Cynthia Packert awarded NEH Enduring Questions grant

Cynthia Packert (History of Art & Architecture) has been awarded an Enduring Questions grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support the development of a new course on the topic of “Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder?” The proposed new course will consider selected Asian and Islamic artworks in the Middlebury College Museum of Art’s permanent collection to explore this fundamental question. Through an intensive combination of close looking, critical analysis, and comparative consideration of diverse artworks and aesthetic traditions, students will ask how the act of beholding is entwined with cultural assumptions and conditioning and address those preconceptions by focusing on specific Asian and Islamic works. The course will be offered twice during the next three years.