Jeanne Smith, MAT '67, ALM '10
Francophile, lover of art history, museum guide
Jeanne taught high school French for thirty-five years, after receiving her M.A.T. degree from Harvard in 1967. She is an avowed Francophile, but her particular interest has long been in art history, and she began taking evening courses in that field at Harvard Extension School in the 1980s. She found it extraordinary to receive instruction from illustrious Harvard and visiting professors, who repeated graduate-level courses they taught in the daytime for Extension students at night. She loved writing her thesis, a socio-political interpretation of unusual animal figures on the façade of a twefth-century church in Spoleto, Italy, and was the oldest student receiving a degree from the Extension School in 2010. It is the Extension School degree that was most rewarding to her.
After retiring from teaching in 2000, Jeanne began guiding school groups at Boston museums, where she again benefited from instruction from curators and art historians. She is still a guide at the Museum of Fine Arts at present, although the commute from Chatham is a challenging one!