Williams College Oral History Project Interview with Mark Haxthausen
July 29, 2003
Interviewer Length: 41 pages
Mark Haxthausen (b. 1941) is the Robert Sterling Clark Professor of Art History at Williams College. Haxthausen came to Williams in 1993, after a career in art history that started in Bloomington, Indiana, took him to the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard, and a tenured professorship at the University of Minnesota.
In his interview with Charles Alberti, Haxthausen discusses his undergraduate experience at University St. Thomas, a small Catholic liberal arts college, from which he took two leaves of absence to travel in Europe. He also describes his graduate experience at Columbia University, asserting that it has one of the most prestigious art history programs in the country. Haxthausen describes his varied teaching and administrative career at length before launching into a detailed discussion of Williams College, the Clark Art Institute, and the graduate program in Art History. He talks about George Hamilton; Marc Simpson; the Williams Art History ÒMafia;Ó faculty members, including Michael Lewis; possible collaboration between the Art History Masters program and the Center for Development Economics; and where he sees the Art Department going in the future.
The transcript of this interview and accompanying audio file (if available) may be accessed only in the Archives/Chapin Reading Room.