Students produce podcast to explore works in the Worcester Art Museum collection
Every fall, students in Professor Kristina Wilson’s art history course get a unique opportunity to share their ideas – researching and producing a podcast for a museum audience. The course, Art, the Public, and Worcester’s Cultural Institutions, partners with the Worcester Art Museum to produce episodes for WAMxUniversity, a podcast series focused on works in the museum’s collection. The episodes become part of WAM’s permanent marketing efforts — heard by visitors, researchers, and anyone curious about the art.
Students work directly with WAM curators, provenance specialists, and digital content producers who visit the class. The research is rigorous: students comb through object files, read museum theory, and develop original arguments about their chosen works before ever recording a word. Carson Dobos ’25, studying John Singer Sargent’s portrait “Lady Warwick and Her Son,” discovered something unexpected when the class listened back to prior years’ episodes. “I’ve found myself hearing both familiar voices and not-so-familiar voices,” he says. “It’s become an archive of all the art history students.”
“It brings more voices into the spaces of their galleries,” says Wilson — and gives students the experience of taking a public stand on what they see.
