A&A and the École du Louvre Partnership Creates New Undergraduate and Graduate Student Opportunities

A new partnership between A&A and the École du Louvre opens up exciting opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students beginning in January 2025. 

Undergraduate students are invited to participate in the École du Louvre’s Winter School, a 10-day intensive educational program that takes place in Paris this January. This year’s topic is “Provenance Research & Duty to Care.” For graduate students, an exchange program will begin in fall 2025, with A&A sending up to two students to the École du Louvre and hosting up to two Visiting Exchange Students at Princeton.

 An inaugural group of three A&A seniors, Moses Abrahamson, Kate Weseley-Jones, and Audrey Zhang, will attend Winter School next month. “My long-term goal is to work in museums. Having begun to learn about the ethics and politics of museum collection while at Princeton, the opportunity to engage with questions of provenance at the École du Louvre’s Winter School could not be more exciting,” said Weseley-Jones, whose thesis topic is late 19th-century French sculpture. “If I were to make a ranked list of the museum collections most indispensable to my current research, the Musée Rodin in Paris would be number one,” Weseley-Jones explained, “The Winter School would be the perfect introduction to the city and I would schedule time to visit sites related to my thesis around the program.” Zhang, concentrating in the Practice of Art track, seeks to apply provenance in her senior thesis. “I am researching and creating art exploring immortality: how we preserve and propagate information,” she said. “I would love to learn how provenance affects which perspectives we immortalize, and how we can safeguard our histories by preserving art and archaeological artifacts.” Provenance is central to Abrahamson’s senior thesis, as well, which investigates the legal and art historical conditions surrounding the creation and removal of Confederate monuments and explores how public art shapes historical memory and national identity. “Studying issues of provenance, cultural heritage, and museum ethics through this program will allow me to situate my research questions within international frameworks of cultural heritage disputes,” said Abrahamson.

The École du Louvre program’s aim is “to equip a new generation of museum and heritage professionals with a comprehensive set of tools and body of knowledge relating specifically to collecting art objects, ensuring their lawful circulation and transfer, studying their archives and documentation and, ultimately, fostering robust scientific responses to issues and challenges – including ethical issues- posed by the global context.” Along with enhancing knowledge and skills, the program brings together students from diverse backgrounds who invariably learn from each other.

The graduate exchange program connects students with scholars working in their field of research while broadening their intellectual and cultural experience, not to mention their language skills.

Along with students, faculty are encouraged to participate in this new partnership. The École du Louvre invites faculty to hold one-week seminars in Paris to develop their work. Professor Nathan Arrington will begin this program with a one-week seminar in March 2025 on the topic “Touch and Greek Art.”

Stay tuned for accounts from our inaugural undergraduate École du Louvre cohort when they return from Winter School!