Inspiring Minds George Bent, Sidney Gause Childress Professor in the Arts, has spent his career at W&L inspiring and being inspired by his students.

“Professor Bent’s energy is infectious. There is a reason people change their majors to art history after taking one of his classes.”

~ Ellie Penner ’23

Sidney Gause Childress Professor in the Arts George Bent said Washington and Lee University was already at the top of his list even before he was interviewed for a position at the university by Pam Simpson, an art historian who was one of the most influential figures of the last four decades at W&L, at a conference in 1993. After their interview, Simpson called him and asked if he would like to share anything else they hadn’t discussed during his interview process.

“I said, ‘We didn’t talk about teaching and how much I love it,’” Bent recalls telling her.

Bent first caught the teaching bug during his sophomore year of college by way of a stint as an instructor for a summer program called Upward Bound, which brings high school students who would be the first in their families to go to college to campuses to explore their academic interests, meet current college students and take college courses. Bent taught a history class.

“There was this other student, another college student, who was working with me,” Bent recalls. “His name is Mark Sanders, and he now teaches at Notre Dame. He and I became extremely close in that program, and one day, he invited me to watch him teach a class. I sat and watched him teach that class, and I remember at the end of it thinking, ‘I want to be him. I want that to be my work.’ That’s when I decided on a career in academia.”

Bent applied to graduate programs in European history and art history and says he would have been happy teaching either. However, he now knows he made the right choice to pursue his Ph.D. in art history at Stanford. The opportunity to teach in the intellectually rigorous liberal arts environment that W&L offers, he said, has also been the right fit.

“The energy of the classroom just can’t be replicated by anything else,” Bent said, noting that W&L students tend to arrive ready to engage.

“If you have good students who are thoughtful, curious and eager, you can have really interesting conversations,” Bent said, “and that means that a teacher is learning. And I have from the day I arrived.”

“W&L students do not put up with faculty who are not prepared every day,” Bent added.

Bent has also devoted much of his career to university service outside the classroom, in roles as department chair and associate dean of the College and on numerous university committees. He and Edwin Craun, professor of English emeritus, established the interdisciplinary Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program in 1995 by collaborating with other faculty from different departments with relevant expertise in the medieval and Renaissance periods. Bent remembers “knocking on the doors of faculty who taught classes that addressed that period and asking them if they wanted to participate — and they all said yes.”

Bent also spearheaded another ongoing and ambitious interdisciplinary endeavor called Florence As It Was, a digital humanities project that reconstructs the city of Florence, Italy, as it appeared at the end of the 15th century, along with David Pfaff, senior academic technologist and director of the IQ Center, and Mackenzie Brooks, associate professor and digital humanities librarian. Bent, Pfaff and Brooks began the project in 2016. With the assistance of more than 20 W&L students over the years, they have created point cloud models of more than two dozen architectural monuments in the city, using technologies that have not yet been embraced widely by cultural studies specialists, including geospatial referencing systems, LiDAR scanners, software programs to create navigable point clouds and photogrammetry tools to produce 3D models of artwork.

Teresa Yoon ’26 said working on the project with Bent as a summer researcher was like having a tour guide walk her through the computer-generated models of 15th-century Florence.

“There is so much I might have blown right past without him pointing things out as we were working on them,” Yoon said, adding that Bent’s warmth and willingness to dive into the project alongside student researchers helped everyone bond quickly as a team.

Bent, Pfaff and a team of student researchers in Florence, Italy.

Bent said in addition to the opportunities he has been provided to continue his research and collaborate with students and colleagues across campus, seeing W&L become more attuned to interdisciplinarity has been a gratifying development throughout his time at the university.

“People in different departments are constantly talking to each other,” Bent said. “We’ve got a variety of programs that bring faculty from different backgrounds together, which really goes back to that concept of never stopping your educational process.”

Current and former students are quick to comment on Bent’s propensity to dive in and engage with the learning process.

“Professor Bent’s energy is infectious. There is a reason people change their majors to art history after taking one of his classes,” said Ellie Penner ’23, who worked with Bent for all four of her years as an undergraduate at W&L and who is now pursuing a Ph.D. in art history at the University of California, Berkeley. “You can’t step your foot halfway out of the door without feeling like art history is the most important thing in the world. To inspire such a hunger in people who often have no previous knowledge of art history speaks greatly to his character and brilliance. George illuminates, inspires and guides students through all the joys and frustrations of history; he is also fiercely committed to the lives and welfare of this world. He reminds us of the power of mankind to transcend tragedy and confront the fears inherent to a fight for better times.”

Staniar Gallery’s recent exhibition on Florence As It Was.

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