IntroductionWorlding Global Art Histories through Teaching Eva Bentcheva, Birgit Hopfener, Franziska Koch, Miriam Oesterreich, and Ming Tiampo

Background

This book developed as part of the ‘Worlding Public Cultures’ (WPC) publication series, which asks what are the mechanisms, power structures, and methodologies underpinning ‘global’ approaches to the arts. Benefitting from the diverse nature of the WPC’s international research network of scholars, artists, and museum professionals who met largely between 2018 and 2023, this book reflects their conversations around the tools and approaches currently being used in teaching. Importantly, it takes impetus from their call to recognize that teaching ‘global’ art history differs across geographies (regions, countries, or cities) as well as institutional and departmental contexts, and even professions (academics, museum professionals, or artists).

WPC’s discussions on this subject first began in 2017 at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Here, the people who formed the WPC Ottawa team brought together academics from Film Studies, History, Literary Studies, and Music in order to explore how different disciplines approached global pedagogies. Following from this series of conversations, the role of syllabi in particular often came up as a reference point within WPC discussions. In what ways were syllabi being used in different pedagogical approaches or classroom contexts? To what extent do the Beginning of page[p. 4] definitions and roles of the syllabus differ? Moreover, how have syllabi been structured in order to reflect a more ‘worlded’ approach to global art? With these questions in mind, we as the editors of this book organized a two-day workshop hosted by the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry in October 2022 which honed in on the role of syllabi in teaching.55For a description of the workshop and a full list of participants, see Worlding Art History through Syllabi, workshop, ICI Berlin, 10–11 October 2022 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e221010>. With over twenty international participants, a series of presentations from academics who developed syllabi on ‘global art’ in Canada, Germany, Singapore, the People’s Republic of China, and the United States, it became evident that syllabus-driven teaching has been undergoing rapid changes in recent years. Discussions quickly showed that the syllabus alone is no longer seen as a sufficient stand-alone tool of teaching. Rather, both demands from students and the experiences of lecturers had paved the way for more diverse pedagogical methods, including museum visits, interactive learning, and digital resources, among others. A post-gathering round of feedback from the participants also revealed more fundamental questions: how does one define a syllabus nowadays? What is its role beyond presenting a course outline and key readings? What possibilities does it open or limitations does it place on teaching specialized or survey courses on global art?

In order to reflect the expanded experiences of teaching that emerged from internal WPC conversations and public events, we conceived this book to reflect a plurality of voices and unresolved questions around what it means to ‘world’ global art history through teaching. It forms part of the ‘Companion’ register of the WPC series Beginning of page[p. 5] which, in addition to providing theoretical and historical background, also aims to share the personal experiences of practitioners and offer inspiration for people working in the field. We hope that the entries in this book will variously appeal to both people learning to teach and those seeking to reshape their teaching methods, strategies, and scope by looking to the experiences of others. Perhaps most importantly, we have developed it as a reminder that the ‘worlding’ of global art history cannot follow a single formula. Rather, it needs to speak to, and from, the diverse histories and requirements of different students and societies. As such, this book addresses the following topics:

• Histories of art (historical) education: specific local and regional programmes and agendas, as well as their entanglements with colonial, transcultural, and transnational histories of art education;
• Authorship: art history writing as a collaborative, multi-perspectival endeavour;
• Pedagogical values and ethics: concerns for positionality and intersectionality, as well as practices of care;
• Disciplinary critique: addressing structures of dominance ingrained in the discipline by raising awareness of complex temporalities, coloniality, and the pluriversality of (embodied) knowledge;
• Concepts and their transformations: calling for comparison as well as translation;

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• Curriculum design: exploring ways of building critical perspectives into the structure of teaching methods and syllabi.

Lastly, it is imperative to note that this book was predominantly compiled between 2022 and 2024. As we neared its completion in late 2025 and early 2026, we saw artificial intelligence (AI) had already begun to take roots in higher education teaching. What is currently manifesting is the use of AI as a tool for academic research and writing; we are witnessing what is undoubtedly only the beginning of a radical transformation in teaching practices that will unfold further in the years to come. Born at the cusp of this transition, this book therefore inevitably bears the marks of slight belatedness, all the while issuing an all-the-more needed caution for teachers and students to recognize that ‘worlding’ through teaching cannot come about through an unquestioning embrace of new technologies. Rather, a critical understanding of the gaps in AI’s knowledge systems, its resources, and its biases is essential, and that any productive harnessing of it as a tool in higher education needs to begin at the level of the points outlined above. Given our timing, this book therefore does not include entries on teaching using AI. We hope, however, that our investigation of syllabi, teaching methods, and departmental and institutional priorities, as well as societal consciousness, will serve as a springboard for future research into how AI may serve as one further tool to help ‘world’ global art history through teaching.Beginning of page[p. 7]

Structure

This book opens with five short essays and two discussions around personal experiences of teaching global art history within diverse institutional and national contexts. These contributions highlight the different historical, theoretical, and practical considerations that a selection of educators needed to take into account in order to challenge art historical canons and critique conventional historiographies and existing teaching methods in Singapore, Berlin, Boulder, Ottawa, Beijing, and Montreal.

Priya Maholay-Jaradi and Roger Nelson’s opening essay situates teaching ‘global’ art history in Singapore from a regional perspective. The authors advocate for ‘an art-historical alterity instead of an alternative art history’ through which they contend that regional histories and dynamics reveal not only what aspects are of significance to the ‘global’, but also which teaching methods have an impact and are relevant within their national and institutional context at the National University of Singapore. By further asking, ‘to what extent are Southeast Asia’s art histories as engaged, active, and consequently, worlded to facilitate [such] alterity?’, Maholay-Jaradi and Nelson set the tone for this book’s nuanced exploration of specific geographies and institutions.

Eva Ehninger’s contribution also picks up on the tension between ‘alternative’ and ‘alterity-guided’ approaches to teaching global ‘modern’ art history. In her essay, she outlines her pedagogical journey at Humboldt University Beginning of page[p. 8] in Berlin, where she combined three teaching formats — classroom seminars, object and museum-centred learning, and student-led discussions — in an effort to merge existing art historiographies with new positions and case studies. For Ehninger, the primary challenge is how to ‘world’ modern art history in a way that neither integrates material from non-European histories into European frameworks, nor presents them as radically other. Instead, she calls attention to their respective local, regional, and national contexts. Her approach resists objectifying non-European art, instead understanding these forms of cultural production as nodes of artistic inquiry that inform art (historical) concepts and generate temporal frameworks.

While Maholay-Jaradi and Nelson’s, as well as Ehninger’s contributions present recent experiences informed by the rise in popularity of incorporating digital, interactive learning and museum visits, Claire Farago’s essay reflects back to 2012, when she first sought to develop an introductory course on art history for first-year students at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Looking back, she offers reflections into not only the need to rethink the content of curricula and teaching methods, but also the impact of departmental dynamics and budgetary constraints when it comes to redesigning courses, or designing them anew. Despite the institutional challenges detailed in Farago’s essay, she too advocates for a continuing commitment to fostering more direct exchanges. This spans not only students and teachers, but also academic and cultural institutions, as well as Beginning of page[p. 9] scholars and other agents such as artists, curators, and even museum visitors. Succinctly terming this a ‘creative commons approach to pedagogy’, Farago reminds us that it is by no means an easy undertaking, nor a guarantee, that sustained epistemic and institutional changes will be possible in the end.

Picking up on the subject of practical and epistemic challenges in (re)designing global art history courses, Ming Tiampo’s essay also reflects on how she and her colleagues at Carleton University in Ottawa shifted away from simply internationalizing the art history survey, to adopting more pluriversal approaches to teaching over the course of two decades. Tiampo spotlights the empowering potential of cross-institutional and transnational research collaborations in teaching topics such as Indigeneity, migration, and plural views on Modernism. In addition, she highlights the importance of developing new teaching resources and literature for students, such as her own coedited source book, Intersecting Modernisms, which prioritizes entangled histories and parallel aesthetic formations in twentieth-century art that speak to colonialism, conflict, mobility, sovereignty movements, technological innovation, and urbanization.

Following these short essays are two conversations between scholars that grapple with the need to speak more openly about personal experiences, challenges, and aspirations. Informed by her teaching experiences in Ottawa and Berlin, Birgit Hopfener converses with Song Xiaoxia about the latter’s motivations to teach ‘global art’ at the Beginning of page[p. 10] Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Song’s answers, on the one hand, reiterate the need to teach (historical) entanglements and nurture students’ understanding of complex temporalities, as reflected in the previously outlined contributions. On the other hand, she draws attention to the local and regional specificities of her context in China. Song outlines how she approaches and teaches about ‘undercurrents’ of the global by also seeking to complexify notions of ‘the West’ for her students without simply changing from a Eurocentric to a Sinocentric model.

The second conversation between Varda Nisar, maya rae oppenheimer, and Edith-Anne Pageot, explores their teaching practices in Montreal. Speaking from two different universities (L’Université du Québec à Montréal and Concordia University), all three reflect upon their personal backgrounds. They highlight that their approaches to teaching have been shaped not only by different academic settings, but also by the languages in which they teach, first-hand encounters with persisting (settler) colonial mentalities in Pakistan and Canada respectively, and governmental acknowledgement of cultural complexities. While sharing a commitment to decolonial approaches in art history, their conversation proposes that in order to teach ‘against the grain’, self-criticality is not enough. At times, an embodied, creative, and ‘curated’ approach to fostering learning spaces is necessary to create a more open dialogue between learners and teachers.

Concluding this book is a questionnaire about the use of syllabi in the teaching of global art history. This features Beginning of page[p. 11] responses by eight participants (Laurens Dhaenens, Franziska Koch, Anton Lee, Varda Nisar, Miriam Oesterreich, Tanya Talwar, Song Xiaoxia, and Esra Yıldız) from the aforementioned WPC workshop ‘Worlding Art History through Syllabi’ (October 2022). Here, they present their different understandings of what a syllabus is, how they design and structure their syllabi (in light of their individual, institutional, and national contexts), and how this relates to their overall teaching strategies.

We hope that in reading this questionnaire in conjunction with the longer essays and conversations featured in this book, our readers may gain critical insights and new ideas for designing their own courses that question and diversify the parameters of the ‘global’ in art history. In the hope of further contributing to this, we have included a bibliography on ‘worlding art history’ in the form of an open-access reading list hosted at the website www.zotero.org.66See the group Worlding Public Cultures at zotero.org <https://www.zotero.org/groups/5463324/worlding_public_cultures/library> [accessed 28 March 2026]. This can also be access via the QR code below.
This features approximately one hundred books, journals, and articles gathered either from literature cited in this book, or included in the syllabi of our contributors. It is important to note that the majority of books listed in this database are in English and have been published in North America or Western Europe. While this is the result of a practical editorial decision to limit the selection to our shared language, it also reflects a more deep-seated problem within the teaching of global art history; namely, the need to find ways to incorporate diverse perspectives through different languages. Thus, we Beginning of page[p. 12] envision this reading list to be simply a starting point for opening up debates on how to ‘world’ art history.

Finally, by sharing this expanded bibliography with our readers, we hope to show how attempts to critically revise art history and its pedagogies have both exponentially grown in the last three decades, and continue to develop in the present moment. For this additional resource to this book, we wholeheartedly thank our generous authors who have contributed the fruits of their labour, as well as our student assistant (Liu Lan-Chen), who has been involved in helping us set up this database, which we hope to see expand and evolve in the years to come. We hope it will serve as an internationally-accessible resource and encourage a rethinking of teaching global art history based on open, transnational exchange and collaborative efforts.