From Internationalizing the Art History Survey to Pluriversal Worldings

This paper reflects on twenty years of teaching of global art history. Drawing on my teaching at Carleton University since 2003, I trace my movement from additive and thematic survey models constrained by Eurocentric teleologies toward comparative, transnational approaches that unsettle inherited categories of period, region, and influence. This methodological shift informs, and is informed by, my ongoing collaborative work on a textbook entitled Intersecting Modernisms, which has shaped and been shaped by the design of my undergraduate courses. I argue that surveys and textbooks function as disciplinary infrastructure, and that transforming them constitutes a form of pedagogical resistance to resurgent ethnonationalism and the narrowing of historical imagination.