Professor Mathur is a really good lecturer and the materials she taught were also pretty interesting. Before this class, I've honestly never thought about museums in a critical fashion, but I grew to appreciate the politics and structures of the museums over the course of the class. My TA, Felix, held extremely engaging discussion sessions and was really helpful. The midterm consisted of three questions that required us to write ~600 words each and the final was one large essay that required us to write ~1000 words. The midterm questions were straight forward but the essay prompt for the final was actually pretty vague - each TA had different interpretations of the prompt and the whole class was also pretty confused. We were given a week to finish the midterm and 4-5 days to finish the final essay, which was a little rushed. Despite the slightly lengthy midterm and final, I would still recommend taking this class with Mathur since people can actually learn stuff.

Class topic is extremely interesting and rather abstract. I am not an art history major so this class was more difficult than I had anticipated. If you're not an art history major like me, beware taking the course. The midterm really screwed me over, I've yet to receive final grade though, unsure of what the outcome will be.

Mathur is a great professor though, probably one of my favorites. Just bad luck I guess :|

Museum Studies

Professor Mathur is very nice and she is concerned about her students. Her tests were not difficult if you do all your readings and paid attention in class. There is only one midterm in class and a final paper (which was not hard to write). The material is definitely interesting; I never knew museums play such an important role in society today. One mistake I did was not understanding the midterm test questions very well, so my advice to you is to read the questions carefully before you answer them. Overall, good professor and interesting class.

I took her Museum Studies class last year, and though it was not at all what I expected -- no hands-on experience -- I did find it interesting, if a little heavy on anti-museum bias. Prof. Mathur is insanely bright and engaging.

I am not an art history major and I wanted to take this class as an upper div elective. Week one she assigned a difficult reading that was hard to understand. It was very discouraging and I was ready to drop the class, but I stayed and I’m glad I did. The readings were manageable and the hardest reading was from week one. She even said herself that it was hard to digest, but she and the TA’s did a good job at explaining it. I found this class very interesting and the workload was not much. I was always able to do the short essays the day before and got A’s on all of them. We only had one test and it wasn’t very difficult. Her pop quiz’s are extremely easy. I would take her again.

Professor Mathur is one of the best professors I've had at UCLA in that she is incredibly thoughtful, intelligent, and always eager to promote discussion. That being said, had this been the only class I'd taken with her, I probably wouldn't have the same opinion. I think the real limit to this course was the dense, boring textbook ($80) we had to buy and which she used to structure her whole class. I felt like we were going over and over the same museums/themes for ten weeks because she was just trying to give us our money's worth for the text. And though she rarely went over the readings, the midterm itself was structured around your knowledge of all the authors and essays up to the test. She mentioned possible guest speakers and field trips, but our only trip to the Hammer was for a panel on museum careers and not necessarily related to the class. Overall, while Mathur herself is a great lecturer, I would wait around for one of her classes or seminars on Southeast Asian art.