David R. Smith |
Professor of Art History
I teach a wide range of subjects, from Ancient Greek and Roman art, to the Northern Renaissance, to the Northern Baroque artists like Rembrandt and Vermeer, who are my favorites and my specialty. This kind of roving around isn't surprising in a department like ours, where a fairly small faculty tries to cover the whole history of Western art, and then some. But I also like the arrangement and wouldn't want to function only as a narrow specialist. They're all subjects I like and have been teaching now for 30 years.
More importantly, though, I find that moving between subjects this way keeps me mentally loose and helps my scholarship. So while most of my research deals with 17th-century Dutch art, I often look for ideas outside the field, not only elsewhere in art history, but in literature and social history as well. I also try to bring this approach to my teaching, and the fact that both the teaching and the research are based first of all on close study of the objects themselves means that the two jobs constantly play into each other.
Some of my best ideas have come to me in class, as often as not from student comments. This also means, though, that I don't have a set methodology and have little patience with ideology and trendy thinking, which are becoming all too common in fields like mine. More than anything else, I'm out to cultivate careful looking, a taste for meaning, and creative laughter.
