Alumni Profile – Dalia Habib Linssen
Dalia Habib Linssen
PhD, GRS 2010
1) What have you been doing since you graduated from BU? Details about your current and past employment? Accomplishments you’re proud of? Challenges you’ve encountered?
Since graduating from BU, I taught art history and visual culture at Rhode Island School of Design for seven years. In August 2018, I joined the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston as the first Head of Academic Engagement, a new position designed to deepen the MFA’s commitment to area colleges and universities.
2) How your time in the department shaped your professional and personal lives?
The wide range of graduate courses offered through the department not only provided me with a broad understanding for art across geographies and cultures, but also offered opportunities to engage with various methodological approaches to studying the history of art and architecture. That variety of content and methodology has helped shape my approach to working thematically across curatorial departments and in program design at the MFA. Focusing on the history of photography as an area of specialization informed my teaching at RISD and subsequent research. Some of my closest friendships, many which remain vital in my life, were formed during my time in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at BU.
3) Any advice that you would’ve given to your younger self?
My favorite piece of advice was delivered on a particularly warm, almost stifling early September afternoon—the first day of graduate school for nearly 20 somewhat anxious, anticipative graduate students. As we gathered in the seminar room for a departmental orientation, Professor Jonathan Ribner counseled that amid what will surely be inestimable demands on our time and emotional stability during graduate school, we should not forget to schedule dental checkups. I would advise my younger self to slow down, look closely, and take deeper breaths.