“What are Our Important Questions?”: Collaboration and Interdisciplinarity in a Digital Age with Jacqueline Francis and Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi

In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing

In this episode, guest interviewer Paul B. Jaskot (Duke University) speaks with Jacqueline Francis, a scholar of contemporary art and chair of the Graduate Visual and Critical Studies Program at the California College of the Arts, and Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, a specialist of the arts of Africa and associate professor of art history at Emory University, on the topic of collaboration and interdisciplinary in art history and digital humanities. They articulate a shared experience of “falling into” collaborative, digital practices out of necessity, led by the kinds of questions they wanted to answer. Throughout the discussion, all three speakers return to the idea of shifting away from paradigms of hierarchy and authority, whether through partnering with students and colleagues outside the academy, rethinking what is recognized as “scholarly” within the humanities and academic publishing, making visible the intellectual exchanges and collaborative labor that makes research projects, artworks, and museum exhibitions possible, and how these attitudes might fundamentally change how we approach the canon of art history.

This fourth season of In the Foreground is a special series of five roundtable conversations dedicated to “the Grand Challenges” – a phrase frequently adopted in the sciences to refer to the great unanswered questions that represent promising frontiers – of bringing together digital and computational methods and the social history of art. This series grows out of a colloquium on this topic convened by Anne Helmreich (Associate Director of the Getty Foundation) and Paul B. Jaskot (Professor of Art History at Duke University) at the Clark’s Research and Academic Program in April 2019. Anne and Paul serve as the guest interviewers for this podcast series, for which they have invited back colloquium participants to reflect further on how digital art history might help us explore social history of art’s future, and which digital methods might be effective at analyzing large scale structural issues and modes of visual expression.