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The Art Conservation Department's administrative offices and a general-purpose conservation laboratory are located in Old College at the University's Newark campus. Additional laboratories and studios utilized by our Master's-level program are located in the Louise duPont Crowninshield Research Building at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library. This facility includes one of the country's largest and best-equipped museum analytical laboratories and six state-of-the-art conservation studios. The University and Winterthur are approximately 15 miles apart.
Undergraduate students complete most of their course work at the university's main campus but have the opportunity to intern with faculty at Winterthur Museum during their junior and senior years in the program.
Graduate students in our master's-level program study with 18 conservators and conservation scientists (full-time and part-time faculty) representing a broad range of conservation disciplines and educational and training backgrounds in addition to faculty from many other departments and programs. Our faculty include six full-time University of Delaware professors in the Art Conservation Department, 12 Winterthur conservators and conservation scientists, and many affiliated and contract professionals.
Our unique relationship with Winterthur allows us to modify the time needed from each conservator or conservation scientist annually, thereby allowing us to meet the specific needs of our graduate students. We also have affiliated arrangements with professors in other departments, conservators in nearby museums, and visiting instructors that lead courses and lecture annually in our program.
Our faculty have consulted on and assisted with the preservation of Rembrandt's Night Watch, Van Gogh's Irises, Whistler's Peacock Room, drafts of the Declaration of Independence, the decorative murals in the United States Capitol and Radio City Music Hall, the largest known woven hanging in the world (from Ethiopia), and the channeled and deteriorated acetate-film negatives of the Dead Sea Scrolls taken at the time of their discovery. They have authored and presented many papers at international professional conferences focused on the preservation of cultural property and serve as elected officials on national and international boards.
