Mitchell B. Frank
Professor; Director, School for Studies in Art and Culture
- B.A. (McGill University) M.A. and Ph.D. (University of Toronto)
- mitchell.frank@carleton.ca
At Carleton I am co-appointed between Art History and Cultural Mediations, an interdisciplinary PhD program. Before beginning at Carleton in 2001, I taught at the University of Toronto, the University of Manitoba, and Concordia University, and worked on various projects at the National Gallery of Canada. Before that I studied Philosophy at McGill (BA 1988) and Art History at the University of Toronto (MA 1991, PhD 1997).
In the Art History program, I have taught a variety of courses from the first-year introductory survey to courses in Baroque and nineteenth-century art. As a teacher I aim to familiarize students with the material at hand, whether it be a work of art or a text, and at the same time help them attain critical awareness. Perhaps because of my undergraduate training in philosophy, I have always been interested in how we understand historical materials and how we draw meanings from them. In making it clear to students that art history involves a process of mediation between works of art and the historian, I encourage students to think about historical material in different ways. In other words, I try to help students think critically and logically, a skill that will help them both inside and outside the classroom.
My scholarly research focuses on nineteenth-century German art and art history. More recently, I’ve been focussing on museum studies. I am completing a book on the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and their engagement with popular art education in the postwar period. I’ve published essays in various scholarly journals, including Word & Image and The Oxford Art Journal.Since 2019, I have also been the editor-in-chief of the Canadian art historical journal RACAR (revue d’art canadienne / Canadian Art Review).
Selected Publications:
The Met and the Masses in Postwar America: A Study of the Museum and Popular Art Education, London, Bloomsbury, 2022.
History and Art History: Looking Past Disciplines, ed. Nicholas Chare and Mitchell B. Frank (London: Routledge, 2021).
German Art History and Scientific Thought: Beyond Formalism, ed. Mitchell Frank and Daniel Adler. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.
German Romantic Painting Redefined: Nazarene Tradition and the Narratives of Romanticism, Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2001.
Central European Drawings from the Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, exh. cat., Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2007 (also published in French translation as Dessins de l’Europe centrale du Musée des beaux-arts du Canada.)