Faculty Spotlight: Q&A with Michael Witte, PhD

The USD College of Arts and Sciences (the college) hired 14 new faculty members in three distinctive themes – Borders and Social Justice, Technology and the Human Experience and Climate Change and Environmental Justice – this past fall. As part of the university's commitment to academic excellence, the college endeavored to assemble a cohort of teacher-scholars who offer a strong contribution to the diversity and excellence of USD through teaching, scholarship, service and collaboration.

This spring semester, the college is featuring each new faculty member with a Q&A series every week. Each spotlight highlights their professional journeys, academic expertise, research and their goals for fostering academic and personal growth within the USD community. 

Learn more about Assistant Professor of Art History Michael Witte, PhD, his background and his passion for research and teaching in the Q&A below.

Cluster-Theme: Climate Change and Environmental Justice and Borders and Social Justice

Q: Please share your name, title, department and the subjects or courses you will be teaching at USD.

A: My name is Michael N. Witte, PhD, assistant professor of art history in the Department of Art, Architecture + Art History. I teach modern and contemporary art and film, including courses on avant-garde and neo-avant-garde art and Third Cinema.  

Q: What key experiences have shaped your career and where you are today? 

A: The friendships I’ve made, through teaching, research collaborations and mentorships, and the connections forged through acts of solidarity with my peers in academic labor, are what have — more than anything else — shaped my career and where I am today.

Q: What sparked your interest in the Technology and the Human Experience and Borders and Social Justice cluster-hire themes, and what drew you to this particular focus? How are you contributing to that focus in your work here?

A: I teach courses in modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on global modernism, Global South cinemas, and the art and visual cultures of the Americas. I’ve been interested in researching and teaching in these areas for a long time, as well as tapping into the traditions within my field for negotiating hegemonic processes in the production of art historical knowledge. Modernity, nation formation, borders and technology — these are themes that are certainly ingrained within the curriculum that I seek to introduce to students. 

Q: What aspects of joining the University of San Diego community are you most excited about?

A: The department I’ve joined here at USD is filled with tremendous talent, and I am excited to work with my colleagues. They are and have been a tremendous support, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to be part of this team.

Q: How do you envision your course curriculum contributing to the academic and personal growth of USD students?

A: The courses I teach are organized around the role of the arts during critical inflection points in history. As such, the questions generated in our analysis are questions often relevant to the types of concerns that students themselves are engaged with already as they negotiate their place in the order of things. In teaching these materials, I do not impose ideological constraints; rather, what I attempt to introduce to students are a series of critical historiographic methods that will aid them in the process of research and writing — skills that are not only vital for a career in the arts, but are transferable to nearly every perceivable occupation. 

Q: What current research projects are you working on or interested in, and how do they align with your cluster theme? 

A: I’m currently writing an article about Jorge Luis Borges and the artist Xul Solar, on their relationship in the context of the modernist experiments in the first half of the XX century in Buenos Aires. This project examines the creation of new avant-garde “accents” in and alongside the changing demographics of the capital. Besides this, I’m working on a few other projects: a book that deals with the construction of a late surrealist film theory, negotiated during the era of surrealism’s international diaspora. Another project I’m engaged with historicizes the emergence of radical forms of conceptual art in Mexico City in the 1960s and 70s. These projects intersect the cluster areas of borders and tech, thematizing the permeability of real and imagined borders in the migration and relative social and geographical mobility of art; and investigating the historical avant-garde’s critical revision of the antique conception of art as technē. 

Q: What’s an interesting or unique fact about yourself that others might not know?

A: Something folks around here might not know is that I used to play drums in an experimental jazz group.