I am Sean Cotter and I am from Cincinnati, Ohio. I came to Notre Dame
knowing that I wanted to take a class in art history and it was, actually,
during my freshman seminar that I found, kind of, my passion with it.
I took a seminar on the Romanesque Renaissance and
I really just, kind of, fell in love with the
subject. Art history at the
University of Notre Dame is a great, diverse curriculum.
You look at Western art from its earliest structures the earliest monumental buildings all the
way through
modern art. It gives you such an
eye-opening set of media
to which you can approach
history in a totally different way
from what people were talking about what
people were producing
and what people thought was worthy of painting.
Right now I am taking my seminar class
with Professor Rhodes and we are talking
about the Acropolis.
We are exploring all different attributes
of the site.
We each have our own research projects
so the full semester has just been
each of us meeting with Professor Rhodes one-on-one
and talking about where we are taking our
paper and where we are taking our
presentations. Professor Rhodes is such a great and influential guy
in terms of art history and in terms of the athenian accropolis.
So it is great to kind of just bounce ideas
off of him and for him to be a sounding board.
I am working on my honors thesis for art history right now,
and it deals with a house that was built
in about 1598 in Mallow in Southern Ireland.
And so I am looking at the use of spolia, the use of older Catholic structures,
in this new Protestant house. I received
a grant from the Nanovic Institute
to actually go and explore the original
documents that kind of talk about the
house and the family who moved into the land at Mallow. That is a lot of original
original research because it has actually never been written on before.
There is something I really love about
the challenge that comes with
the unexplored. I love the
tradition that can emerge from that.
I love that I am, kind of, part of that
tradition.
I am looking at going to grad school
for museum work and collection,
and I eventually want to pursue a PhD in
art history. It really teaches you how
to solve a problem and how other people
have solved a problem.
Because that is really what a lot of art is,
it is solving a problem for a very specific
context and it has made me such an aware person.
