The Reluctant Professor: How a History Student Became a Professor Working With Sexuality in Art
On March 3rd 2017 at 5:00 PM, I attended a talk/question and answer session for members of Humanities House held in the J. Ray Ryan Building with Alexis Boylan, a joint Associate Professor of Art History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies here at the University of Connecticut. The session was part of a continued collaboration between Humanities House and the Humanities Instit, of which she is the associate director. Topics discussed included her life and work as well as her upcoming book, Ashcan Art, Whiteness, and the Unspectacular Man, which is coming out on April 20th, 2017. I found the Dr. Boylan to be really engaging of the audience. She also did an excellent job of stimulating discussion.
She started off her talk by explaining her journey to becoming a professor. When she first entered college as an undergraduate, she did not see herself in a career path that required doing work as a lecturer in her future. She explained that she got into the field of Art History essentially by accident. While studying for her Bachelor’s in history, she took an art history course to fulfill a general education requirement, and quickly fell in love with this field of study. While taking the class, Dr. Boylan also discovered that while she had never enjoyed writing about history, writing about art excited her. To paraphrase what Dr. Boylan stated, the next thing she knew she was at Rutgers University studying for her PhD in Art History.
Suddenly, her life had taken a different track. It was while at Rutgers that she was drawn to studying how sexuality is depicted in art, which is what much of her work today focuses on. A topic that has been of particular interest to her and as previously mentioned, is the subject of her upcoming book, is the Ashcan School. I was curious to know more about the Ashcan School so I asked Dr. Boylan to explain what it was. She stated the Ashcan School was made of up primarily six painters who had met while studying together and painted scenes of daily life in New York City working class neighborhoods, often times with an emphasis on masculinity. According to her website her other work includes a study on the perception of art created by contemporary African American artists from the perspective of Marxist aesthetics and various studies on Feminist Art.
Overall I found the discussion very interesting and thought provoking. Before going to the talk I had never had much of an interest in art history, but the talk piqued my interest and had made me think about taking a class on art history in the future. On a more broad note, I think something to take away from this for members of the Humanities House and all student of humanities in general, is Dr. Boylan’s story of how she ended up becoming a professor. Her story serves as a reminder of the versatility and utility of a background in the humanities, and the wide variety of career paths such a background opens up.
