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The following modules are offered to UCL undergraduate students taking BA History of Art or BA History of Art, Materials and Technology. Also, affiliates registered in the UCL History of Art department, students in the School of European Languages and Cultures (SELCS) who are taking a combined honours degree which includes History of Art in the title, and combined honours students taking BA Philosophy and History of Art.
Year 1 Thematic Seminars are only available to first year students taking the BA History of Art or affiliates in the History of Art Department.
Year 2 Period Modules, Year 2 Methods Modules, and Year 3 Special Subjects are normally available to History of Art students only (single and combined honours). Please remind yourself of your programme diet before making your module choices. Students should check the prerequisites under each module description to see whether they are eligible to take the module.
BASc Arts & Sciences (Cultures pathway) students may only take Year 2 modules if they have completed a first-year survey module HART0006 and/or HART0005. Details of elective modules open to both UCL degree students and affiliate students who are registered outside the History of Art department are listed on the Art/Architecture in London page.
Year 1
- HART0001 History of Art and its Objects – The Core Course – 30 credits
Module tutor: Rosemary Moore (T1) & Jenny Nachtigall (T2) + Postgraduate Teaching Assistants
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring Terms: Lecture 14:00 – 15:00, BA1 discussion group either 09:00 – 10:30 or 15:30 – 17:00, Fridays
Module description: This is an obligatory introductory module for all History of Art students and is not normally available to students from outside the department. The module is an introduction to a range of skills required to study the History of Art, including the first-hand study of works of art. It is designed to familiarise students with some current debates in the subject, and introduce them to a variety of theoretical positions of which they need to be aware in the course of their degree.
Student Contact Hours: 40, in 20 weekly 1-hour lectures and 20 1-hour seminars.
Duration of Module: 20 weeks, beginning in first week of Autumn term.
Prerequisites: Students should normally be in the first year of a Single or Combined Honours degree in History of Art.
First Year Summer reading list
Term 1
- HART0006 First-year History of Art Survey (1): Premodernity – c.1600 – 15 credits
Module Tutor: Jess Bailey
Timetabled: Autumn Term: 09:00 – 11:00, Wednesdays
Module Description: The First-Year History of Art Survey comprises two obligatory modules (HART0006 and HART0005) for all History of Art students. In ten lectures each term, students are introduced to key monuments and central issues in the discipline of art history and are encouraged to consider them critically. The main issues that will emerge throughout the modules are: representation and the image’s relation to the world; art history’s relation to history and context; the role of viewer(s); questions of canon formation and methodology. The Survey covers a wide range of art, architecture and visual culture from ancient times to the present day.
Duration of Module: 10 weeks, beginning in the first week of Autumn term.
Student Contact Hours: Lectures and question time: 20 hours.
Students should normally be in the first year of a Single or Combined Honours degree in History of Art, or History of Art, Materials and Technology.- HART0004 Thematic Seminar - 15 credits
Module Tutor: Students will select a thematic seminar at the start of term taught by an academic member of staff. Rota to be confirmed at the start of the academic year, depending on research leave and other variations in the timetable, but may be Stephanie Schwartz, Jacob Paskins or our new Lecturer in Materials & Technology
Timetabled: Autumn Term: 11:00 – 13:00, Thursdays
Module Description: This module is designed specifically for students on the first-year Single Honours History of Art, or History of Art, Materials and Technology programmes. It comprises a number of historical and topical seminar options, which are designed to provide students with smaller group teaching and direct engagement with art objects in museums, galleries and historical sites. Students take one out of the several options on offer during the academic year. The module is taught as a mixture of informal lectures, seminars and/or gallery visits, accompanied by weekly reading projects and group discussion of key issues.
Duration of Module: 10 weeks, beginning in the first week of Autumn term.
Student Contact Hours: 20+
Prerequisites: Students should normally be in the first year of a Single-Honours degree in History of Art or History of Art, Materials and Technology.
- HART0003 Introduction to Art and Science – 15 credits
Module Tutor: Tea Ghigo
Timetabled: Autumn Term: 14:00 – 16:00, Tuesdays
Module Description: This is an introductory module that covers basic organic and inorganic chemistry in a lab-based environment for first year History of Art, Materials and Technology students. During the course you will learn the scientific foundations needed to understand the relationship between the materials used to make artworks and the physical properties of these materials. The module will cover topics such as the periodic table, bonding, solubility, and pH values. Problem-led lab work will allow you to consolidate your learning and to apply your analytical skills to the study of the materials of art.
Duration of Module: 10 weeks, beginning in the first week of Autumn term..
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours in 10 weekly 2-hour classes, plus supervised optional practical sessions.
Prerequisites: Normally only offered to 1st-year MAT students. No previous experience of chemistry is required to undertake this module.
Term 2
- HART0005 First-year History of Art Survey (1): c. 1600 to the Contemporary – 15 Credits
Module Tutor: Gabe Beckhurst
Timetabled: Spring Term: 09:00 – 11:00, Wednesdays
Module Description: The First-Year History of Art Survey comprises two obligatory modules (HART0006 and HART0005) for all History of Art students. In ten lectures each term, students are introduced to key monuments and central issues in the discipline of art history and are encouraged to consider them critically. The main issues that will emerge throughout the modules are: representation and the image’s relation to the world; art history’s relation to history and context; the role of viewer(s); questions of canon formation and methodology. The Survey covers a wide range of art, architecture and visual culture from ancient times to the present day.
Duration of Module: 10 weeks, beginning in the first week of Spring term.
Student Contact Hours: Lectures and question time: 20 hours.
Student Workload: Attendance at all lectures, reading in support of lectures, exam.
Means of Assessment: 100% by online remote examination in Summer Term.
Prerequisites: Students should normally be in the first year of a Single or Combined Honours degree in History of Art, or History of Art, Materials and Technology.- HART0144 Thematic Seminar (Spring) – 15 Credits
Module Tutor: Students will select a thematic seminar at the start of term taught by an academic member of staff. Rota to be confirmed at the start of the academic year, depending on research leave and other variations in the timetable, but may be Natasha Eaton, Briony Fer and Rosemary Moore.
Timetabled: Spring Term: 11:00 -13:00, Thursdays
Module Description: This module is designed specifically for students on the first-year Single Honours History of Art, or History of Art, Materials and Technology programmes. It comprises a number of historical and topical seminar options, which are designed to provide students with smaller group teaching and direct engagement with art objects in museums, galleries and historical sites. Students take one out of the several options on offer during the academic year. The module is taught as a mixture of informal lectures, seminars and/or gallery visits, accompanied by weekly reading projects and group discussion of key issues.
Duration of Module: 10 weeks.
Prerequisites: Students should normally be in the first year of a Single-Honours degree in History of Art or History of Art, Materials and Technology.
- HART0148 – Introduction to Media and Technologies – 15 credits
Module Tutor: Helia Marcal
Timetabled: Spring Term: 11:00 – 13:00, Fridays
Module Description: This course offers an overview of technologies used to create artworks and cultural objects, from early modernity to the present. These might include but will not be limited to print technologies, still and moving image—photography, video, televised media—and mechanical and electronic projection devices. From paints, prints, daguerreotypes and celluloid strips through electromagnetic signals to bit steams, you will be introduced to the materiality of communication. Challenging the traditional genealogies of media, we will explore the media’s material histories, affordances, and the limits of their use. This class provides a foundation for a profound understanding of the methods and materials used by the makers, at different times and in a multitude of locations, and under consideration of social and technological contexts.
Duration of Module: 10 weeks, beginning in the first week of Spring term.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours
Prerequisites: Normally only offered to 1st-year MAT students. No previous experience is required to undertake this module.
Year 2
All modules are 15 credits taught in one term. Note that the modules are arranged with the autumn term options followed by the spring term options
Term 1
- HART0036 Advanced Lecture in the History of Art (Modern and Contemporary) – 15 credits
Module tutor: Gabe Beckhurst
Timetabled: Autumn Term: 14:00 – 16:00, Mondays.
Of Public Interest: Performance Art and Participation
In this module we will explore the histories of performance and live art as developed through transregional exchanges between Europe, the US and Japan from the 1950s to today. With emphasis on the wider social contexts in which artists explored the body as a material and involved audiences in the work’s realisation, the module examines performances that sit at the boundary of art, cultural and subcultural practices in order to challenge traditional structures of making, exhibiting and looking at art. Through close study of a range of artistic movements and sensibilities including Fluxus, Happenings, Body Art, endurance and re-enactment practices, we will explore some of the key debates within histories of performance and live art, and engage concepts such as the spectator, participation, consent, authenticity and ephemerality.
Duration of Module: 10 weeks, beginning in the first week of Autumn term.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours.
Prerequisites: Students should have completed a first-year History of Art programme or have equivalent relevant experience.Suggested summer reading
• Rancière, Jacques, ‘The Emancipated Spectator,’ Artforum (March 2007): 271–274.
• Kaprow, Allan, ‘Notes on the Elimination of the Audience’ (1966), in Participation, ed. by Claire Bishop (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2006), pp. 102–104.Indicative topics
- From Painting to Action
- Environments and Happenings
- Fluxus and Event Scores
- Enduring Bodies
- Mapping the Political
- The Extended Body
- Relational Aesthetics
- Transmitting Performance
- Anachronising Performance
- HART0031 History of the Category ‘Art’ – 15 credits
Module tutor: Kimberly Schreiber
Timetabled: Autumn Term: Lecture 10:00 – 11:00, Seminar 12:00 – 13:00, Tuesdays
This module aims to familiarise students with the ways in which the concept of art has evolved in Europe. It examines the emergence of Aesthetics as a distinct branch of philosophy in eighteenth-century in Britain, France and Germany, and will consider subsequent nineteenth-century developments especially in relation to the role of the category Art in Modernism, and the ways in which it has informed more recent philosophies and histories of art. It is based on the study of texts in Seminars.
Duration of module: 10 weeks, beginning in the first week of Autumn term.
Student Contact Hours: 20 hours, a mixture of lectures and text-based discussion classes.
Prerequisites: Normally only offered to 2nd-year History of Art students. Other closely similar experience might be acceptable.
Indicative weekly topics- HART0034 Methodologies of Making – 15 credits
Module tutor: Tea Ghigo
Timetabled: Autumn Term: 11:00 – 13:00, Mondays
Module Description: This module focuses on the experimental system of art making, remaking, collecting, mediating, and conserving. It encompasses readings and discussions centred around theories related to the materiality and the immaterial, makers and their tools, the workings of institutions and collections, alongside the notions of time and archive. For the most part, classes will begin with a lecture followed by a discussion. In the first part of the class, students will be introduced to theories of making exemplified by artworks and artefacts related to one of the main topics of the module. In the second part of the class, students might be asked to bring and discuss an example of an artwork or an artefact, to develop a statement drawing on the readings, or to engage in structured debates on the topic of the class. How is theory performed? How is it entangled with practice? How can we theorise practice or develop a practical aesthetics?
Duration of Module: 10 weeks, beginning in the first week of Autumn term.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours in 10 weekly 2-hour classes.
Prerequisites: Normally offered to 2nd-year History of Art students, but also relevant for other disciplines that engage in theoretical discourses on forms of making.
Suggested reading list
Indicative weekly topics
- HART0167 Colour: Art, Empire, Modernity – 15 credits
Module Tutor: Natasha Eaton
Timetabled: Autumn Term: 11:00 – 13:00, Wednesdays
Module Description: Colour has long fascinated and frustrated scholars across many disciplines. This interdisciplinary module explores the agency, magical and philosophical notions of colour within the context of modernity. With a strong theoretical emphasis, we will explore the emergence of the observer, pathology and affective qualities of colour and the underpinning of colour as chromophilia or chromophobia. Writers with whom we will engage include Aristotle, Newton, Burke, Goethe, von Helmsholtz, Fechner, Tagore, Wittgenstein, Gandhi and women concerned with colour such as Lubaina Himid. The module takes a roughly ‘genealogical’ approach to the histories of colour from the later seventeenth century to c.1950 – so as to include the legacies of empire and the emergence of the postcolonial. How far do we attempt to decolonize colour? What forms of interface do we project, albeit often anachronistically or by analogy, on the racial and global definitions of colour?
Duration of Module: 10 weeks, beginning in the first week of Autumn term.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours
Prerequisites: Students should have completed a first-year History of Art programme or have equivalent relevant experience.
- HART0162 Imagining Jerusalem in the Middle Ages – 15 credits
Module Tutor: Bob Mills
Timetabled: Autumn Term: 16:00 – 18:00, Tuesdays
Module Description: This module will explore the diverse artistic and religious cultures that enriched and enlivened medieval Jerusalem, with a particular emphasis on works created or recreated between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. As well as investigating key sites in Jerusalem itself, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount complex, students will explore the ways in which Jerusalem was understood and imagined beyond its physical borders, through such phenomena as mappae mundi, relics, architectural replicas and apocalyptic imagery. Taking a geographically decentred approach to the study of medieval art, the module will introduce students to the aesthetic and intellectual networks running between Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East. It will open a window onto relations between different religious and ethnic groups in the region. Finally, it will reflect on the modern legacies of medieval efforts to represent Jerusalem.
Duration of Module: 10 weeks, beginning in the first week of Autumn term.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours
Student Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, gallery visits, one essay, one exam, in-class presentation.
Prerequisites: Students should have completed a first-year History of Art programme or have equivalent relevant experience.
Suggested reading list:
• Boehm, Barbara Drake and Melanie Holcolmb, Jerusalem, 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.
• Connolly, Daniel K. The Maps of Matthew Paris: Medieval Journeys through Space, Time, and Liturgy. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009.
• Folda, Jaroslav. Crusader Art: The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1099–1291. London: Lund Humphries, 2008.
• Grabar, Oleg. The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
• Montefiore, Simon Sebag. Jerusalem: The Biography. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2011.
• Mourad, Suleiman A., Naomi Koltun-Fromm and Bedross Der Matossian, eds. Routledge Handbook on Jerusalem. London: Routledge, 2010.
• Rudy, Kathryn. Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011.
• Weiss, Daniel H. Art and Crusade in the Age of Saint Louis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Whalen, Brett Edward, ed. Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages: A Reader. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011.
• Wharton, Annabel Jane. Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Indicative weekly topics:
1. Jerusalem Syndrome: City of Feelings
2. Rebuilding Jerusalem (i) Byzantine and Early Islamic Rule
3. Possessing Jerusalem: Holy War
4. Rebuilding Jerusalem (ii): Crusader Art and Architecture
5. Fragmenting Jerusalem: Relics of the True Cross
6. Mapping Jerusalem: Travel and Meditation
6. Virtual Jerusalem: Replicas, Simulacra and Souvenirs
8. Heavenly Jerusalem: Apocalypse and End Times
9. Remembering Jerusalem: Staging the East
10. Filming Jerusalem: Orientalism and Medievalism in Hollywood
- HART0175 Empires of Africa – 15 credits
Module Tutor: Jacopo Gnisci
Timetabled: Autumn Term: 14:00 – 16:00, Tuesdays
Module Description: Africa is the cradle of humankind but also the cradle of art making. Archaeologists have discovered perforated shells in caves in South Africa and Morocco that date back at least 76,000 years ago and represent the oldest datable human body decorations. This module introduces students to the arts of pre-modern Africa though a series of case studies. We will focus on the rich material culture and extensive trade networks of several prominent African civilizations, starting with Ancient Egypt and ending with the Kilwa sultanate on the Swahili Coast, to counter negative images of the continent. The module serves as a foundation for those who wish to study African art and architecture further or to engage with global art histories. By the end of this module, students will be familiar with some key methods and issues of the field and will have gained knowledge of the artistic heritage and history of some of the most prominent African states before AD 1500.
Duration of Module: 10 weeks, beginning in the first week of Spring term.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours
Student Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, gallery visits, one essay, one exam, in-class presentation.
Prerequisites: Students should have completed a first-year History of Art programme or have equivalent relevant experience.
Suggested reading list
Indicative weekly topics- HART0176 Cutting a figure: Making and Shaping the Body c. 1400 – 1500 – 15 credits
Module Tutor: Jess Bailey
Timetabled: Autumn Term: 14:00 – 16:00, Thursdays
Module Description: This course addresses conceptions of the human body as constructed by artisanal practice, focussing on processes of making and materials: their affordances, associations and the effects that are drawn from them. Focussing on the late medieval to Early Modern period, it explores an expanded field of crafted objects (tableware to armour) as well as some canonical sculptures and paintings, all works that variously represent, stand in for, dress, contain or serve the body. Continuities with earlier periods as well as changing technologies of making, and developments like the emergence of the ideal ‘nude’ and forms of self-fashioning will be brought into view. Placing our objects of study in relation to wider social and political practices or beliefs, we discuss period discourses and ask how often-unstated constructions of difference (cultures, gender, appearance…) are at play.
Each week the class will address a different theme in the making of the body with reference to one or more materials of making. The properties, working and effects of materials - from modelled clay to cloth of gold - will be analysed to gauge the ways they respond to and effect function, meaning and temporality. In a period in which durability and weight were often pre-requisites of crafted bodies, we also recognise fragility and how time remakes the body.
Duration of Module: 10 weeks, beginning in the first week of Autumn term.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours.
Prerequisites: Students should have completed a first-year History of Art programme or have equivalent relevant experience.
Suggested reading list
Indicative weekly topics- HART0054 Theory and History of Conservation – 15 credits (MAT priority)
Module Tutor: Helia Marcal
Timetabled: Autumn Term: 11:00 – 13:00, Fridays
Module Description: When thinking about artworks and artefacts, conservation provides an extensively rich area of study of their modes of conception, creation, dissemination, display and perpetuation. This is due to the premise that in order to engage with an artwork, conservation first and foremost seeks to understand what the work is and how it functions within and beyond its historic moment. Outsiders often refer to conservation as a homogenous field of activity that aims at prolonging the cultural objects’ lives into the future. But there are, in fact, different conservations that operate with respect to diverse theories, types of artefacts, institutional settings, historic contexts, and the cultures that produce them. During this module, we will sketch a picture of conservation that always exists between a set of dichotomies of hands and minds, practice and theory, the tangible and the intangible, and the traditional and the new. By putting today’s conservation into an historical perspective, we will examine how more recent conservation became of necessity a reflective, critical practice. Whenever possible, visits to museums and sites of conservation will enrich classroom discussions.
Duration of Module: 10 weeks, beginning in the first week of Autumn term.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours.
Prerequisites: Students should have completed a first-year History of Art programme or have equivalent relevant experience. This module is a requirement for MAT students but HoA students may also choose it as one of their ‘period’ options.
Term 2
- HART0035 Advanced Lecture in the History of Art: Remaking the early modern human body: sixteenth-/seventeenth-century transformations of knowledge, political authority, and image-making– 15 credits
Module tutor: Rose Marie San Juan
Timetabled: Spring Term: 14:00 – 16:00, Mondays
Module Description: The early modern remaking of the human body entailed many arenas and strategies, from its brutal fragmentation in official practices of punishment and medical research to its re-invention as an artificial entity in the form of the articulated skeleton or the mechanical automaton. A crucial factor was the rendering of the body as a visual image, one that drew on new and innovative formats and materials and served many purposes. What they all shared was the close scrutiny under which they were now assessed: medical anatomical image’s relation to the experience of the actual human body, differences between the European body and the body now encountered within travels to distant lands and categorised as cannibal, exchanges between the human and non-human body on display in the cabinet of curiosities, radical shifts between religious sacred images and new forms of painting of everyday life in the new picture gallery, and even the comparison between images of capital punishment and the experience of witnessing such practices. In different ways, all demonstrated the body’s life-like condition, not only as an entity defined through animation but also in constant transition and mutability. This kind of replication of the body, involving artistic invention, experimental technologies and mixtures of the human and non-human, is the focus of this course, which will examine all forms of representation that confront the body as material and in transition, including unpredictable transitions such as those between life and death. Duration of Module: 10 weeks, beginning in the first week of Spring term.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours.
Student Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, one essay, and exam.
Prerequisites: Students should have completed a first-year Art History programme or have equivalent relevant experience.Summer reading list - TBC
Indicative weekly topics - TBC- HART0032 Methodologies of Art History – 15 credits
Module tutors: Anaïs Da Fonseca and Jess Bailey
Timetabled: Spring Term: Lecture 10:00 – 11:00, Seminar 12:00 – 13:00, Tuesdays
Module Description: This text-based module introduces students to the diverse ways in which art historians engage with and write about visual art and culture. Students will be asked to analyse a range of art historical methods as well as varied approaches to critical writing, with the goals of becoming familiar with recent methodologies that pertain to the visual image and developing ways of bringing critical issues to their research and written work. Topics addressed normally include: formalism, iconography and iconology, the social history of art, psychoanalytic approaches, semiotics, poststructuralism, issues of gender, sexuality and race, postcolonialism.
Duration of Module: 10 weeks, beginning in the first week of Spring term.
Student Contact Hours: 20 hours, a mixture of lectures and text-based discussion classes.
Prerequisites: Normally only offered to 2nd-year History of Art students. Other closely similar experience might be acceptable.
Suggested reading list
Indicative weekly topics
- HART0051 Architecture and Modernity – 15 credits
Module Tutor: Jacob Paskins
Timetabled: Spring Term: 11:00 – 13:00, Fridays
Module Description: Architecture today is dominated by international design firms that produce spectacular buildings across the world. But how did architecture become global? This module asks how architectural knowledge and styles spread across continents during the past 150 years. We will confront how European colonialism exported architecture and urban planning to North Africa, the Middle East and India. How did the striking architecture of universal expositions transmit ideas about modernity? How did the so-called International Style of modernism spread through Europe, the United States, Japan, China and South America? Guided by the work of postcolonial theorists and historians, we will examine the reactions to an apparently global form of modern architecture in the twentieth century. Ultimately, we ask if there is any room for regional difference in globalised architectural production?
Duration of Module: 10 weeks, beginning in the first week of Spring term.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours.
Prerequisites: Students should have completed a first-year History of Art programme or have equivalent relevant experience.
Summer reading
• Zeynep Çelik, Empire, Architecture, and the City: French-Ottoman Encounters, 1830–1914 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008).
• Preeti Chopra, A Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites and the Making of British Bombay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).Indicative topics
• Colonial architecture and urbanism
• Imperial London
• From orientalism to postcolonialism
• Cultural nomadism
• International expositions
• Translating modernism
• From imperial modern to global modernisms
• Transcultural architecture
• Critical regionalism...and its critics- HART0173 Art and Science in Britain, 1750-1900 – 15 credits
Module Tutor: Caroline Rae
Timetabled: Spring Term: 11:00 – 13:00, Mondays
Module Description: In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, the domains of art and science were intimately entwined. Scientists trained themselves to draw. Artists studied botany and geology to ensure the accuracy of their pictures and experimented with pigments and materials. Photography and new modes of mechanical reproduction challenged artists and scientists alike to think anew about the epistemological status of images. In this module we will explore the constant, complex interweaving of art and science in Britain – tracing the ways that art responded to, mediated, and intervened in scientific practice. The module will likewise consider the visual cultures of scientific experimentation and communication. Through this exploration we will gain a broad overview of key developments in British art between 1750 and the late nineteenth century.
Duration of Module: 10 weeks, beginning in the first week of Spring term.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours
Student Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, gallery visits, one essay, one exam, in-class presentation.
Prerequisites: Students should have completed a first-year History of Art programme or have equivalent relevant experience.
Suggested reading list - TBC
Indicative weekly topics – TBC- HART0073 Histories of Photography – 15 credits
Module Tutor: Kimberly Schreiber
Timetabled: Spring Term: 11:00 – 13:00, Thursdays
Module Description: This module surveys the history of photography from its invention in the 1830s to its postmodern iterations in the 1970s. More specifically, it considers several key episodes in photography’s history through discussions of the contentious and public debates about the ways in which photography has been historicized. Is photography an art? Is it—was it—a threat to art? Is photography something closer to a tool or technology? Is it media? Throughout the module we will consider the myriad ways in which these questions have been posed and pondered by poets, critics, scientists, photographers and art historians.
Duration of Module: 10 weeks, beginning in the first week of Spring term.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours
Student Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, gallery visits, one essay, one exam, in-class presentation.
Prerequisites: Students should have completed a first-year History of Art programme or have equivalent relevant experience.
Indicative weekly topics
Summer reading list- HART0056 Prints and Printmaking – 15 credits
Module Tutor: Caroline Rae
Timetabled: Spring Term: 14:00 – 16:00, Tuesdays
Module Description: Multiple, ephemeral, mobile: prints, be they woodcuts, engravings, etchings, or lithographs, among other techniques, share certain features that make them unique. Printmaking is a profoundly indexical medium, always referencing the matrix (the woodblock, the copperplate, the lithographic stone) from which the resulting impression was reproduced. Prints have served as models for other art forms, as the vehicles for the circulation of new ideas, as devotional or scientific tools, as book illustration, as colonial tools. This module will focus on a diverse range of techniques and theories of printmaking. Questions to be considered include copies and copying, the multiple image, movement and circulation, and ephemerality.
Duration of Module: 10 weeks, beginning in the first week of Spring term.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours
Student Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, gallery visits, one essay, one exam, in-class presentation.
Prerequisites: Students should have completed a first-year History of Art programme or have equivalent relevant experience.
Suggested reading list - TBC
Indicative weekly topics – TBC- HART0166 Repatriation in the Age of Global Dispossession – 15 credits
Module Tutor: Anaïs Da Fonseca
Timetabled: Spring Term: 14:00 – 16:00, Thursdays
Module Description: Taking the lead from the 2002 “Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums” and the 2018 “Sarr-Savoy Report,” this course will reconsider debates around the repatriation of museum collections acquired during periods of colonization, global violence, repression, and persecution. This course will ask such questions as: What does it mean for a museum, nation, or individual to own culture? What are the limits of repatriation as a doctrine of social, political, or economic restitution? What is the role of museums in decolonization? A driving impulse of this seminar will be to rethink the mobility of culture in the twentieth century in terms of global histories of migration, displacement, and dispossession. Through a variety of case studies, students will probe how the politics of repatriation may help us to better understand the relationship of culture and museums to the humanitarian crises that have shaped the colonial and postcolonial worlds.
Duration of Module: 10 weeks, beginning in the first week of Spring term.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours
Student Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, gallery visits, one essay, one exam, in-class presentation.
Prerequisites: Students should have completed a first-year History of Art programme or have equivalent relevant experience.
Suggested reading list - TBC
Indicative weekly topics – TBC- HART0071 Methods and Materials of Artists – 15 credits (MAT priority)
Module Tutor: Tea Ghigo
Timetabled: Spring Term: 11:00 – 13:00, Wednesdays
Module Description: This module will provide you with knowledge of the theoretical and practical aspects of artists’ techniques and application and highlight some of the issues surrounding their preservation and conservation. You will be asked to demonstrate the knowledge you have acquired through an independent project work, which will allow you to develop some of the skills needed to approach objects through their materiality, namely experimental design, and analysis of results. In addition to seminars and lectures, the module will (where possible) include object-based learning at museum and heritage institutions.
Duration of Module: 10 weeks, beginning in the first week of Spring term.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours in 10 weekly 2-hour classes, plus supervised lab/project work.
Prerequisites: Normally, this course is for MAT students who have completed the first-year course on “Introduction to Art and Science”. HoA students who have equivalent relevant experience may request to attend.
Suggested reading list
Year 3
The essay options are set out first. All Special Subject modules are of 30 credits and are taught over both terms.
Final Year Essay Options
- HART0118 BA Dissertation in History of Art - 30 credits
Module tutor: All Staff
A 10,000 word essay (the ‘dissertation’) to be handed in at the beginning of Term 3. Students define a research project with the help and approval of the Department and receive guidance while undertaking the research and writing the essay.- HART0119 Independent Study Essay in History of Art – 15 credits
Module tutor: All Staff
A 4500-5,000 word essay to be handed in normally at the beginning of Term 2. This 15-credit module is designed to enable students to present an essay for assessment in connection with their own private studies. Students define the topic with the help of a member of staff in the Department and receive guidance while undertaking the research and writing the essay.- HART0120 BA Dissertation in History of Art, Materials and Technology – 30 credits
Module tutor: All Staff
A 10,000 word dissertation to be handed in at the beginning of Term 3. Students define a History of Art, Materials and Technology research project with the help and approval of the Department and receive guidance while undertaking the research and writing the essay.
- HART0108 (MAT only) Art/Work/Space – 15 credits
Module tutor: Tea Ghigo
This is a work placement module that entails a work experience in a museum, heritage institution, collection, gallery, conservation studio or in the art trade. On the basis of the experience acquired during this module, students write an essay on a topic relating to one of the aspects of this experience. This module is available only to MAT students.
Duration of Module: 10 + weeks.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours.
Student Workload: Students carry out a work placement and write an extended essay.
Means of Assessment: 5000 word essay
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year MAT module.
Final Year Special Subject Courses
- HART0107 Postcoloniality, Colonialism and Art in the British Empire – 30 credits
Module Tutor: Natasha Eaton
Timetabled: 16:00 – 18:00, Mondays
Module Description: Today ‘empire’ and postcoloniality are central to how we engage with the world. From debates surrounding globalization, to the ways in which we are rethinking Britishness, imperialism and its troubled legacies continue to occupy our political landscape and to inform the entanglements of British and non-western art. As leading anthropologist Nicholas B. Dirks warns, ‘in calling for the study of the aesthetics of colonialism, we might end up aestheticising colonialism, producing a radical chic version of Raj nostalgia’. With this cautionary agenda in mind, the aim of the course is to problematise the aesthetic and political underpinnings of these cultural encounters. In so doing, this module will provide an alternative history of art in the British Empire. Instead of focussing only on ‘conquest’ and racial subordination, it will also emphasise cross-cultural exchange and a range of indigenous techniques for resisting British art. Its agenda is to make you aware of the critical intervention of other cultures in the formation and subversion of imperial artistic identity. In so doing, you will engage with contemporary debates preoccupied with postcoloniality and British visual culture. The focus of this course is the relationship between Britain and South Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, although you will also be encouraged to contextualise this colonial experience with other spaces of empire. Material covered includes graphic media, Mughal miniatures, Anglo-Indian architecture, Bengali folk art and performance, ‘picturesque’ landscape paintings, caricatures, history painting, indigenous photography, ethnographic sketches and creole portraiture. An effort will be made to understand the phenomena of colonial and metropolitan collecting, “the exhibitionary complex” and the cultural underpinnings of imperial and vernacular museums.
Duration of Module: 20 weeks
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art module or equivalent relevant experience.Suggested reading - TBC
Indicative weekly topics – TBC- HART0194 Contemporary Art and Climate Change – 30 credits
Module Tutor: Maja and Reuben Fowkes
Timetabled: 14:00 – 16:00, Mondays
Module Description: Contemporary art could be seen as a barometer for the momentous transformations brought by climate change to all spheres of planetary life. In this module we will consider how artists have articulated the unfolding drama of climate breakdown, including by visualizing its effects on atmospheric flows, oceanic bodies, river ecologies and glacial worlds, revealing its disruption of plant, animal and microbial realms and addressing its unequal impacts on marginalized communities. The artistic response to climate emergency has also entailed tracing its roots in the capitalist system and colonialism, challenging the growth paradigm, advocating the legal protection of the natural environment and modelling scenarios for a world without fossil fuels. Contemporary art has from the outset been closely involved in discussion of the Anthropocene, which denotes the unprecedented scale of human interference in natural processes. We will therefore also consider artistic strategies to decolonize and pluralize the notion of the Anthropocene and put indigenous rights and environmental justice at the heart of the climate debate. Drawing on the expanding literature of ecocritical art theory and interdisciplinary insights from the fields of plant neurobiology, extinction studies and beyond-human anthropology, we will look into artistic practices from India to the Arctic and the Caribbean to the UK, including the work of Cooking Sections, Ursula Biemann, Allora and Calzadilla, Sammy Baloji and Himali Singh Soin. At issue too is the extent to which climate change is redrawing the boundaries of contemporary art, as it merges into activism, finds expression in diverse forms of emancipation and is channelled into social practices for possible ecological futures. Duration of Module: 20 weeks
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art module or equivalent relevant experience.
Suggested reading - TBC
Indicative weekly topics - TBC- HART0165 South African Photography: From Colonialism to the Contemporary – 30 credits
Module Tutor: Tamar Garb
Timetabled: 11:00 – 13:00, Wednesdays
Module Description: Photography has been practiced in Southern Africa since the middle of the nineteenth century and was widely used to survey populations, classify peoples and organise knowledge. Hierarchical assumptions about race, gender and sexuality inform the way photographic figuration developed from early on. We will explore how the residue of the slave trade, Imperial plunder and Enlightenment ‘science’ produced a dehumanizing photographic iconography of the ‘African’. But alongside the classificatory and coercive, new forms of picturing emerged, from honorific portraits to family records, studio performances to parodies, providing sites through which multiple subjectivities and alternative African-based modernities were imagined. The colonial archive constitutes a resource for contemporary South African artists. Crucial too is the centrality of documentary photography and a particular version of this realist project emerged in the middle of the twentieth century that was harnessed to the anti-apartheid struggle. After the advent of democracy in 1994, photographers and artists looked to reinvent the medium by mobilising photographic history at the same time as exploring its capacity to invent new subjectivities and identities. Contemporary South African lens-based practices (analogue, digital, video, animation) navigate this complex photographic archive from typological imagery to the family album, from photojournalism to the snap-shot. The course will look at the critical debates and historical developments that this rich trajectory reveals, focussing on the way that human figures are mediated and framed through technology, genre and medium within the specific context of modern South Africa.
Duration of Module: 20 weeks
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art module or equivalent relevant experience.
Suggested summer reading:
• The Cambridge History of South Africa, an excellent anthology of essays. Available online at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/the-cambridge-history-of-south-afri... - look particularly at chapters by Saul Dubow, Stanley Trapido, Deborah Posel, Anne Kelk Mager, Tom Lodge.
• Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 1994
• Darren Newbury, Defiant Images, Photography and Apartheid South Africa, 2009
• Tamar Garb, Figures and Fictions, V & A, 2011
• For those of you who like fiction, why not try some of the following: Nadine Gordimer; John Coetzee (especially ‘Disgrace’), Ivan Vladislavic (especially ‘Portrait with Keys’), Marlene van Niekerk (‘The Way of the Women’ and ‘Triomf’), Zakes Mda (especially ‘The Madonna of Excelsior’, Zoe Wicomb (especially ‘David’s Story’), Athol Fugard (Especially Sizwe Bande is Dead’) Damon Galgut (especially ‘The Promise’).- HART0164 The Social Lives of Artwork – 30 credits
Module Tutor: Hélia Marҫal
Timetabled: 14:00 – 16:00, Fridays
Module Description: This module will explore the social lives of artworks. It will focus on biographical and ecological approaches to the study of objects, characterised by a focus on the interactions between people, objects, technology and nature. This approach will allow students to understand artworks through their means of production, to situate both art objects and themselves within the network of interactions art objects occupy, and to analyse processes of historicisation, acquisition, collection management, and conservation as part of a social-material context.
Duration of Module: 20 weeks
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art module or equivalent relevant experience.
Suggested reading - TBC
Indicative weekly topics - TBC- HART0088 Art and Visual Culture in Early Modern England – 30 credits
Module Tutor: Rosemary Moore
Timetabled: 14:00 – 16:00, Thursdays
Module Description: This course will examine the intersections of art and visual culture, medicine, knowledge and authority in early modern England. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were characterised by religious, dynastic and political upheaval in Britain, while the violence of colonialism and slavery can also be traced back to the period. At the same time, movement of people, and of ideas – facilitated in part by the development of print – contributed to technological innovation, scientific curiosity and empiricism. How then might we understand the role of images in all this? Concepts of mobility, transformation and exchange will be key to our approach, as will the representation of the human body. From self-fashioning and heraldic devices in portraiture, to case studies of anatomical imagery that offer insight into the capacity of print to rapidly disseminate information across geographical borders, we will inviestigate a wide range of media. Alongside this, we will consider different approaches to observing, measuring and recording. In this way, we aim open up questions as to the presumed ‘naturalism’ of, for instance, John White’s watercolours representing the indigenous inhabitants encountered during colonizing expeditions to Roanoke Island in the 1580s, or the meticulous copperplate engravings of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665).
Duration of Module: 20 weeks
Duration of Module: 20 weeks
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art module or equivalent relevant experience.
Suggested reading list - TBC
Indicative weekly topics - TBC- HART0198 Planetary/Provincial: Modern Art and Architecture in its Global Contexts – 30 credits
Module Tutor: Jenny Nachtigall
Timetabled: 11:00– 13:00, Thursdays
Module Description: Arguably modernism was always driven by transcultural dynamics, even if art history remained stubbornly national. In this module we will engage with the challenges of a planetary outlook on modern art, architecture and aesthetics. In place of national surveys and further additions to the European canon, we will think about points of contact, appropriation and circulation in the art, architecture and aesthetics of Europe, East Asia and Africa between c. 1850–1960. Drawing on a number of case studies from Czechoslovakia, Germany, Japan and Nigeria, the module will also introduce key debates on the modern nexus of art and anthropology and emerging scholarship on the contradictions of colonial entanglement. We will pay close attention to material infrastructures of colonial trade, travel and economic exchange but also think about modes of world-making enabled by radical pedagogies, socialist and feminist internationalisms and transnational networks of solidarity and friendship.
Duration of Module: 20 weeks
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art module or equivalent relevant experience.
Elizabeth Harney and Ruth B. Philips, “Introduction. Inside Modernity. Indigeneity, Coloniality, Modernisms,” in Mapping Modernisms. Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), pp. 1-29. Kobena Mercer, “Art History after Globalisation: Formations of the Colonial Modern”, in Colonial Modern: Aesthetics of the Past, Rebellions for the Future, ed. Tom Avermaete, Serhat Karakayali, Marion von Osten (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2010), pp. 232-42
Suggested reading:Indicative weekly topics:
1. Global, Transcultural, Planetary: Debates
2. The Making of “African sculpture”
3. The Skins of Architecture: Ornament, Style, Race
4. The Ethnographic Museum II
5. Ornamentalism
6. Group Dynamics, Distribution, Solidarity- Monica Juneja, “‘A very civil idea’. Art History and World-Making – With and Beyond the Nation”, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81, (2018).
- Jill Richards, The Fury Archives. Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes (New York: Columbia University, 2020), pp. 1-30.
- HART0078 Advanced Undergraduate Course in the History of Art: Against the Grain: Archives, Canons and Chronologies in Transnational Art – 30 credits
Module Tutor: Gabe Beckhurst
Timetabled: 11:00 – 13:00, Tuesdays
Module Description: This module explores modern and contemporary art and visual culture in terms of critical debates around racism and racialisation, migration and diaspora, and cross-cultural and cross-regional interactions. Each week we will explore a different way of thinking with and against the ‘grain’ of modernism as advanced through critical interpretations of the archives, canons and chronologies that have historically supported its paradigms. The module considers a range of visual and artistic practices, including those that reach beyond Anglo-European notions of the figurative and abstraction to investigate the critical poetics and politics of self, collective and historical definition for artists of colour from the early twentieth century to the present. We will engage a global perspective on aesthetic practices and material explorations that both disrupt and exceed racial-colonial, political and legal categories of personhood, identity and citizenship as well as imperatives to assimilate with national cultures. There will also be opportunities to encounter new approaches to the study of diaspora, racialisation and visuality in art history through decolonial, queer and feminist methodologies that blend historical research and critique with innovative narration.
Duration of Module: 20 weeks
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art module or equivalent relevant experience.Suggested reading list
• Enwezor, Okwui, ‘The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition’, in Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, ed. by Okwui Enwezor, Nancy Condee and Terry Smith (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 207–234. Available via UCL Library.
• Hartman, Saidiya, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe, Vol. 12, No. 2 (June 2008): 1–14. Available via UCL Library.
Indicative weekly topics- The ‘Grain’ of Modernism
- Reading Colonial Archives: Intimacies, Ambivalences, Redirections
- Making/Unmaking the Subject
- Counterhistories: Anecdote, Rumour and the Unwritten
- Art into Life: the Harlem Renaissance and Négritude
- Confluence: Civil Rights and Cultural Pan-Africanism
- Black Atlantis
- Defamiliarising Vision: Race, Circulation and Photography
- Politics of the Pose
- Moving Images of Longing and Belonging
- Public Art, Public Bodies: Latinx and Chicanx Performance in Los Angeles
- Material Contradictions: Sculpture, Junk and Social Consciousness
- Diasporic Aesthetics and Conceptual Art
- Feminism and the Black Arts Movement
- Beyond Representation
- Diasporic Archives and Unruly Documents
- Queer and Trans Worlding
- Countervisualities
- Critical Fabulation: Witness, Testimony, Chorus
- HART0177 German Art, 1450-1600: Renaissance and Reformation – 30 credits
Module Tutor: Allison Stielau
Timetabled: 11:00– 13:00, Fridays
Module Description: This module considers visual and material culture produced in German-speaking lands between 1450 and 1600. Renaissance and Reformation are two conceptual frames that have shaped the study of this period, which spans both the flourishing of cultural production informed by an interest in antiquity and the profound upheavals of religious schism that would reorder Europe’s political and social landscape. Over the course of two terms, we will interrogate the usefulness of Renaissance and Reformation for understanding “German Art” while gaining familiarity with a wide variety of media, from popular printed broadsides to carved wooden altarpieces, fine panel paintings and engravings, and the jewel-like vessels of elite art collections. We will also engage with some of the most significant artistic and religious debates of the period. Was Italian art superior to its Northern counterpart? What role should images play within Christian devotion? What should artists portray if the traditional subjects become inappropriate? We conclude with the historiographical question of how the Reformation and the so-called Northern Renaissance in the sixteenth century have impacted the discipline of Art History as a whole.
Duration of Module: 20 weeks
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art module or equivalent relevant experience.Suggested reading:
• Susie Nash, Northern Renaissance Art (2008)
• Jane Campbell Hutchison, Albrecht Dürer: A Biography (1990)
• Peter Moser, Lucas Cranach: His Life, His World, His Pictures (2005)
• Cranach Digital Archive: https://lucascranach.org/home
• Lyndal Roper, Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther's World and Legacy (2021)
• W. G. Sebald, After Nature (2002), p. 1-37
• Dorothea von Mücke, "History and the Work of Art in Sebald's After Nature," (2011): https://nonsite.org/sebalds-after-nature-authorship-at-the-threshold-of-...Indicative weekly topics:
Week 1. Temporal and Geographical Frames
Week 2: Was There a Northern Renaissance?
Week 3: Welsch vs. Deutsch
Week 4: German Senses of the Past
Week 5: The Impact of Print
Week 6: Commerce, Diplomacy, and Humanism: The Portraits of Hans Holbein
Week 7: Artistic Ego-Documents: The Case of Albrecht Dürer
Week 8: Fashion and Self-Fashioning
Week 9: Collectors and their Cabinets
Week 10: Renaissance Misogyny
Week 11: Art Histories of the Reformation
Week 12: The Image Question in Christian Art
Week 13: Luxury and Mimesis as Provocation
Week 14: Artists and Reform
Week 15: Iconoclasm
Week 16: Prints and Propaganda
Week 17: Making Art in the Reformation’s Wake
Week 18: Defining Protestant Art
Week 19: Landscapes, Soundscapes, Smellscapes: New Research on the Senses in the Reformation World
Week 20: Legacies of the Reformation within Art History- HART0196 On Property: Photography, Land and Labour in America – 30 credits
Module Tutor: Kimberly Schreiber
Timetabled: 14:00 – 16:00, Thursdays
Module Description: This module takes as its subject the concept of property. More specifically, it seeks to examine how property became a critical framework through which to account for the emergence of the modern liberal subject as someone who owns their land and labour. Our focus will be on the role photography played and continues to play in this process as well as the process by which someone or something (land, labour, housing, etc.) comes to be owned. We will also consider photography as a form of property, attending to foundational debates about reparation and authorship.
The course is organised chronologically, offering a survey of key photographic practices through which the ownership of land and labour were fought over and reinvented. However, it will eschew a concern with the development of photography as a medium or an artistic practice for a more synchronic account of the social spaces through which that which is counted as property was—and still is—contested, including the battlefield, the prison, the factory, and the home. Course readings will mix histories of photography with geography and political economy in order to ask students to consider the multiple technologies making these spaces public and private. Likewise, it will consider how subjects are made to belong—or not—to a public, be it a nation or a neighbourhood, or even a class. Accordingly, weekly readings will also contend with critical studies of race, gender, and class as they frame current studies of photography and property. Influential films will also serve as points or sites of critical intervention, allowing students to take stock of the wider visual landscape through which the subject as property or as an owner of property was invented.
Duration of Module: 20 weeks
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art module or equivalent relevant experience.
Suggested reading list:
• Ellen Meiskins Wood, The Origins of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2017)
• Orlando Paterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard, 1985)
• Rinaldo Walcott, On Property: Policing, Prisons, and Calls for Abolition (Toronto: Biblioasis, 2021)
• Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2018)
Indicative weekly topics: See module description above for list of key sites and themes that will be addressed in the module- HART0106 Architecture and the Modern City – 30 credits
Module Tutor: Jacob Paskins
Timetabled: 11:00 – 13:00, Mondays
Module Description: Architecture is inhabitable, multi-dimensional space. But film, photography, drawings and texts provide much of our understanding of architecture and the modern city. This module asks what different forms of architectural dissemination can tell us about the design and meaning of buildings and urban space. How does cinema, television and radio represent architecture to a mass public? How has architecture become a touchstone in the art of comics? How do written texts including guidebooks and magazines communicate architectural knowledge to diverse audiences? How do manifestos and the architecture book transmit new ideas about architectural design? Asking these questions, we will explore how historians have used these different modes of architectural representation to write the history of architecture in the twentieth century. Finally, we will consider how these varied artefacts continue to inspire architecture and urban design.
Duration of Module: 20 weeks
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art module or equivalent relevant experience.