Thinking Beyond Borders: A Conversation with Jill Caskey
Academic disciplines can be notoriously resistant to change, particularly when the need for change arises from within the established epistemic structures used for analyzing and categorizing the world. This rigidity often means that, even when we discuss and advocate for change in academic settings, it does not necessarily lead to a fundamental transformation in how we approach teaching and research.
I recently sat down with our very own Jill Caskey, Co-Principal Investigator of the Global Past Research Initiative (GPRI), who not only articulated her desire for change in the way Art History is taught but also put her ideas into practice as a course instructor at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM). Her efforts have paved the way for a truly global approach to teaching Art History here at UTM and beyond. Read on to hear how Jill situates her teaching and research in the framework of GPRI’s call to action.
AQSA IJAZ: As a GPRI scholar specializing in art history with a unique position bridging European and Islamic artistic traditions, how do you envision your work contributing to GPRI’s mission of cultivating an alternative model for the Global Humanities?
JILL CASKEY: I hope that the research I’ve done on cross-cultural exchange and historiography can provide strong foundations for me as the GPRI moves into its next phase. I’ve tended to approach diverse contexts of medieval art with an eye on comparative analyses and interconnectivity. In addition, my historiographical work, with its attention to the roots of disciplinary taxonomies along with their biases and benefits, makes me aware that other areas of research have their own histories and cultural baggage that also require careful and patient unpacking. The comparative, the connective, the historiographical — these three approaches will be important as we move forward and brainstorm about what the Global Humanities could be.
AI: As a professor at UTM, you have made significant changes to the pedagogical approach in Art History, particularly in diversifying the course content beyond the European Middle Ages and integrating Islamic Art into the core curriculum. Can you share your experience teaching this course and its impact?
JC: Great question! In my first year at UTM, I incorporated Byzantine and Islamic art into a year-long survey of medieval art; I was the first to do so at U of T. That year I received an institutional grant to build a collection of slides of Islamic art for my courses.
“A few fun things to notice: the blue stickers indicate the lower left corner of the image to help you load it correctly in the slide carousel. The white plastic is the front, black is the back, again to keep you from loading it wrong and projecting it backwards. And the labels were typed out on an electric typewriter. I also love how you can see ERINDALE COLLEGE stamped in red on the back of them — showing they are institutional property (with the original name of UTM).”
— Jill Caskey
In the era before digital photography, the slides we had access to — in institutional slide libraries as well as in our personal collections — determined what we could teach. So, creating those slides was essential for expanding the art history curriculum beyond Western Europe. All these years later, I remain very proud of that grant and what it allowed me to do.
Eventually I split the survey into two semester-long courses, The Medieval Mediterranean and The Medieval North, a division that underscored cross-cultural connections and was radical at the time. Over the years I worked hard on this interconnected model with my U of T colleagues Adam S. Cohen and Linda Safran; our long-standing collaboration ultimately led to our textbook Art and Architecture of the Middle Ages: Exploring a Connected World (Cornell University Press, 2022) and to the complementary open-access website (artofthemiddleages.com, created with UTM Postdoctoral Fellow Erika Loic, who now teaches at Florida State University).
The book brings Western European, Byzantine, and Islamic art together in a single chronological framework. Within that framework we also sought more inclusivity, incorporating works of religious and cultural groups that have been marginalized or omitted in existing books, such as Picts, Jews, and Zoroastrians.
Now my survey courses are called Art of the Early Middle Ages and Art of the Later Middle Ages, workaday titles that belie the innovative nature of the textbook and website I use in the classroom. Students respond well to this broadened conceptualization of the Middle Ages, as it helps them see connections between the medieval world and their own. I love it when students come forward and tell me, “I’m from … and I never knew that…”, or “I’m … and I am so happy to see my religion discussed here.”
AI: Within the network of global trade and cultural exchanges, is there a driving force — a common ideology — that underpins the built environment around the globe during the premodern period?
JC: I don’t think so. There are common threads, to be sure, such as the impetus to develop sacred space or to express political power. These commonalities are so general, though, that they are basically productive starting points. What is compelling to me is how approaches to building sacred space or expressing political power can vary in profound ways. Building projects that spring from a similar impetus — and that even have the same function — can range from embracing material exuberance to stripped-down asceticism, and from self-conscious innovation to insistent traditionalism. How patrons, architects, and builders respond to ideas, opportunities, and constraints as they seek to fill a building with the “life” they envision for it is a fundamental question in the history of architecture. Yet this basic question elicits myriad answers, testifying to the richness and diversity of the premodern imagination.
To conclude, I might flip your question inside-out and ask if there are common ways to approach the built environment within networks of global trade and cultural exchange. Let’s discuss that after the Cairo workshop!
AI: Often, projects aimed at challenging dominant knowledge paradigms can inadvertently perpetuate divisions and intolerance. Given GPRI’s mission and the work we engage in, how do you perceive our approach in responding to this concern, especially in the realm of political action within knowledge production?
JC: My hope is that the project’s openness to experimentation and absence of a single ideological agenda will encourage participants to relax, listen, and learn — in honest and respectful ways. We come from different places, disciplines, experiences, and stages of life, meaning that we probably won’t agree or achieve consensus as we grapple with major methodological questions. But that’s okay — there can’t be only one answer or a single way forward. Multiplicity is key.
Jill Caskey is chair of the Department of Visual Studies and professor of medieval art at UTM. Her interests in the mobile — merchants, conquerors, pilgrims, relics, and portable objects — shape much of her research and teaching on the Mediterranean basin and beyond. However, the history of architecture remains her first and greatest academic love.
Aqsa Ijaz is an essayist, musician, and teaches courses in Persian and Urdu literary and linguistic studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. She is Co-Project Manager for the GPRI, curator and lead author for this blog series, and in her spare time, you’ll find her tucked neatly behind her cello, Marcus, practicing away.