Jennifer Way

Professor

Art History
Job Overview: 
Jennifer Way's research and teaching explore the ways art and art history engage with primary source texts, materialities and collecting practices in relation to the nation and belonging, politics, political economies, technology, and everyday life.
Contact Information
Email: 
Jennifer.Way@unt.edu
Website: 
http://jenniferwayphd-arthistory.com
Office: 
ART 312
Areas of Expertise: 
20th and 21st Century Art and Art History
Bio: 

Jennifer Way is an art historian specializing in the 20th and 21st centuries, with emphasis on the period from 1945 to the present. Previously, she worked in the curatorial departments of art museums in Philadelphia and Detroit and as leadership for not for profit organizations.

Way's research discovers the meaning people made of art. Her current research projects explore how Americans engaged with a foreign art form in projects that intersected international agendas with domestic everyday life, and linked the United States and Vietnam on questions of diplomacy, domestication and belonging in the Free World during the 1950s. Way uses historical texts and contemporary theory to illuminate archival materials, object practices, and discursive meanings that arise at the intersection of politics, economy and art.

Course topics Way teaches in relation to her research examine craft and decorative art in historiographies of modernism; visual culture, refugees and migrants; art and suffering; objects of diplomacy; heritage and memory; and the politics of exhibitions.

Academic leadership

  • Created academic project partnerships across the university and within the greater DFW community and beyond
  • Innovated teaching and research-related programs such as Conversations: Art, Politics and North Texas, Leadership Perspectives on Technology and Art, Women, Art and Technology
  • Established student online teaching with the Virtual Senior Center, NYC
  • Established and manages Collections Cultures and Collaborations a student-research, collections-based project collaborating with local museums and collecting organizations, now entering its 10th year, to supplement art history methods courses
  • Supervised over 50 MA art history projects
  • Created and taught over 28 seminar topics and 14 upper-level art history courses
  • Organized 41 visiting scholars and artist visits since 2004
  • Created and implemented collaborative and interdisciplinary teaching/ research projects
  • University award for mentoring students in research
  • University award for teaching
  • Grant reviewer for European national research programs
  • Publications and tenure reviewer
  • PI and Co-PI for external and internal grants and fellowships, raising $150,500 to support research and teaching post-tenure

Administrative leadership

  • University leadership roles in promoting gender equity and graduate studies
  • Oversaw Merit, Promotion. Tenure Committee for college, department, and program, 8+ years
  • Mentored numerous probationary faculty through tenure
  • Program coordinator
  • Chair of numerous academic search committees
  • Supervised college academic, gallery, and ad hoc policy and grievance committees

Book
The Politics of Vietnamese Craft, American Diplomacy and Domestication