Matthew Mckelway

Do not take this course. 0/10 recommend. Maybe take it pass fail if you really want to take it for some reason.

The course was enjoyable. I learned a lot about the arts of Japan and was very engaged in the material because as an Art History major it is my area of interest. However, I feel like my interest and learning came from within, and not from the course itself. The selected readings and course objectives outlined in the syllabus would have been very effective, however, the professor did not follow them. He always lectured behind the days they were supposed to be given, often changing the material at the last minute right before class, so the readings would no longer apply to the lecture material, and constantly late for his lectures. The subject matter was well chosen, however, the professor would often stray from his material during lectures going into tangents of his own life. To put it concisely, the outline course is well written however in application the course is not taught effectively due to the professor. Professor McKelway was not an effective teacher. He was always late to his lectures and kept the class long over the class time, inconsiderate to students like me who had another course directly after. His grading regulations were not clear and the course was extremely disorganized. He constantly changed his material right before lectures because he was behind in his lectures so it was impossible to be prepared and since he edited his lecture slides before classes and di…

Echoing the ideas in the other review of the art hum course taught by Professor McKelway at Reid Hall, you must reply to his emails within two minutes of receiving it(yet when there is a question that the class desperately needs answer he will not reply unless you text him several times.)Do not whatsoever get stuck in England during a week-end trip due to Brexit and miss one class. You can't make any typos on any of the 2 paged double-spaced papers otherwise he will write one page single-spaced criticism of your grammar. Anyway perhaps the most telling anecdote is that Professor McKelway cancelled a trip to Versailles with no explanation an hour before we were supposed to meet there. (It takes about an hour to get to Versailles.) Students who were already on their way decided to go anyway and ran into him there.

Professor McKelway was a massive disappointment. While he has a clear command of his subject, he is utterly incapable of structuring a lecture, let alone an entire course. At times I wondered whether he had ever taught at all. In addition, his mannerisms and utter self-involvement made the lectures a fairly painful experience. He could not go more than a sentence or two without stopping to make an inane reference to how a particular work might have intersected with his personal life at some point. He is far more interested in hearing his own voice than he is in introducing his students to Japanese Painting. One of my biggest complaints about McKelway is his lack of organization. For whatever reason he had great difficult in learning how to use CourseWorks, and ended up posting lectures and notes in the oddest fashions, further disjointing the course. This made studying for the midterm and final extremely difficult, especially given that he refused to offer a slidelist. He honestly expects you to be familiar with all the images he shows you in class, which is a tall order, especially given that he often fails to include complete information, if any, when he presents an image during lecture. Do not take a course with this professor unless you are extremely patient.

If you want an interesting and comprehensive introduction to East Asian art, don't take this class with Professor McKelway. If you value your GPA even a little bit, don't take this class with Professor McKelway. And if you are looking for an easy class, definitely don't take this class with Professor McKelway. Although this class is called "Arts of China, Japan, and Korea," probably only about 5% of the course was dedicated to Korean art. Professor McKelway is an expert in Japanese art, but that is not an excuse to completely ignore one of the three pillars of the course, especially when Korean art was so influential in the history of East Asian art. Professor McKelway also decided to cram ukiyo-e art into the last 20 minutes of the course, which is laughable not only because ukiyo-e was incredibly important in Japanese art history, but also because those same ukiyo-e pieces that we rushed through in the very last seconds of the very last lecture also proceeded to show up on the final exam. This class truly failed to fulfill its role as a survey or introductory course. Finally, the class also lacked any semblance of structure or organization. Instead of highlighting 25-50 key works and artists for the final exam, all Professor McKelway provided were a few old PowerPoints from when he previously taught the course, which each had about 60-80 slides of art that often lacked prope…

I took Professor McKelway's course on the arts of Japan and would say that it was a bit of a mixed bag. First off, he is a really smart guy and knows a ton about Japanese art. Whenever he lectured it seemed like the information just rolled off the top of his head in a way which conveyed that he had a clear grasp of the subject matter. One of the things I appreciated about his style was that instead of making us memorize huge amounts of objects, though memorization was still a big part of the class, he tried to take time with each object and allow people to make comments, effectively running the course like a large Art Humanities class instead of an introductory lecture. This was interesting to me because I had not taken Art Hum at the time and so I was able to really learn a lot about how art is discussed at Columbia and in academia in general. Downside to this though is that we did not make it to the Edo Period in Japanese art. In fact we barely made it through the Momoyama period. This is a huge concern, because we didn't even touch the last 400 years of Japanese art in a course which is supposed to be an overview of art from the country. This disorganization also showed up in courseworks where the readings were not listed in a way which made it easy to tell which reading was for which week and at the end of the semester I carefully went through the readings he posted and co…

Oh boy, where to begin with this one? For starters, he flat-out didn’t know the material on the Art Hum syllabus. This makes sense since he’s a specialist in Japanese art, but I cannot for the life of me understand why he was cleared to teach a course where all of his lectures sounded like he had skimmed the Wikipedia article five minutes before class. I took this class at Reid Hall in Paris, and it was painfully obvious that he didn’t give a sh*t about teaching, but just wanted a semester-long paid vacation in Europe. He confirmed this theory by canceling class several times to go skiing in Switzerland or visit friends in Italy (but don’t you dare get sick and miss class without getting a note from a doctor, though, that’s just disrespectful). To make up for the lack of content in his teaching, Matthew would embark on truly fascinating stories about his personal life. There was that one time his friend made a joke about the “penis patrol” (fig leaves over dicks) that he just *had* to tell us every single time we saw a suspiciously covered dick (this happens a lot in art hum). There was the gleeful slut shaming of another friend’s teenage daughter who had just gone on the pill. There were endless “rude” French people who insisted on speaking to him in English, never mind that his French accent is oh so very painful and basically incomprehensible. And woe be upon the student wh…

Three papers, midterm, final exam, museum visit

I have to come and defend Professor McKelway because I loved him and can tell he probably reads these reviews because organization and timeliness weren't an issue. He's brilliant to put it simply. He lectures from factual information, personal experiences engaging with the artworks, and by prompting questions for the class along the way. He's an East Asian Art encyclopedia. Highly impressive how he can pull some much information off the top of his head. I love his humor (slap stick southern charm) and ability to make the class (being a core class) where it was maybe a lot of us' first time engaging with the subject matter a less daunting experience. Shout out to Andrew and Misaki, great TA's with great fits!!

Matthew McKelway is a pretty good professor. He clearly knows his material very well, which sometimes devolves into a barrage of information during class. I advise you to bring a laptop to class and try to note down everything you can get because come exam time, you will need those notes because looking up Japanese art, even through Google, is a big pain. He's a decent lecturer, sometimes ends up rambling but you can just tune out. He also asks questions in class, but nothing too difficult. He will take roll call until he knows your names -- and he will remember if you're not there, or late. He can be a bit of a jerk for example, he'll be snarky if you pronounce a Japanese word wrong even though his accent isn't that hot either (I have Japanese-speaking parents). A previous review of McKelway said he's not very organized, especially on Courseworks. I think he's improved remarkably as the Courseworks postings were explicitly clear and well-ordered. He posted up every lecture slideshow before class and emailed us about it. He also compiled these "study guides" for each topic we covered, listing the works of art (with date, artist, medium etc) we should be familiar with, events and definitions.These guides sometimes left out information, and were composed a little strangely, but you could still follow them. However, the powerpoints themselves were a little lacking. I needed to st…