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Meet Art History's Newest Professor

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Katie Hamlin

Elizabeth Kassler-Taub is one of 30 new tenured or tenure-track faculty members to the College community this academic year. Like their fellow faculty members, these new professors embrace curiosity—the questions they seek to answer are at the heart of their teaching and research.

  • Elizabeth Kassler-Taub

Elizabeth Kassler-Taub

Assistant Professor of Art History

PhD, Harvard University

AM, Harvard University

AB, Princeton University

I am a historian of art, architecture, and urbanism in early modern Italy. My research focuses on the transcultural exchange of artistic and architectural knowledge in the Mediterranean, with a special interest in the relationship between Italy, Spain, and the Islamic world during the 16th century. In my writing and teaching, I explore subjects from the early-modern experience of empire to contemporary theories of global art history.

On curiosity: In art history, curiosity is a visual drive: We are in the business of looking, and of looking deeply. My role isn't just to teach students how to look at a painting or a building, but to help them uncover why it is that we look at something in the way that we do. I encourage students to question the assumptions that they bring to the table as viewers and as inhabitants of urban spaces. How can interrogating our experience of the visual world make us more curious observers of our own identities?

You can read more about all of the "Newest Teacher-Scholars at Dartmouth"