The Department of Art and Art History at The University of Texas at Austin is pleased to invite applications for the position of Professor and Holder of the Kay Fortson Chair in European Art. 

This appointment, to be made at the rank of Full Professor with tenure, will begin in fall 2024. Relocation to Austin, Texas is required. Applicants must be scholars of European art in the broadest sense and have attained nationally/internationally prominent, high impact research profiles. We seek candidates with wide interest in the histories, theories, and methodologies of art history and who value inter- and cross-disciplinary thinking.

While open to other periods, our search prioritizes the Early Modern period (1400-1750). Art history’s ongoing global turn has radically revised traditional understandings of the Renaissance and Baroque, reorienting them as products of a broader early modern intellectual and material exchange that stretched beyond the confines of Europe. We are particularly interested in scholars whose research concerns the ways in which architecture and objects, and the artists who produced them, interacted with zones of contact and exchange that stretched between Europe and the Americas, Africa, and Asia. This was an era in which new visual cultures were being forged and visual expression of “modernity” operated in tandem with unprecedented colonial expansion and extraction, rapid technological innovations, and profound sociopolitical upheavals. Candidates’ scholarship should engage innovative methodologies developed in art history to contend with the dynamics and challenges of the Early Modern era.

The successful applicant will join a large and vibrant department, in which 18 scholars pursue research side-by-side with practicing artists and art educators, totaling nearly 50 tenure- track and professional-track faculty. The art history program alone serves roughly 100 undergraduate majors and 50 MA and PhD students. Tenure-track faculty teach two courses per semester. Beyond areas of specialization, these typically include one course each year from among several large introductory surveys or small undergraduate major seminars (research methods, art historical methods). Faculty advise students at all levels and participate actively in department, college, and university service. Tenured faculty are also expected to generate and publish (or the equivalent) new knowledge at a level consistent with tenured appointment at an R1 research university.

The University of Texas at Austin offers outstanding resources in the Fine Arts Library, Blanton Museum of Art, Harry Ransom Research Center, and Benson Latin American Collection, as well as many opportunities for collegial exchange via the Institute for Historical Studies of the Department of History and with colleagues across the University.