Professor Virginia Tyler is one of a select group of faculty members nationwide chosen by the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) to participate in a special week-long seminar on Teaching Pre-Modern European Art in Context. The seminar on “The Uses of Antiquity” is for full-time faculty members who regularly teach art history at smaller colleges and universities. It will be hosted by the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, Illinois, July 13–18, 2014. The goal of the seminar is to strengthen the teaching of art history to undergraduates at smaller colleges and universities.

CIC selected 21 faculty members to participate in the seminar Rebecca Zorach, professor of art history and the college at the University of Chicago, will lead the program, which is supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

“Strengthening the teaching of art history at colleges and universities—many of which have limited faculty resources in art history—is critical,” said CIC President Richard Ekman. “The seminars will have significant value for the faculty members who participate, the colleagues with whom they will share their new knowledge, and the students who enroll in their courses.” The seminar will take as its starting point European objects spanning the years 1300–1800 at the Smart Museum. Participants also will have the opportunity to examine prints and rare printed books in the Regenstein Library’s Special Collections Research Center, principally the large collection of the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae and related prints after Roman monuments and antiquities, considering the role of prints, books, and other small objects in disseminating and popularizing classical styles and imagery. Participants will visit local sites such as the university’s Oriental Institute, campus and neighborhood murals, and the nearby Museum of Science and Industry to consider how participants can use their own local resources creatively to discuss with students ways in which artists, architects, patrons, and others have understood and reinterpreted the past. Pedagogical discussions will address close looking, the relationship of texts to objects, and ways faculty members can help students think critically about the texture of history and the practices and decisions of artists.

For more information, visit the CIC website at www.cic.edu/ArtHistory.