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Celebrating a Career:
Carol Nathanson

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Dr. Carol Nathanson has been the heart and soul of the art history program ever since she arrived at Wright State from Case Western in 1979. Carol’s passion for her subject is truly legendary, as is the bottomless depth to her knowledge: students leave her classes in awe of her ability to bring modern and contemporary art to life in all its fascinating complexity. Even the weird stuff makes sense after a conversation with Carol!

Carol is the personification of the teacher-scholar, with high standards for both her own and students’ research and writing. Her attention to detail in student writing means that students receive papers back covered in comments, arrows, and suggestions often extending to the back of the page. Surprisingly, however, students don’t complain about it: at the end of a course with Carol, students understand that good writing and clear thinking takes work, but that the effort pays off. And they appreciate the fact that Carol’s effort on their behalf is a generous, never-to-be-forgotten gift. She is always willing to spend extra time with students and respond to their requests: in fact, Carol is the perfect teacher combination of taskmistress and marshmallow.

In her own scholarly work Carol is equally meticulous, and her interests are wide ranging. She has published interviews with artists, written essays and entries for exhibition catalogs, published articles in scholarly journals and curated exhibitions, often supported by highly competitive grants. She is at work on a much-anticipated monograph about early 20th century painter Anne Estelle Rice and is in the final stages of completing a catalog of modern drawing for the Georgia Museum of Art. Whether it is a catalog, a journal article, a grant proposal or a curatorial project, the results are engaging, thoughtful and thoroughly researched. The same is true of her extensive volunteer work in the community: it’s always well done.

Carol’s colleagues have enormous respect for her good judgment and prodigious expertise. Art department alumni surveys always yield many comments about the quality of the art history education students receive here, and that is in large part due to Carol Nathanson. Thank you, Carol, for all you have given Wright State.

See also Celebrating a Career: Martin Maner