Diversity Commitment

The Department of the History of Art is committed to building a diverse and welcoming community in which all members are valued and supported equally. We strive to cultivate and maintain mutual understanding and respect within our community, as well as to support faculty and students who revitalize the Department by challenging the assumptions of our field and institution. We embrace diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB), as well as anti-racism, as core values of our practice, and we actively oppose all forms of discrimination. 

Through our research and teaching we continue to express our openness to studying art made by all people everywhere at all times. At the same time, we believe that interrogating and challenging our discipline’s racist, sexist, and imperialist roots is central to our scholarly and pedagogical mission. As a community, we commit to assiduously questioning, revising, and renewing our discipline and, where appropriate, to rejecting inherited assumptions and habits of mind. 

Furthermore, the department continues to review the curricula of study at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Instead of attempting a single definitive sequence of survey classes, the Department strives to offer at least three different introductory undergraduate courses each year, each addressing a broad geographical and chronological range of material. The traditional graduate “Methods & Theories” course has been replaced with the “First-Year Colloquium,” which interrogates the concept of canonical art history. 

We commit to a dynamic, continuous dialogue within our department, among our communities at Yale and in New Haven, and within the broader discipline of art history.