Art History Major
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About the Major
Art history students study images and objects from the world’s history. They ask what artworks mean, examine the contexts in which artists produced them and learn how all of these issues affect how history is constructed. Art history students engage in critical reading and discussions and develop research skills using careful and creative approaches to problem-solving, all to understand how power, identity and cultural exchange affect art and objects across time and in their global contexts.
Jobs in Art History
- Educator
- Museum curator or collection/site manager
- Governmental or nonprofit researcher/writer
- Lawyer
- Art and architecture preservationist or conservator
Past Elon Art History Internships
- The High Museum of Art in Atlanta
- North Carolina Museum of Art
- Smithsonian American Art Museum
- The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
- Sotheby’s in London
Related Majors
Elon’s ‘close and careful’ mentorships guided art history major to clear career path
Lindsay Maldari has always had a fixation on objects — curated knickknacks and bookshelves of scrapbooks filled with napkins, receipts and other material memories. In that way, she’s like her paternal grandfather, an Italian American immigrant and artisan who “always had these collections of bits and bobs and so many clocks, and I just loved looking at every last one of them,” she said.
And though the idea of studying art history crossed her mind more than once, it wasn’t on her radar when she stepped onto the Elon University campus for her first year in 2015. She had liked the subject matter in high school but thought she needed a more practical major; she chose Elon for its honors program, small class sizes and renowned study abroad program.
The biggest coincidence is that I wasn’t scouting out art history programs. I just fortuitously ended up in the most wonderful of art history programs, and I’m truly grateful for that. I was incredibly fortunate to be on the receiving end of very close and careful mentoring.
Nearly a decade later, Maldari is living in Rome, having recently obtained her master’s degree in art history from John Cabot University. She soon plans to pursue her PhD and ultimately wants to become a professor of art history. And she credits it all to her time at Elon and the mentors who saw in her a person whose curiosity about objects and interest in material traces of memory made her the ideal art history student, which she ultimately became.
“The biggest coincidence is that I wasn’t scouting out art history programs,” said Maldari, who graduated from Elon in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in art history and political science. “I just fortuitously ended up in the most wonderful of art history programs, and I’m truly grateful for that. I was incredibly fortunate to be on the receiving end of very close and careful mentoring.”
Encouraged to pursue art history by professor Evan Gatti, Maldari ultimately grew to understand that art history was as practical a major as others at Elon.
“I regularly find that my art history background trained me for so many things that have nothing to do with art history,” she said, citing how it taught her to be a good reader, critical observer and scholar. “I think it’s very easy to fall into that trap of thinking of it as a very minute field, but it’s not true. If you do art history, you’re inevitably thinking through other disciplines constantly. It is so much more of an open field than people give it credit for.”
Gatti not only encouraged Maldari to become an art history major, but she signed on to be her research mentor. For three years, Maldari worked on her honors thesis — a visual analysis of the 1938–1943 Fascist publication “La difesa della razza” (“The defense of race”), a magazine that reproduced and instrumentalized art objects and artifacts through an explicitly eugenic lens so as to promote the regime’s antisemitic race laws of 1938.
The depth of research skills she received from Gatti and her other Elon professors became abundantly clear when Maldari pursued her master’s degree after graduating from Elon.
“I relied on the methodological training that I received at Elon all the way through my master’s,” she said. She relied on it so much, in fact, that she even had her parents mail her Elon notebook to Rome during grad school.
Elon also prepared her to take on her master’s program research on official monuments and grassroots memorials commemorating the 335 antifascist partisans and Italian Jews killed in the 1944 Nazi massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine in Rome.
“I’m still indebted to my Elon training,” she said. “I was primed to think critically about the power of objects while at Elon, and it’s continued carrying through in the work that I’ve done since.”
She said she also has infinite gratitude for all of the professors — including those in her second major in political science as well as her minor in Italian — who “were fully supportive in more ways than one.”
Like the others, Gatti’s mentorship didn’t begin and end with teaching and research. She was also there to encourage Maldari when there were setbacks — like when Maldari learned she didn’t receive the Lumen Prize, which would have funded her research abroad in Rome. Gatti pivoted and encouraged Maldari to apply for a faculty-mentored research travel grant through Elon’s Center for Research on Global Engagement. In the end, that grant would allow Maldari to conduct a week of field research in the Italian capital during her senior year.
That visit ultimately led to Maldari’s decision to get her master’s degree in art history in Rome, where she still works after grad school as program coordinator at the Borromini Institute, collaborating with faculty from U.S. institutions to plan curricula for study abroad programs in Rome.
As soon as she can bear to leave Italy, she plans to get her PhD in the United States with the goal of becoming a professor of art history. She hopes to become the kind of mentor she was lucky enough to have in excess at Elon.
“I’ve always had incredible mentors whose support consistently filled my cup,” she said. “And that made me want to do the same kind of work with students in the future.”
Did You Know?
- lmost every Elon art history student participates in a study abroad or Study USA program. These include short-term and full-semester programs led by art history faculty, in such places as France, Japan, Italy and the city of Los Angeles. Some art history students also participate in semester-long programs at universities outside of the United States so they can deepen their understanding of global art, history, culture and languages.
- Art history majors and minors have the opportunity to work with the Elon University Art Collections. Under the supervision of a faculty mentor, or as part of select courses, students can curate exhibitions on campus or with the community. There are also opportunities to research and document the collections.
- Since 2003, the Art History Speaker Series has brought world-renowned art historians to campus. With several talks scheduled per year, the series gives students the opportunity to interact with major scholars in the field.