SUNY Online Teaching Ambassador 2024: FIT – David Drogin

Dr. David Drogin is Professor in the History of Art Department in the School of Liberal Arts & Sciences at FIT. He has been a full-time faculty member since 2004 and served as department chairperson in 2013–2020 and as assistant chairperson and coordinator of the Art History & Museum Professions major in 2008–2012. Dr. Drogin received his PhD and MA from Harvard University and his BA with honors from Wesleyan University. He is a 2009 recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. 

Dr. Drogin is a specialist in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian art, with focus on northern Italy, patronage studies, and sculpture. He publishes regularly on these topics, including co-editing Sculpture and Italian Renaissance Patronage (Ashgate, 2010), and contributing the chapters “The Body, Space, and Narrative in the Work of Early Fifteenth-Century Tuscan Sculptors” in The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge, 2020) and “Art and Patronage in Bologna’s Long Quattrocento” for A Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Bologna (Brill, 2018). He lectures frequently around the United States and abroad, recently presenting “A Semiotics of Perspective and Vision in Donatello’s Relief Sculpture” at the Vision and Depiction conference at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands in February 2024.

In the History of Art Department, Dr. Drogin teaches early-modern courses including HA112 History of European Art & Civilization, Renaissance to Modern; HA317 Italian Renaissance Art & Civilization; and HA396 Art & Patronage in the Italian Renaissance (Presidential Scholars). He was among the first instructors to teach in the pilot program for Blended Learning with hybrid online/in-person classes, and regularly teaches multiple online sections of HA112. Throughout his courses, Dr. Drogin emphasizes the intersections of history and art, the contemporary relevance of historical material, and the power of images to support or challenge social constructs. He embraces online learning because of the different learning modalities it provides students, accommodating a range of learning styles and schedules, broadening the opportunities students have to successfully delve into the material in a variety of ways. His online classes widely integrate tools such as VoiceThread that allow students to engage individually with artworks in compelling ways that foster close looking and critical analysis. In these ways, Dr. Drogin leverages the advantages of online learning to enhance students’ engagement with historical material and their understanding of how it affects their lives and the world around them.