Anne Rudloff Stanton loves romance. She loves the way it looks, the way it sounds, and the way it smells—but only when it’s found in the margins of 14th-century books. The professor of Art History and Archaeology describes one example—a small drawing of a man leaving a woman—and she leans forward as if she were talking about a mutual friend of ours. “There’s this long sequence of the story of Moses, who, as you may not know, was married before he married Zipporah,” she begins. “He first married the daughter of the king of Ethiopia.”

Stanton teaches a variety of courses in the Department of Art History and Archaeology, among them period surveys of art that begin with the ancient world. One of her most interesting courses is called “The Art of the Book,” in which students learn to view the book as an artifact unto itself and culminates with their learning to make their own books at the end of the semester.