Scholar Sarah Archino is going places. She’s also been a lot of places, at least according to her impressive qualifications, honors, and interests on the Furman University web page. I like the variety: she’s held several teaching appointments with different colleges, she’s served two years as a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Paris and a Research Fellow in Germany for one year. Her undergraduate degree was from University of Florida, her Master’s from Hunter College in New York and she stayed in New York for her Ph.D. from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
At Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, Dr Archino is the Department Chair and Associate Professor of Art History. A quick Google search revealed her position there as well as her Biography and Curriculum Vitae that, while impressive, doesn’t appear to be updated to include her recent accomplishments after 2015.
We do get to see at least a portion of the diverse doctorate and post-doctorate work experiences in which Archino participated. Her 2012 dissertation was titled “Reframing the Narrative of Dada in New York, 1910-1926. Committee: Rose-Carol Washton Long, Emily Braun, Gail Levin, Francis M. Naumann, and William C. Agee” and in Germany she worked on a research project: “Don’t Believe What You Read: Marcel Duchamp and the American Press.” In Paris, her interests expanded from American and European art to teaching classes with such explosive titles as “Anarchism and American Culture” and “Considering the Vernacular in American Art.”
Accompanied by a smiling portrait, Archino appears here to be more than a standard cut-and-dried academic, however. In addition to serving as a teaching and research fellow, she also founded and served as co-editor for the AndOr Project, described on the Furman University site as “an online space that explores the practices and implications of digitality for exhibition and archive research.”
Hm…
The And Or project (&/) appears in the Journal on Images and Culture (http://vjic.org/vjic2/?page_id=4767) and presents different online photographic exhibitions. Archino is listed as one of the three collaborators in the project, or as it’s written: “We are a collective of three: artist, art writer, and art historian” who launched this online space as a shared venture. Other online sites reference Dr Sarah Archino as co-editing the And Or Project from 2014-2019 (https://www.isabellastreffen.com/work/the-and-or-project).
Another interesting article located online explained how Archino, along with Isabella Streffen and Siofra McSherry, created their And Or project space as a way by which we could rethink how artwork might be presented and shared; rather than a museum, this site would serve as a way “to reimagine the relationship between art, interpretation, exhibition and theory within electronic media” (https://dora.dmu.ac.uk/handle/2086/18742) and promote discussion between different parties.
I first learned of Dr Sarah Archino’s work when I read her essay: “An Interdisciplinary Approach to Cultivating Visual Literacy.” As a Humanities instructor and art aficionado, I recognize that visual literacy is key to introducing students (people in general) to art, providing them tools to wield in the approach and subsequent analysis of art. I appreciate that Archino’s work doesn’t stop there, though. Her interests in interdisciplinary learning extend from her own Art History into STEM fields with medical students. Archino was a 2019 fellow of Furman’s Institute for the Advancement of Community Health, which awarded her an earlier grant to do the foundational research for a study that examined how medical students could improve their observational (and therefore analytical skills) simply by participating in visual analysis training through art. She continues exploring this line of inquiry with the Furman University art department and a grant from Prisma Health (https://news.furman.edu/2021/08/26/the-art-of-medicine-visual-learning-fine-tunes-observation-skills/).
A Google Scholar search confirmed Archino’s statistics: 11 citations, an h-index of 2, and an i10-index of 0.
ResearchGate verified Sarah Archino claims 5 featured research publications with 3 citations in her profile, bringing her ResearchGate Score to 2.73.
I recognized the big smile in her Facebook profile picture, but Archino does not seem to maintain an active presence on Facebook with the most recent post dated 2015 (apart from contributing an online donation in 2021). Archino is also linked to a presence on everipedia.org (https://everipedia.org/wiki/lang_en/sarah-archino) that displays similar information to her Furman University bio.
The largest source for information, other than the Furman University staff page, is Archino’s entry on academia.edu where she boasts 91 followers, 35 currently following, 3 co-authors, and 4,227 total views. Her 20 papers, 5 talks, 2 website entries, 1 conference presentation, and 1 SoTL (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) paper are also provided.
Is it possible Dr Archino prefers the action of teaching and researching to maintaining an online presence? Her 100% score on ratemyprofessors.com signals that might be so with students finding her “compelling,” “caring,” a professor with “amazing lectures” who is also “accessible outside of class.” In fact, her “passion for her subject” is one descriptor that fits with the online persona she has developed; Archino’s variety of projects, both grant-funded and personally-created, take on a variety of subjects.
Interdisciplinary teaching is more than a research subject for Dr Sarah Archino – it’s a philosophy by which she takes on interesting classes to teach and extraordinary research projects bolstered by a passion for art history and sharing the relevancy of visual literacy with others. If her wide smile in all the photos I’ve seen of her is any indication, things are progressing nicely.
REFERENCES:
Academia.edu. https://furman.academia.edu/SarahArchino
Everipediaorg. https://everipedia.org/wiki/lang_en/sarah-archino
Furman University. https://www.furman.edu/people/sarah-archino/
Google Scholar. (n.d.). Sarah Ardino. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=kM5SRNAAAAAJ
Muffoletto, R. (Ed.). (2016, March 15). And or project by Sarah Archino. Journal on Images and Culture. Retrieved March 28, 2022, from http://vjic.org/vjic2/?page_id=4767
Osby, L. (2021, August 27). The Art of Medicine: Visual Learning Fine Tunes Observation Skills. Furman News. Retrieved March 28, 2022, from https://news.furman.edu/2021/08/26/the-art-of-medicine-visual-learning-fine-tunes-observation-skills/
Rate My Professors. Sarah Archino: Professor in the Art History Department at Furman University. https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=2092403
Research Gate. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sarah-Archino/scores
Streffen, I. Archino, S., & McSherry, S. (2018, August 1). ‘the and or project: The third way’. DORA Home. Retrieved March 28, 2022, from https://dora.dmu.ac.uk/handle/2086/18742
The and or project. ISABELLA STREFFEN. (n.d.). Retrieved March 28, 2022, from https://www.isabellastreffen.com/work/the-and-or-project