In the classroom, Bass takes art history as uniquely charged among the humanistic disciplines to query how ideas are given form through images and objects, and how works of art themselves incite ideological debate. She strives to convey the radical nature of the works that she teaches—even those as entrenched in the canon as Albrecht Dürer’s Adam and Eve or Rembrandt’s Nightwatch. She offers an approach to the study of early modern art that crosses geographical boundaries and includes unusual suspects from medals to maps to carved nautilus shells. Above all, she models a dynamic approach to historical inquiry that begins always with the object itself.

Bass's most recent mentoring project was as faculty advisor to the student-curated exhibition Thinking Small, which began in a seminar she taught in Spring 2021, and which was generously supported by a collaboration between the Yale University Art Gallery and the Center for Netherlandish Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Courses Taught at Yale

Nature and Art, or The History of Almost Everything (Spring 2024, upcoming)
Dutch Art and its Worlds (Spring 2023)
Early Modern England (Spring 2023) co-taught with Tim Barringer
Critical Readings in Early Modern Art (Fall 2022)
Early Modern Media (Fall 2022) co-taught with John Peters
Thinking Small (Spring 2021)
Renaissance Bodies: Art, Magic, Science (Spring 2020, Fall 2016)
Introduction to the History of Art: The Politics of Representation (Fall 2019)
History and its Images (Fall 2019)
Portraiture and Selfhood (Fall 2018)
The Painting of Modern Life (Fall 2018)
Art, Nature, and the Modern World (Spring 2018) co-taught with Jennifer Raab
Rembrandt’s Amsterdam (Fall 2017)
The Early Modern Book (Fall 2017)
Bosch and Bruegel (Fall 2016)