Art History Professor Job Description

An Art History Professor teaches students how to read images and buildings as historical evidence, and produces research that changes what the field knows about them. O*NET groups the job with faculty who teach courses in drama, music and the arts, and it lists art history professor among the job titles reported for that occupation. In practice the work has its own rhythm, its own sources and its own professional body, the College Art Association (CAA).

Teaching

The classroom work starts with the survey: a semester that moves from cave painting to the Gothic cathedral, or from Courbet to contemporary installation, built around hundreds of images. Above the survey sit period and regional courses (Italian Renaissance, Islamic architecture, art of the Americas before 1500, modern Chinese painting) and seminars where students write research papers from primary sources. Good teaching here means training students to describe what they see before they interpret it, then to test that interpretation against documents, patronage, materials and the history of earlier readings.

How much of the job is teaching depends on the campus. CAA's tenure standards tell evaluators that the full-time teaching assignments of art historians vary considerably across two-year colleges, four-year liberal arts schools and research universities. A community college instructor may teach several survey sections a term, while a faculty member in a doctoral program also advises dissertations.

Research

Art historical research is tied to objects and places. Scholars spend time in storerooms, print rooms, archives, church interiors and excavation sites, and CAA asks tenure committees to recognize the financial and time implications of research that depends on travel to distant or international locations. The output takes several forms: journal articles, monographs from university presses, essays in exhibition and collection catalogs, and digital projects such as databases or mapped collections.

CAA's standards also name public and community-based scholarship as legitimate work, with examples that include curating exhibitions, conducting oral art history projects, engaging in public art projects and negotiating repatriation cases. Because that work can leave little paper trail, the standards advise art historians to document it with portfolios, letters from community members and records of grants.

Museums and collections

Museum relationships run through the job. Faculty bring classes into galleries and study rooms, borrow objects for teaching exhibitions at campus museums, and collaborate with curators on loans and catalogs. Some positions are joint appointments: CAA keeps separate guidance for tenure-track curatorial appointments, and recommends that a curator's tenure dossier link each research project to the museum's or collection's mission.

Service and image rights

Service covers department meetings, curriculum committees, faculty searches and reviews of colleagues. A less visible task is image management: building lecture sets, clearing reproductions for publications and deciding when fair use applies, a question CAA has addressed in a published code of practice for the visual arts.

Degrees

CAA's standards describe the PhD as usually the terminal degree for art historians, with another doctoral-level degree acceptable when its scholarship contributes to the field. For teaching appointments at two-year colleges, CAA sets the minimum qualification at a Master of Arts in art history. It also allows that an EdD, an MFA or a related degree may be a suitable equivalent for faculty in programs that combine art history with visual studies, visual culture or digital media.

Across the broader O*NET occupation that includes art, drama and music faculty, 51% of surveyed respondents said a master's degree was required, 32% said a doctoral degree and 14% said a bachelor's degree. Those figures describe the whole occupation, not art history alone.

The path, as a rough guide

A typical route runs through an undergraduate major in art history or a related field, then a doctoral program that includes coursework, qualifying exams, reading knowledge of research languages and a dissertation. Language needs follow the specialty: Latin and Italian for a Renaissance scholar, Japanese for someone working on Edo prints, German or French for much of the European modern literature. Candidates may spend a year or more in a postdoctoral fellowship, a visiting post or a museum fellowship before a tenure-track offer, though this is guidance rather than a rule.

What tenure committees look for

CAA asks institutions to put their reappointment, promotion and tenure policies in writing and hand them to faculty at hiring, supplemented with criteria specific to art historians. Its standards recommend that a senior colleague be assigned as a tenure mentor whenever possible, and that other art historians be consulted early in any review unless the candidate is the department's only art historian. If standards change during the probationary period, CAA says candidates should either keep the original standards or receive an appropriate amount of time, normally three additional years, to meet the new ones.

On scholarship, CAA recommends that quality be judged by reviewers who have read the work and can place it against the state of the field. It also points evaluators to separate CAA guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship in art and architectural history, and it asks institutions to recognize the scholarship of teaching and learning as a valid research field.

Skills that matter

• Visual analysis and clear description of objects, buildings and images
• Archival and provenance research, including paleography where the period demands it
• Writing for several audiences: peer reviewers, students, museum visitors
• Familiarity with image databases, collection management systems and digital publishing tools
• Comfort speaking about objects in a gallery as well as at a lectern

No license or certification is required to teach art history at the college level.

The size of the field

The Humanities Indicators project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences surveyed humanities departments in 2024 and published an art history profile in 2025. It counted 368 departments awarding degrees in art history. Of those, 144 (39%) awarded graduate degrees, with 83 (23%) awarding PhDs. The same survey found that art history departments employed 3,150 full- and part-time faculty members in fall 2023, and approximately 4,560 students were working toward graduate degrees in the discipline.

Fewer tenure lines

The structure of the faculty has shifted. According to the project's summary report, The Academic Humanities Today, the share of art history faculty with tenure or on the tenure track fell from 70% in an earlier department survey to 63% in 2023. The rest of the faculty hold full-time non-tenure-track or part-time posts, such as lecturer, visiting and adjunct appointments, with no path to tenure.

Chairs were asked about the future as well. Approximately 51% of art history chairs were optimistic about the future of art history at their institution.

Federal projections

O*NET reports 116,900 workers in the broader Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary occupation in 2025, with growth over 2025 to 2035 projected at 1% to 2%, which it classes as slower than average. It projects about 8,000 openings a year on average for the occupation. That occupation includes studio art, theater and music faculty, so the figures frame the art history market without measuring it.

Where the jobs are

BLS industry data for May 2025 shows where the occupation works. Colleges, universities and professional schools employed 74,280 of these faculty at a median of $78,770. Junior colleges employed 16,330 at a median of $77,730, and their 90th percentile reached $183,230, against $150,280 in the four-year sector.

Practical moves for candidates

• Teach beyond the specialty. A candidate who can cover both halves of the survey, plus a course on global or contemporary art, can answer searches written around either half.
• Document museum work. Catalog essays, exhibition curation and collection research count under CAA's standards, so keep a record that a tenure committee can evaluate.
• Look at the full range of employers. Liberal arts colleges, regional public universities, community colleges and campus museums each hire art historians, and each weighs teaching and research differently.
• Keep a second track open. The research and writing skills of a doctorate in art history carry into curatorial work, collections and provenance research, publishing, arts administration and secondary teaching.

BLS does not break this pay out by rank, discipline or tenure status, so the band at the top of this page is a national picture for the occupation as a whole.

Dear Members of the Search Committee,

I am writing to apply for the tenure-track position of Assistant Professor of Art History, with a focus on early modern Europe, at Lakeview College. I completed my PhD at the University of Northbrook in May, and I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Ashford Museum of Art, where I work in the department of prints and drawings.

My dissertation, "Paper Saints: Devotional Prints and Their Owners in Antwerp, 1560 to 1620," traces how inexpensive engravings moved from print shops into households, convents and confraternities. I read inventories in the city archive alongside surviving impressions, many of them pasted into prayer books, to show how owners trimmed, colored and annotated the sheets they bought. A chapter on hand-coloring appeared this spring in a peer-reviewed journal, and I am revising the full manuscript as a book.

At the museum I co-curated a small exhibition of Netherlandish devotional prints and wrote two of its catalog entries. The project taught me how to plan an object study session for twenty undergraduates and how to explain a watermark to a visitor in under a minute. I would bring both skills to your print collection and to the campus gallery.

I have taught the second half of the Western survey four times, as well as a seminar on the Reformation image debates. My students build a short object report on a work they handle in a study room, then expand it into a research paper. I would gladly teach the full survey sequence, a course on art and the global trade in the early modern period, and a methods seminar for majors.

Thank you for your time and consideration. I would welcome the chance to discuss how I could contribute to the department and to Lakeview's museum partnerships.

Sincerely, Dana Okafor