Introduction

It is rare that college teaching in art history makes national news, yet Yale University's 2020 decision to move away from teaching the traditional introductory survey of Western art in favor of thematic, global introductions to topics like “Global Sacred Art” and “The Politics of Representation” unleashed a media backlash, spawning news and opinion pieces both in the art world press, like Artforum and ArtNews, and in high-profile venues like the Wall Street Journal. ¹ The furor was such that the then department chair Tim Barringer felt compelled to write a defense of this decision in a letter to the members of the College Art Association, the discipline's US professional organization, explaining that: “Art history is a global discipline.…The diversity of the department's faculty and our intellectual interests finds an analogue in the diversity of today's student body.” ² Certainly, more and more programs in the history of art are replacing traditional Renaissance and Early Modern courses centered on Italy and Western Europe (or at least complementing them) with courses on the art of the early modern world.