Get to know our faculty through this ongoing series. This month, we interviewed Dr. William Barnes, Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History.

What area of art history/architectural history did you focus on in graduate school? And where did you go?

I took an earned M.A. at Tulane University in New Orleans. While the M.A. at Tulane is general in focus, I wrote my Master’s thesis on the art of the Aztecs. I stayed at Tulane for my Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Art History and Archaeology. I took my exams in three areas: Pre-Columbian art history, Colonial Latin American art history, and World Archaeology. My Ph.D. dissertation focused on the royal art of the Aztecs.

And what area do you focus on now? Give one factoid everyone should know about that area?

I research and publish on the arts of ancient Mesoamerica, particularly the art and visual rhetoric of the Aztecs.

Factoid: In Tenochtitlan, the Aztecs had a system of compulsory education whereby youths learned reading, writing, and sacred lore.

Best advice you have ever received? 

Academically? My advisor would regularly remind us that all it takes is one wild supposition to undermine a dozen solid arguments. As for life advice — one should never feel guilty about taking a nap.

If you weren’t a professor, what would you do and why?

If I wasn’t a professor I’d likely be a museum preparator or exhibit designer — failing that, I would have likely gone into CIS.