The extensive East Asian art holdings at the Harvard Art Museums occupy a central place in teaching and research for faculty and students in our program. All of our course offerings emphasize the close study of objects, from undergraduate lecture courses, where graduate students, as part of their teacher training, hold sessions in the galleries or art study center, to pedagogical courses that consider the public display of East Asian art, to museum research seminars, where objects become case studies for term papers and the inspiration for original research.

Collaborative work with our curators at the cutting edge of museum pedagogy gives our students valuable opportunities for practical experience in conceptualizing rotations, writing labels and wall texts, and researching the collection. One traditional part of the training involves a connoisseurial component of the Ph.D. qualifying exams taken in the third year, during which students are asked to identify and elaborate upon several objects chosen from the collection.