Presentation by Kerry Paul Boeye (with discussion)
Part of the Engaged Art History Event Series
June 20, 2023, 12-1pm EDT

This presentation contends that art history fosters forms of shared experience with profound ontological value that challenge the alienation, intellectual routinization, and shallow commodification of contemporary society. Philosophers of aesthetics have long probed the experiential nature of viewing art, but little has been written about the experience of art history. By briefly considering how even traditional frameworks of art history and aesthetic philosophy may serve to articulate the nature of art-historical experience, this paper highlights art-historical conversation as fertile ground for radical empathy between viewers of artworks.

Kerry Boeye received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2010. He is an associate professor at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore, where he teaches a wide range of courses on medieval, Islamic, and African American art, as well as courses in aesthetics and museum studies. His research focuses upon English and French manuscripts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but he has also published co-authored articles on art history pedagogy and a twelfth-century Italian altar frontal. Currently he is working on a survey of western medieval illustrations of the Solomonic books of the Bible.