This story is part of Practice What You Teach, a series that highlights CU Denver lecturers’ diverse expertise and scholarship. Lecturers are crucial to CU Denver’s academic programs, comprising nearly 40% of all faculty. On the whole, Instructional, Research, and Clinical (IRC) faculty make up nearly 64% of faculty and 67% of student credit hours.
Art Historian Sarah Nichols has been fascinated by how culture is manifested in visual art for most of her life. When she was a kid, she was drawn to fine art illustrations in encyclopedias and doll costume designs from around the world. In graduate school at the University of Colorado Boulder, some of her research focused on coinage design in the late Roman period. “Quite often, the best and the worst of us is distilled in the things we make,” said Nichols. “Whether we intend to show those things or not, they’re there.”
Today, Nichols is still captivated by visual culture and shares that passion with her students as an Art History lecturer in the College of Arts & Media at CU Denver. She mostly teaches asynchronous classes, including Art History Surveys I and II, which means that her students engage with the class curriculum online and at their own pace. At the beginning of her career, Nichols aspired to be an art curator, but she realized her love for teaching when she was given a teaching assistantship while she earned her master’s degree. Twelve years later, Nichols’ interest in exploring knowledge and ideas with students hasn’t stopped.
As Chancellor Michelle Marks and Provost Constancio Nakuma have noted, lecturers are a crucial part of CU Denver’s academic programs and make up nearly 40% of all CU Denver faculty. IRC (instructional, research, and clinical) faculty make up nearly two-thirds of all faculty. Their diverse expertise and scholarship help create robust learning opportunities for our students. In “Practice What You Teach,” the first in a series highlighting three CU Denver lecturers, we spoke with Nichols about her background, methods for teaching students asynchronously, and artistic expression through time.
On why visual arts inspired her…
I’ve always made things. When I was little, I was very visually driven. I was always driven by pictures. And one of the things that I look back at now was this big old set of World Book Encyclopedia I had. It’s very old school, but we had this really old, very outdated set, and the pictures were amazing: mid-century Kodachrome, very vivid colors, and very different illustrations. Just looking through all the pictures within these articles was really inspiring to me.
On artistic identity…
Every artwork has a story. It has a connection to the person who made it, or it has a connection to the culture who made it. So, as someone who focuses on ancient art quite often, you don’t get artists names very clearly. And it’s not really until much later, in the Renaissance, that artists have any kind of footprint in terms of history, specifically in terms of a personality.
On what you’ll learn in Survey II…
[Currently,] we’re talking about artistic identity, and how that structurally forms from the time that artists are trained in guilds in the spirit of a controlled environment—creating art that is executed for specific, very powerful patrons—to the point where artists become afraid that they can express themselves. [We also discuss how] the idea of the individual grows within society, then the idea of the artist as an individual grows in society.
On the benefits of online teaching experiences…
I think over the pandemic, we’ve become much more aware of the technology disparities among our students. So, being able to create something that is accessible is possible, depending on your comfort level. Some people take online courses because they’re a little bit nervous using their voice, and they’re much more comfortable typing.
On providing students with a framework…
We have access to a lot of different information, but students need to know how to process information. And that’s what a professor provides. They provide a perspective; they provide a method. They provide a way of digesting things and putting things together. So, it’s not just curation. But it’s also commentary placed within it.
On the most rewarding thing Nichols gets out of teaching…
I think it’s interacting with the students. I think that placing something out there and being able to take students through, even though they’ve never taken an art history class before, is rewarding. I’m often the first art history class that they’ll take.
On what’s changed in her field…
Old school art history was slide, slide, slide. And, more recently, I think there’s been a real movement towards teaching students ways and methods of thinking about the work, as opposed to just a great deal of content.
On the best way to spend a Saturday…
I’m catching up with discussions, but my perfect day is being able to do a little work, and then finish that work early, get a few things done at home, and then maybe be able to go out with friends afterwards. I like a balance between leisure and productivity.
Click here to learn more about CU Denver’s art history degree path.