Joel Brody

Professor of Art History, both a general survey and a specific course on Italian Renaissance Art.
at Saint Francis College in Brooklyn Heights. Brother Camilus was on leave for a year. I was happy to teach his courses.
Art History Professor at two branches of CUNY-- City University of New York. The first was at Staten Island College. and later Kingsborough Community College. As a graduate student at Cornell, I won a teaching fellowship to teach Italian Conversation Courses and also Sculpture and Drawing.
In the late 80s until 1997, I taught a course at Kean University in Union, NJ: Cultural and Intellectual Traditions, which included the history of art, opera, dance, world literature, and classical music. I always took students to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and to the Metropolitan Opera. Never did I give true and false exams or short answer tests. Always essays and papers to access how students could use the course material creatively.
One of my colleagues at Kingsborough won a grant to spend the summer in the Czech Republic,
He asked me to take over his sculpture and drawing courses at the School of of Visual Arts in Manhattan. It was a joy to teach students who were passionate about art.
At the Met Opera, Franco Zeffirelli gave me a wonderful compliment: "You can do no wrong on stage." I smiled, but the reason was that I had lived in ten European countries, observed how people moved, quite differently from Americans, learned their languages, and I knew the paintings in museums well. i always knew who I was and could act accordingly and naturally.
At Kean University, I gave lectures to the other professors teaching this course. They hadn’t traveled in Europe and were limited to the textbook. They criticized me for being Eurocentric. Yes, but was there a Michelangelo in Burundi? Or a Shakespeare in Zambia?