I arrived at Wellesley in the fall of 1976 intending, like so many others before and since, to major in biology. I also signed up for ART 100, the introductory survey. Coming from a small high school in southern Illinois, I had no idea that art history existed as a discipline. But from the moment the great Miranda Marvin strode onto the stage of the darkened Jewett Auditorium and began talking about the art of ancient Egypt, I was hooked.

I did not give up on science.  I took biology courses through all four of my undergraduate years. My courses in “Ecology” and “Advanced Ecology” (what would likely be called “Environmental Science” today) did more to shape my understanding of the world than any other classes I have taken.

Both art and science continue to be central to my work. Much of my research from graduate school onward has centered on the intersection of art and science, with my first book exploring the relation between geology and landscape painting. Two years ago I developed a new course for Wellesley’s Environmental Studies Program: “Art and the Environmental Imagination,” a course that I hope to continue to teach in the coming years.

So many talented, accomplished scholars struggle in today’s job market, that I feel guilty that my path was so smooth. The year that I was completing my dissertation, my Wellesley advisor James O’Gorman was planning to go on leave and suggested that I apply to be his sabbatical replacement. I did. I was offered the job, and almost thirty years later I am still teaching in the department.

The greatest challenges were in my early years of teaching when I was attempting to balance motherhood and career. I recall too well the corrosive feeling that I had not enough energy and not enough hours to do either job as it should be done. Plus the enormous cost of childcare. That was hard.

I have always felt extraordinarily fortunate in my job. I work every day with smart, engaged, ambitious students, stimulating colleagues, and supportive staff on one of the most beautiful campuses in the country. I am continuously learning, engaging ideas that transform and expand my understanding of the world. What could be better?

American Art, both the arts of the United States and, more broadly, the arts of the Americas, are such new fields, really launched in the 1970s and onwards, that there is untold work to be done, including in the relations among the continents’ cultures and countries.

I think the current climate has made me more keenly aware of the necessity of encouraging  and facilitating in the classroom the expression of diverse points of view, of listening to them respectfully, and of making certain that my own views do not circumscribe or suppress the expression of others.

In the arts lie the very best of us: our passions, our creativity, our efforts to reach out to and touch others in moving, meaningful, and transformational ways.

Art History offers the knowledge and the critical skills that equip us to probe, analyze, make sense of and make meaningful the visual aspects of our environment.—not just paintings hanging on museum walls, but the buildings we walk past each day, the parks we visit, the spatial configurations of the places we inhabit, the digital advertisements that assault us all through the day.  Art history informs and heightens our visual senses. It offers us some measure of intellectual mastery in our encounters with visual culture, and, beyond that, in drawing us to art, opens to us a lifetime of deep pleasure.