduate program translates to a strong undergraduate program, but this is the case more often than not.</p>
<p>btw I’m not some ranking robot… I take every ranking I see with a grain of salt.</p>
<p>“Art history rankings refer specifically to the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU, which has NOTHING to do with the undergraduate program. The undergraduate program has entirely different professors.”</p>
<p>FALSE. A cross-reference between the faculty listings on the Fine Arts website and the NYU Department of Art History within the College of Arts and Science shows that the two departments share four professors and/or lecturers.</p>
<p>Don’t disparage other people’s attempt at research if you can’t even conduct your own.</p>
<p>
4 professors…out of 18 in art history and 30 in the IFA. Not exactly a lot of overlap. What was your point, again?</p>
<p>I’m extremely familiar with the art history offerings at NYU. In fact, I applied there for graduate school. Virtually all of the big names are in the IFA (Philippe de Montebello, David O’Connor, Linda Nochlin, Priscilla Soucek, Marvin Trachtenberg, Katherine Welch, etc.). Furthermore, Met curators often teach in the IFA (where many of them got their PhDs); they do not teach undergraduate courses. I will admit that the undergraduate program does have Joan Connelly, who manages to be both a fine art historian and archaeologist. </p>
<p>(bdl108, no worries. I have been equally guilty, if not more so, of using rankings. I was just slightly frustrated since I had addressed the split faculties in post #4.)</p>
<p>I just wanted clarifcation for the disucssion - it is not true that there is a completely different set of professors without some overlap.</p>
<p>In no particular order: NYU, Columbia, Yale, Bryn Mawr, Haverford (which shares the dept. with BMC), Williams, Vassar, Smith.</p>
<p>archaelolgist…as a New Yorker, and someone very interested in art, I am surprised by your comment about the Brooklyn Museum. Could you please direct me to verification of that statement, in either a news article, or journal?</p>
<p>Here you go, Callie. </p>
<p>[Revealed:</a> one third of Brooklyn Museum’s Coptic collection is fake](<a href=“http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Revealed:%20one%20third%20of%20Brooklyn%20Museum’s%20Coptic%20collection%20is%20fake/8620]Revealed:”>http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Revealed:%20one%20third%20of%20Brooklyn%20Museum’s%20Coptic%20collection%20is%20fake/8620)</p>
<p>Can someone comment on Stanford’s undergrad program? I’m starting this fall and have always loved the idea of doing a secondary major in art history. Probably won’t pursue it as a career though.</p>