American Art History | Teacher Seminars Online

This course investigates the creation, display, and reception of art and material culture in the United States from roughly 1650 to 1900, grappling with the question of what is “American” about American art. Artists, architects, and designers in the United States mobilized diverse European, African, Asian, and Native American traditions in their work and different groups of Americans used art and artifacts to express who they were and what they wanted America to be. How did such art help to define conceptions of personhood, nationhood, democracy, and citizenship, and also promote colonization, Manifest Destiny, racial and gender disenfranchisement, and attempted cultural genocide? How did paintings, sculptures, buildings, and artifacts of various media represent and shape notions of “America” and American identities?

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Jennifer Van Horn, Lead Scholar

Jennifer Van Horn is an associate professor with a joint appointment in the departments of art history and history at the University of Delaware. She is a specialist in the art of the United States and has published about objects of many sorts, including dressing tables, dentures, portraits, city views, gravestones, and embroidered samplers. Several of these appear in her first book, The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America, which was a finalist for the George Washington Prize. Her second book, Portraits of Resistance, Activating Art During Slavery, locates enslaved Africans and African Americans on both sides of the painted canvas, as producers and viewers of portraits, and as destroyers and preservers of depictions. Before returning to teach at her alma mater, the University of Delaware, Van Horn worked as an assistant curator at George Washington’s Mount Vernon and taught at George Mason University as well as for the Smithsonian MA Program in the History of Decorative Arts.

Maria Miraballes, Master Teacher

Maria Miraballes is an eighteen-year veteran high school social studies teacher in Stamford, CT. Throughout her tenure, she has been acknowledged as a Spotlight Teacher of the year as well as a finalist for Teacher of the Year for the Stamford Public School System. Maria has also been on the curriculum committee for her district for fifteen years helping the district evolve its use of historical lenses to examine American history, with an emphasis on inclusivity in education. Maria earned a BA from the University of Connecticut and an MA in Secondary Social Studies Education from the University of Bridgeport, CT.