During Heghnar Watenpaugh’s recent academic residency in Paris, the Louvre, the city’s most famous art museum, was continually in headlines even here in the U.S. A heist back in October led to the resignation of the museum’s president and renewed questions regarding staffing and security.
“This is a time globally where there are a lot of questions being asked of museums, just like any of our cultural institutions,” said Watenpaugh, who teaches art and architectural history in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis. “There are people pointing out that some museums, especially art museums, have been very elitist, and maybe some of them still are.”
How can all museums welcome more people? How can they welcome young people? How can they welcome all sections of society?
These questions sparked many of the class this past spring when she held a “Chair of Excellence,” or special visiting professorship, at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilisations, or INALCO. She will continue asking these questions next in Los Angeles, as she was recently named a Getty Residential Scholar by the Getty Research Institute and will be spending the 2026-2027 academic year on their Brentwood campus.
For someone who, when in graduate school for art history, wasn’t sure she’d even be able to find a job, Watenpaugh is in-demand. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust, National Endowment for the Humanities and many others. Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek and in a BBC podcast series about cultural heritage destroyed during the Syrian conflict.
Talking museum studies amidst museum critiques in Paris
INALCO, a prestigious French university known for their comprehensive language programs, was interested in Watenpaugh’s approach to teaching about the visual world. Instead of teaching about particular artists or artwork, Watenpaugh said, her course focused on museum and cultural heritage studies.
“The idea is to see how, let's say, the Eiffel Tower has been maintained, preserved, used and how do people today relate to it as an object from the past,” Watenpaugh explained. And, she said, these issues are a hot topic in the art world, especially in France.
In class, Watenpaugh and her students also analyzed informal heritage and cultural memory produced by “the people,” grassroots expressions such as graffiti as well as state-sponsored heritage produced by institutions like museums.
Another hot topic? Restitution and the return of cultural objects to their pre-colonial homes.
While Watenpaugh was in Paris, French legislators rewrote laws on restitution. France is in the process of returning some artifacts that had been looted by the French military from African countries during colonial times. In the process, the nation is faced with a difficult facet of its history and ways they can repair the damage.
"In my teaching, I try to encourage the students to really understand a particular issue or challenge in a particular context: why this particular object is being claimed or not claimed?” said Watenpaugh. “But also understand that these are universal issues and they resonate with other examples in other parts of the world.”
Students sometimes stayed an hour after class to keep the dialogue going.
“It absolutely makes a difference to have a chance to see how similar debates are unfolding in different places,” Watenpaugh said. “It's a real education, and it's so important to make these connections with scholars here, and museum professionals and students.”
UC Davis students, alumni
After teaching or doing her archival research in Paris during the day, Watenpaugh logged into Zoom in the evening to meet with her independent studies students in California working on their theses, reminding them to “breathe” ahead of their final deadlines.
“When they are deep into their own research, they just need to know that you're rooting for them, which I think is kind of our jobs as educators, right? To give them the tools to succeed, to gently guide them, and then to be there to cheer them on,” she said. “And then maybe one day you run into them in some strange place in the world, and they come to your talk!”
Museum Studies Minor
“Art, Architecture, and Human Rights,” taught in the Jan and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, is part of the Art History program’s minor in museum studies.
The minor open to students across UC Davis.
While in Paris, Watenpaugh met up with Elsa Denis, a UC Davis alum living in France, who had previously taken Watenpaugh's most popular course, “Art, Architecture, and Human Rights." The course analyzes cultural heritage and art institutions through a human rights framework, and incorporates some central struggles in the arts today from museums reckoning with restitution to debates around art and activism.
Denis now works as a grants administrator at the University of Montpellier and helps organize collaborations with UC Davis.
“Our networks are everywhere — it's really nice to hold on to those wonderful connections and a sense of common purpose," Watenpaugh said. ”Our alumni are just so wonderful. I think they feel a very special connection with Davis. It's such a unique place. Quirky. Weird. We have Eggheads. We have cows. But we have museums, too. We have incredible public art."
Filling in the blanks at the Getty Museum
At the Getty this fall, Watenpaugh will be near the museum artworks that were the subject of her last book, The Missing Pages. The book traces eight illustrated pages from a 13th-century Armenian manuscript that disappeared in 1920 to their purchase by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1995. A 2010 lawsuit against the Getty demanding the pages be returned to the Armenian Church set off Watenpaugh’s search, set against larger issues of the Armenian Genocide.
While at the Getty, Watenpaugh will also be working on her next book examining how violent pasts are presented or suppressed in cultural heritage, museums and architectural preservation.
“We need to think about the intentional destruction of cultural heritage that has become a global phenomenon,” she said. “But I also want to tell the stories that don’t make the news, of curators, activists, and everyday people who believe in cultural heritage for everyone, today and tomorrow.”
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