Happy Holidays from AHTR!

Aritmetica (Arithmetic) Filippo Calandri Florence: Lorenzo Morgiani & Johannes Petri, January 1, 1491/92 Book with printed text and woodcut illustrations. Met Museum, NYC. One of the first illustrated textbooks. The low price of such a text would have made it available to far more students than earlier teaching materials, which had been written by hand on vellum. The small size and the many diagrams made it easier to use, while the pictures must have made math much more bearable to small boys.

We hope this post finds you finished with grading … or nearly there. AHTR is taking a hiatus for a few weeks returning on January 22, 2015, to announce the launch of the new AHTR site. We–AHTR’s growing community of contributing editors, site editors, and lesson plan contributors–are really excited to share this milestone.

The new site has a much “cleaner” and more easily navigable look and will debut over 25 new survey lesson plans that cover the traditional Prehistoric to Contemporary timeline, as well as thematic groupings. Thanks to the Kress Grant, many instructors have contributed lectures and PPTs (and have been remunerated for doing so), adding new voices to the AHTR site and making this work open-source for the wider art history community to use, remix, share, add to, give feedback on, and edit for their own use as they wish. (On that note, we couldn’t resist using the pre-digital version of a low-cost, engaging textbook we found at the Met Museum as our image for this final post of 2014.)

Before we leave you to enjoy the holiday season, we’d like to share with you a few announcements:

Keep an eye on the AHTR Journal in 2015–One of the first journal series in January will focus on survey exams. Alexis Carrozza will get us started with a post on how her classes prepare for exams, and Karen Shelby will follow with some ideas on how to write effective exams. We’d love to hear from the wider AHTR community for this series–if you have ideas on student review and preparation for exams, the writing of exams, or other related areas within this topic that you would be willing to share, please send us an email at teachingarthistorysurvey@gmail.com. We would love to hear your ideas and include them in this series.

AHTR will be presenting at CAA 2015–AHTR is part of the panel “What have you done for art history lately?” organized by Karen Leader and Amy Hamlin. The session will be held on Friday February 13 from 2:30-5:00 on the 3rd floor West Ballroom at the Hilton Hotel in New York.

We wish you a very happy and healthy holiday season! See you all in 2015.

Michelle and Karen

Deans, AHTR