Jennifer Kingsley

My undergraduate degrees are in History and Art History from Williams College (2000). After working as an Intern Educator at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, I moved to Baltimore to continue my studies. I received my Ph.D. in the History of Art from Johns Hopkins University in 2007. From 2008 to 2010, I was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Columbia University in New York and from 2010 to 2011, Visiting Assistant Professor in Art History at Oberlin College. While studying and teaching at these universities, I have continued to be active in museums, working at the Walters Art Museum as a Hall Fellow (2003), and lecturing regularly at the Cloisters, the medieval branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2006-2010). In 2011, I returned to Baltimore to join the Program in Museums and Society, a position that is giving me an opportunity to pursue a long-standing interest in the connections between the two worlds in which I have worked: the university and the museum. The Program in Museums and Society offers an interdisciplinary minor that emphasizes both significant concepts in museum history and theory, and practicum work. Our students range from art-history to international studies majors. Working with these students is a commitment to considering museums from multiple perspectives, while at the same time encouraging students to investigate the discipline of their major according to a distinct set of interests and concerns. Museums work visually as well as through their texts, and serve as sites in which academic knowledge is encountered and debated publicly. For that reason the main purpose of my classroom teaching is to promote museum literacy and in that work I place particular emphasis not only on the museum as a primary source, but also on its public role in our society. As part of that emphasis, I am leading the development of the program's engagement with local public history projects and digital work.