Conversation Series Sofa Issues Winter 2026
Connection-Making Machines: Teaching Art History
Rose Lewis with William J. Diebold
“Well, you know, we’re all connection-making machines. So if you have thirteen pieces of common information, you can connect them. You may be wrong to do that, but you can do it.“
Many of my questions this term have revolved around the art of teaching, ranging from very practical concerns about constructing a well-paced syllabus to more personal concerns about inspiring a shy student to feel prepared to contribute to a class discussion. I have been very fortunate to learn from a great number of wonderful professors whose approaches to teaching have been especially fresh in my mind. As an undergraduate, I took almost all of my art history courses from William Diebold, studying an eclectic range of topics from Gothic architecture to contemporary exhibition design. William’s course on Iconoclasm was rumored to have the longest waitlist in the department. In our largely discussion-based classes, I always appreciated his ability to seize upon a point that a student was about to make and guide them towards it with a series of questions, encouraging them to deepen their analysis and draw connections between sometimes unexpected topics. I learned to watch for a particular pattern of hand gestures: if his wrists were moving, there was more thinking to be done, and any conclusions would be punctuated with a very specific flourish.
Rose Lewis: In the pedagogy class I’m taking, we’ve been reading bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress and some Paulo Freire to talk about different systems for invigorating and inspiring students that aren’t necessarily the “banking model” where the professor lectures and the students just take in the information.
I remember, as an undergrad at Reed, really enjoying the discussion-based classes, but then every now and then wishing that there could be a little bit more of the person in the room who knows the most about the subject matter sharing what they know.
I think that your classes did a really good job of striking that balance and that you in particular did a really good job of finding threads within what students were saying that could be productively developed upon to lead to greater depth than the student might stumble on under their own guidance, and so I was wondering how you developed that instinct.
William Diebold: Well, I take that as a compliment, and I’m glad to hear you say that, because those are the things that I always worried about.
I guess I first should say that I was educated at a time where there was no attention whatsoever to pedagogy. I’m a contemporary of Paulo Freire, but I know about him only from reading about him decades later. Virtually the only things I know about pedagogy come from my own teaching and my own learning experience.
I have to say that I’m there with you: in college I hated the discussion parts of class because, exactly, I wanted the person who knew something to say something, and I didn’t actually really want to hear from my peers, for better or for worse.
When I got to Reed, I was made to understand that it was all about discussion. My humanities colleagues and my art colleagues modeled that in talking about pedagogy. Whatever I did right came from paying attention to what the students were saying.
It took a while, but eventually I learned that over the course of a term, everything I wanted to have the students know would come out at some point, and I didn’t really care what sequence they came out in unless they needed to be sequenced in some way pedagogically.
So I think it was Reed that did it, in the sense that this is how you should teach there. And it was perfectly amenable to me, even if it wasn’t what I in fact liked as a student myself.
I mean, it’s a bad answer in the sense that it’s luck plus luck. Let’s leave it at that.
Rose: I think luck is very important.
Our professor now has said that sometimes, if you have a class that meets early in the morning or if it’s a required class, it can be difficult to foster the kind of environment that leads to really productive discussions. I was wondering if you had any secret tips for inspiring people or if it’s just luck of the draw.
William: To the degree there was inspiration, the inspiration would come from the fact that I was interested in what I was doing. Reed allowed me to do whatever I wanted to, basically. It’s an incredibly rare–I would say virtually unique–system wherein nobody said “you have to teach Roman art every four years,” or whatever.
That came out of a very particular situation at Reed where they had only two art historians, and they were smart enough to recognize that there was no pretension to coverage of all of Western art. We were therefore able to teach whatever it is we’re engaged in. Obviously the faculty member being engaged seems like it would help. I was interested in everything I taught. I kept changing my syllabuses as I changed. I was allowed to be engaged because I never had to teach to a preset syllabus.
Even in Hum 110, where there was a syllabus, it was pretty clear that you could do whatever you wanted with that syllabus. I mean, I did feel I had to teach the texts that were on the syllabus, but there was plenty in them to do. Nobody was saying, “you have to teach it this way or that way.”
Rose: How did you handle the fact that the Hum course would draw on so many disciplines, including ones that are not within your realm of interest or background? How would you find, within each text, the thing to be excited about?
William: I was educated to read everything in context. The things that were hardest for me to teach in Hum 110 were the philosophy texts, not because I didn’t find them interesting, but because the philosophers were always presenting the texts as if Socrates was a colleague of theirs at Berkeley and they were reading a paper of his. I was trained to think that Socrates was a guy of the fifth century BC.
As long as I can put any text or any artifact in its cultural context, I try to do that, so that was what I did. I can’t explain to you anything about the arguments in the Nicomachean Ethics, but I know something about what it says to talk about rich people or virtue around 400 CE. Nobody was saying you have to teach it the way the philosophers are teaching it.
Rose: I didn’t always appreciate, while I was actively taking Hum 110, the ways in which the curriculum would connect to things I would be studying later on. I remember revisiting Plotinus when I took your class on the Gothic because his discussion of the mystical virtues of glowing stones related to medieval arguments about the spiritual value of stained-glass windows.
William: Well, you know, we’re all connection-making machines. So if you have thirteen pieces of common information, you can connect them. You may be wrong to do that, but you can do it.
Rose: One of the conversations that I remember the most vividly from that particular class was the essay that we had read–I think it was Erwin Panofsky–making the argument that the structure of Gothic architecture is similar to the structure of philosophical arguments that were being made at the time. That led all of us to wonder whether one could say that the five paragraph essay had some influence on contemporary architecture.
William: That would be an excellent, excellent question. And the answer, in my opinion, is probably yes.
Rose: I’m going to have to bear that in mind when I’m looking at the next new little house that pops up around Portland.
Of the classes more tailored to your own particular interests, the two that I remember the best are the Iconoclasm class and our exhibition design seminar, wherein we were talking about how to grapple with Reed’s history of at one point having hosted a traveling exhibition curated by the German Social Hygiene Museum in the 1930s.
It seems like everything we were talking about there in terms of how you educate the public about topics that can be difficult and distressing seems to get more and more relevant every year.
I was wondering if that kind of research had continued to be a thread that you were following.
William: I would say both those classes grow out of the same interest in a certain way.
When I was being educated in art history, the main questions basically had to do with what was the maker intending to do with the work of art, and what did the original public make of it? At that time in the humanities, there was beginning to be a lot of interest in what audiences think. What does the viewer think? What does the reader think?
Chartres Cathedral was built in 1240, and most of art history at that time was certainly interested in what the beholder thought, but they were basically thinking about the beholder of 1240. But, you know, Chartres Cathedral keeps being beheld.
I’m basically interested in how people make meaning, and those people can be 13th-century people or they can be people last week. Those for me are both part of art history. I don’t have much of a sense of identity with the past. I’m not interested in the Middle Ages because I want to be there or I think I’m like them. I’m interested because I’m not like them.
I would say that iconoclasm is interesting to me because it is a viewer reaction, sometimes at the time, but often not at the time. But it is a reaction. And so I’m certainly interested in that. I would say that exhibitions are also a common site of reaction these days.
My current research is all about the 20th-century interest in the Middle Ages, so it’s about what are people of the relatively recent past making of this stuff that was made a long time ago, and why are they interested in it, and what are they doing with it?
Also, this is totally cynical, but I will say that if you start becoming interested in reception and the entire history of reception, it’s good for art history because there’s a lot of work to be done.
With the intellectual tools we have these days, Chartres Cathedral is pretty well studied in its 13th-century context. There’s not a ton more to learn about it. That’s not to say that we won’t develop new questions, but we don’t have those at the moment. And so I can use the old questions that I’m well skilled and trained at, like what did somebody say about this? What did they think about it? And if I apply those questions to a 17th-century viewer of Chartres Cathedral, that hasn’t been done yet.
I’m actually pretty well trained at doing archival research, and that archival research could be in a 20th-century German archive as well as it could be in a 13th-century French archive, and those for me are both close to equal in interest.
Rose: Absolutely. Even the very recent past can be different as it is shaped by its context.
The exhibition design seminar introduced me to the concept of institutional critique, and it has been interesting to see which institutions are more open to critique than others. We had a discussion in a recent class about Fred Wilson’s work in the Seattle Art Museum, doing something very similar to what he’d done in Maryland. One of the readings said that the shock value and sensation of his first Maryland iteration of it made it more effective than the subsequent Seattle one. It’s almost as though his methods had become subsumed into mainstream curatorial practice to become just a thing that museums do now because it seems trendy. The thought that I had was that this kind of institutional self-critique is still helpful, even if maybe its motivation is just “this will make us seem cool,” rather than “we deeply believe that we need to make these changes.”
William: Right. I mean, that’s a good way to think about it. It is true that museums do it because
it gets them prestige, but it’s better than their not even being aware that that might be a way to get prestige.
Rose: I’ve thought about that often with regard to Reed and the critiques of its curriculum. I think the year that I did Hum 110 was the last year that it was just Greece and Rome. I think the remaining years that I was an undergrad, it was Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. After I graduated they fully reformatted the whole thing. I was definitely following those conversations with quite a lot of interest because I was still working on campus sometimes, and so I was seeing student viewpoints pro and con.
A tension that I come up against with regard to that kind of thing is that I both understand the importance of broadening and expanding the canon, and I also find myself sometimes feeling that, given that we are in the world as it exists now, I don’t want people to lose the good parts from the canon as it existed.
William: There are many, many, many things in the world, and we can’t study them all. The course is still pretty canonical. I could never make a case for why we did the Greeks and the Romans. I couldn’t ever convince myself that that made any sense whatsoever. I mean, it was fine. But everything else would be fine, too. And in my opinion, some things would have been finer, like stuff written in English, for example. You could have taught writing a lot better if we were reading things that were actually written in the English language.
Rose: Absolutely.
I’m wondering—I imagine the answer is probably no, but I’m wondering–if, given the whole debate around Hum and the ultimate decision to go in a slightly more “progressive” direction, if Reed would be more interested now in investigating the exhibition we were thinking about doing. But I think that probably admitting, “Well, it was a different time, and this was something we were doing then,” is maybe still not something the administration would really want to highlight.
William: I mean, to be fair, I don’t think the administration was not interested. I think it would have been a very difficult thing to do, and it would have been problematic. So I wouldn’t blame anyone for that not happening, and I’m not sure it would have been a good idea either.
Rose: It’s so hard to know how to present that information in a way that’s educational and sufficiently sensitive.
William: Totally, yes, absolutely.
Rose: People talk so much about how we’re having this crisis of media literacy, crisis of understanding, just crisis of interpretability, I suppose. How do you feel that that impacts what you’re doing? Do you feel that that is the case? Or do you have a somewhat more hopeful bent on things?
William: It’s a little hard for me to answer that because I don’t actually talk to a whole lot of people about this. When I was teaching, I did all the time.
I have to say that towards the end of my teaching career, the generational split between me and the students was clearly perceptible to me. They saw the world in ways that I didn’t, which was fine, but I also found it hard to even convey what my position was.
I guess all I’m saying is I’m not sure I have my finger as closely on the pulse of what exactly is going on with media these days.
I’m still totally fascinated by the fact that photography, which has been a manipulable genre since it was invented, still seems to have truth value, when we’ve known for, now, close to two hundred years photography doesn’t have. So that to me is an interesting historical problem.
Rose: The question about photography is a very, very interesting one. One of my classmates is a former photojournalist, and a lot of what they’ve been talking about are exactly these limitations. In journalism, a photograph is supposed to be the truthful, objective thing, but of course, they’re very aware of all of the decisions they’re making about how to frame it, how to light it, what angle, everything. It’s been really interesting hearing them apply those questions to documenting performance work or other kinds of artwork that are more ephemeral. There’s necessarily going to be a very different experience from when you’re primarily experiencing a performance to when you’re seeing the photos or just reading about it afterwards.
When we’re thinking about something like a cathedral or some tangible, physical thing, we can maybe be lulled into thinking, “well, when I’m in the museum standing and looking at the Mona Lisa, I’m having such a similar experience to everyone else who has stood in the museum looking at the Mona Lisa,” when I know that that’s not necessarily true.
William: Right. Indeed not.
Rose: What’s next on the horizon for you now that you’re no longer teaching?William: Oh, I’m busy. I do a lot of research and writing, and frankly, I can do a lot more of it than I ever could because I don’t have to do other things. I’ve got a lot of research projects. It’s the best job in the world to retire from in the sense that I can keep doing all the parts I want. If I were a chemist, I would need a lab, but as an art historian, this room is just as good as any other room. I published a volume last year called Medieval Art, Modern Politics that was a collection of essays with a colleague. I’m working on the 20th-century reception in the Middle Ages, so I stay busy. It’s great.
William J. Diebold is the Jane Neuberger Goodsell Professor of Art History and Humanities emeritus at Reed College. He has published extensively on early medieval topics, including his book Word and Image: An Introduction to Early Medieval Art and articles on Carolingian and Ottonian manuscripts, ivories, and writing about art. His more recent research, on the modern reception of medieval art, has led to publications such as Medieval Art, Modern Politics (co-edited with Brigitte Buettner).
Rose Lewis is an artist and musician based in Portland, OR. Her work is deeply rooted in the DIY tradition of the global punk community and encompasses media including drawing, printmaking, zine-making, show booking, painting in oil and watercolor, writing, electric guitar, and elaborate cake. Find her work at rose-lewis.space.