BA Modules 2026-27

Module tutors: Rosemary Moore (Term 1), Kirsty Sinclair Dootson (Term 2) + Postgraduate Teaching Assistants  
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring Terms: Lecture 14:00 – 15:30, Fridays AND 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 1.5-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 Suggested Reading  

While many of our incoming students have previously studied History of Art at A-level or have other Art School training, we recommend the following books in preparation for our BA programme, which stresses the importance of both historical research and critical thought. 

The key component of the First Year curriculum is the Foundation Course and Core Course. The following is a suggested reading list: 

1) Survey Course 

A familiarity with the overall history of art is essential. Students should consult any number of 'survey' textbooks to gain this knowledge. There is no specific handbook for such a task and students should read broadly and voraciously in all areas. 

Above all, students should familiarise themselves with the rich collections available to them in London libraries and collections. 

2) Core Course 

Students will also be introduced to the different critical approaches or 'methodologies' used in the discipline. For this we recommend the following as primers: 

R. Nelson and R. Shiff (eds.), Critical Terms for Art History, 1996 

D. Preziosi (ed.), The Art of Art History, 2009 [students should look for the revised 2nd edition] 

Other books of general interest that have been suggested include: 

E. Fernie (ed.), Art History and Its Methodologies, 1995 

P. Smith and C. Wilde (eds.), A Companion to Art Theory, 2002 

S. Edwards (ed.), Art and its Histories, New Haven and London 1999 

F. Borzello and A. Rees (eds.), The New Art History, 1986 

J. Harris, The New Art History: A Critical Introduction, 2001 

N. Mirzoeff (ed.), The Visual Culture Reader, 1998 

C. Harrison, P.J. Wood, and J. Geiger (eds.), Art in Theory: 1648-1815, 1815-1900, 1900-2000 

S. Hall, Representation, 1997 

M. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, 1987 

G. Pollock, Vision and Difference, 1987 

J. Woolf, The Social Production of Art, 1981 

N. Hadjinicolau, Art History and Class Struggle, 1973 

A. Hauser, The Social History of Art, 4 vols., 1951 and re-editions 

J. Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972 

Module Tutor: New Associate Lecturer  
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 with discussion: 20 hours. 
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.  

First Year Summer reading list - see HART0001 reading list above 

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.  
Timetabled: Autumn Term: 11:00 – 14:00, Thursdays (seminar will run for two hours either 11:00 – 13:00 or 12:00 – 14:00, to be confirmed by tutor at start of term) 
Module Description: This module is designed specifically for students on the first-year Single Honours History of Art, or the History of Art, Materials and Technology route. 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. 
 

Module Tutor:  New Associate Lecturer 
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.  

Indicative Weekly Topics and Suggested Reading 

This introductory module covers basic organic and inorganic chemistry in a lab-based environment for first-year History of Art students. During the course, you will learn the scientific foundations needed to understand the relationship between the materials artworks are made of, their physical properties, and what can emerge from how they interact. The module will cover topics such as the periodic table, bonding, solubility, and pH. Problem-led lab work will allow you to consolidate your learning and apply your analytical skills to the study of the materials of art.  

Weekly Topics:  

Week 1: Introduction to the course. Heritage, science and the atom.  

Week 2: Periodic Table.  

Week 3: Atomic structure and Bonding.  

Week 4: Molecule, reactions and pH.  

Week 5: Electromagnetic spectrum and colour theory.  

Week 6: Why are some varnishes hard to remove? (in MAT Lab)  

Week 7: How do you synthetise a red dye? (in MAT Lab)  

Week 8: What is fluorescence? (in MAT Lab)  

Week 9: How do you use XRF to identify pigments? (in MAT Lab)  

Week 10: Exam.  
  

Summer reading:  

Roy S. Berns, Color Science and the Visual Arts: A Guide for Conservators, Curators, and the Curious, The Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, 2016.  

Philip Ball, Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Colour, University of Chicago Press, 2004. 

Module Tutor: Mignon Nixon 
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 with discussion: 20 hours. 
Student Workload: Attendance at all lectures, reading in support of lectures, exam. 
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. 

First Year Suggested Reading - see HART0001 reading list above 

Module Tutor: Students will select a thematic seminar at the start of the academic year 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. 
Timetabled: Spring Term: 11:00 – 14:00, Thursdays (seminar will run for two hours either 11:00 – 13:00 or 12:00 – 14:00, to be confirmed by tutor at start of term) 
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. 

Module Tutor:  New MAT Lecturer (T2) 
Timetabled: Spring Term: 14:00 – 16:00, Mondays   
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. 

Indicative Weekly Topics and Suggested Reading  

Indicative Weekly Topics 

Week 1 (12 January). Introduction to media and technologies 
Week 2 (19 January). Early media technologies 
Week 3 (26 January). Fine art technologies: print and reproduction (Study visit - see details below) 
Week 4 (2 February). Snapshot: introduction to photography 
Week 5 (9 February). Moving image: the evolution of film 

READING WEEK (12-16 February) 

Week 6 (23 February). The window to the world: video and television 
Week 7 (1 March). Interactive and electronic art 
Week 8 (8 March). Student presentations 
Week 9 (15 March). Net art 
Week 10 (22 March). Obsolescence and change 

Suggested Reading 

No summer reading is needed. 

Module tutor: Alison Wright 
Timetabled: Autumn Term: 14:00 – 16:00, Mondays.  
Module Description:  This course focuses on conceptions of the body as they impact upon and are constructed by artistic making. We address how technologies of making, the senses, social and political practice and belief may be explored via materials and an expanded field of crafted works - from reliquaries to table ware, marble statuary to gilded effigies and dress (armour, vestments, courtly and serving bodies). By focussing on the period c. 1300-1550, European religious, social and technological continuities are put in play with radical developments such as the emergence of a notion of the ideal ‘nude’, and new kinds of self-fashioning that also depend on an encounter with difference.  
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. 

Module tutors: Amanda Ju and Cadence Kinsey 
Timetabled: Autumn 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 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. 

Module Tutor: New MAT Lecturer (T2) 
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/art-history/dr-helia-marcal

Timetabled: Autumn Term: 14:00 – 16:00, Thursdays.  
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 History of Art students may also choose it as one of their ‘period’ options. 

Module tutor: Jenny Nachtigall 
Timetabled: Autumn Term: 11:00 – 13:00, Thursdays. 
Module Description: One of the most enduring origin stories of the modern European avant-gardes is that they wanted to transform art into life. But what do we mean when we talk about life in relation to art? Focussing on the period c.1900-1960, this module will engage with the roles of images and objects in broader debates on the living and the dead in modernity. The module aims to introduce students to practices and theories that were left out of canonical accounts of the modern avant-garde movements and their social roles in times of political upheaval and technological change. We will revisit European interwar avant-gardes like Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, New Objectivity and Soviet Productivism through a new lens on the life and the living. In so doing, we will think about how seemingly neutral concerns with the organic, animation and animism relate to the politics of the body, colonialism, and questions of the environment. At the core of the module will be the artistic and political diversity through which “life” is represented, produced, staged, or contested in modern art and architecture, and in the writing of its histories. 
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. 

Module tutor: Nicholas Robbins 
Timetabled: Autumn Term: 14:00 – 16:00, Fridays. 
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 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 

Module Tutor: Aparna Kumar 
Timetabled: Autumn Term: 14:00 – 16:00, Tuesdays.  
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 Autumn term. 
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours. 
Prerequisites: Students should have completed a first-year History of Art programme or have equivalent relevant experience 

Module Tutor: New Mod & Contemp Lecturer 
Timetabled: Autumn Term: 11:00 – 13:00, Fridays.  
Module Description:   This second-year module will be taught by a new lecturer, who is being recruited in Spring 2026, specialising in Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Cultures. A full module description will be published once the appointment has been made. 
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.

Module Tutor: Mignon Nixon 
Timetabled: Autumn Term: 11:00 – 13:00, Wednesdays.  
Module Description: Feminism of the 1960s and 1970s galvanized profound changes in art and art history. Those changes form the focus of this module. We learn about art informed by feminism and about feminist perspectives on art. Considering influential texts in the fields of art history, cinema studies, psychoanalysis, politics, and gender studies, among others, we examine the pivotal role of art in stimulating and shaping feminist thought. We also consider how feminism challenged the intellectual and institutional traditions of art and art history. Finally, we reflect upon the historical, methodological, and political ramifications of these debates over time. 
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.

Module tutor: Cadence Kinsey 
Timetabled: Spring Term: 14:00 – 16:00, Mondays. 
Module Description: This module explores the histories of live art in Europe, the U.S. and Japan from Gutai to contemporary practice, with a strong emphasis on technologically mediated performance. Structured around the notion of the ‘emancipated spectator’, we will consider works of art that sit at the boundary of art and non-art in order to challenge traditional structures of making, exhibiting and looking at art. Through close study of a range of artistic movements including Fluxus, Situationist International, Relational Aesthetics and Re-Enactment, we will explore some of the major debates within histories of performance and live art, and think about key concepts such as the spectator, participation and ephemerality.  
Duration of Module: 10 weeks 
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. 

Module tutor: Jenny Nachtigall & New Early Modern Lecturer 
Timetabled: Spring Term: Lecture 09:00 – 10:00, Seminar 11:00 – 12:00, 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 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. 

Indicative Weekly Topics and Suggested Reading  

Indicative Weekly Topics 

Taste and Perception 

The Sublime 

Art and Ideology: Marxism and Cultural History 

The Frankfurt School: Benjamin and Adorno 

Suggested Reading: 

Shiner, Larry, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).  

Guichard, Charlotte, ‘Taste communities. The rise of the amateur in eighteenth-century Paris’, Eighteenth century studies, 45, No. 4 (2012), 519-547. 

Module tutor: Alison Wright and New Associate Lecturer  
Timetabled: Spring Term: 14:00 – 16:00, Thursdays.  
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 Spring 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. 
 
Indicative Weekly Topics and Suggested Reading  

Indicative Weekly Topics 

Week 1: Introduction to theories on materiality 

Week 2: Artwork 

Week 3: Artist 

Week 4: Collaboration 

Week 5: Decolonising methodologies 

Week 6: Technique 

Week 7: Conservation, Preservation, Restoration 

Week 8: Remaking 

Week 9: Archive 

Week 10: Institution 
  

Suggested Reading 

Bennett, Jill. Practical Aesthetics. Events, Affects and Art After 9/11 - Radical Aesthetics, Radical Art. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012. 

Ingold, Tim. “Materials against Materiality.” Archaeological Dialogues, Vol. 14/01 (June 2007): 1-16. 

Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co, 1976. 

Barker, Emma, ed. Contemporary Cultures of Display. New Heaven: Yale University Press, 1997, 105-126. 

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: research and indigenous people. London: Zed Books, 1999. Read Chapters 1 and 2. 

Kubler, George. The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008 (1962). 

Module tutor: Bob Mills 
Timetabled: Spring Term: 14:00 – 16:00, Fridays.  
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 fourteenth 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 Spring term. 
Student Contact Hours: 20 hours, a mixture of lectures and text-based discussion classes.  
Prerequisites: Students should have completed a first-year History of Art programme or have equivalent relevant experience 

Module tutor: Allison Stielau 
Timetabled: Spring Term: 11:00 – 13:00, Thursdays. 
Module Description: This module considers painting produced in the Low Countries (modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It tracks the invention and proliferation of scenes of every-day life without clearly identifiable narratives. These include the largely unpeopled categories of still life and landscape as well as so-called genre scenes, which depict common activities of work and pleasure. The quotidian subjects and curious naturalistic aesthetic of these paintings have presented art historians with an interpretive conundrum. Are they message-less mirrors of the early modern world? Or didactic and moralizing scenes that should be read symbolically? Moreover, can their realisms be taken at face value, or are artistic liberties (and contemporary visual clichés) identifiable in the representation of everything from frogs and tulips to scenes of agricultural harvest and popular festivities? To what extent might we understand the subjects of our investigations with the seeming contradiction once formulated by the poet Marianne Moore: “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”? 
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 

Module tutor: New Associate Lecturer 
Timetabled: Spring Term: 11:00 – 13:00, Fridays. 
Module Description: Most cultural institutions around the world are now equipped with scientific laboratories whose technology is constantly evolving, as is their role within the institution. This module centres around the analytical techniques most employed to analyse museum collections, with particular emphasis on paintings, illuminated manuscripts and other works of art on paper. After learning the chemistry behind painting and writing supports, pigments and dyes, students will become familiar with the most common invasive and non-invasive techniques to characterise them. How do x-ray or electron-based techniques work? What information can each technique provide, and how can this be contextualised historically? Furthermore, how can different techniques complement each other in addressing historical questions? Likewise, the course will address broader ethical and methodological questions involved in the material analysis of museum collections: how should an analytical method be chosen? What purposes can scientific analyses have beyond conservation and attribution?   
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, this course is for MAT students who have completed HART0003 Introduction to Art and Science. HoA students who have equivalent relevant experience may request to attend subject to availability. 

Module tutor: Emily Floyd 
Timetabled: Spring Term: 14:00 – 16:00, Tuesdays. 
Module Description: History of Art has traditionally prioritised visual analysis and close looking as core methods for interpreting artefacts. But what happens when we listen to, smell, touch or even taste art history? How might the non-visual senses prompt us to think differently about visual and material culture? This module uses space as central category of analysis to explore aural, olfactory and haptic approaches to a wide range of artworks, architecture, film, media and exhibition practices. Our sensorial and spatial enquiry will be structured around close examination of case studies and informed by a broad corpus of theoretical texts on sound, smell and touch, including debates around the presumed dominance of the visual in art and architectural history. Although the module primarily focuses on the nineteenth century to the present day, it has a broad historical and regional coverage to acknowledge that sensory experience is not universal, but rather shaped by subjective, historical and cultural contexts. Methodological questions lie at the heart of the module, drawing on interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to sensory perception and cultural formations of the senses. We will explore how both past and present sensibilities inform the making and interpretation of art, architecture and visual culture. We will also consider the absence or loss of sensory perception, including other modes of sensing such as the so-called ‘sixth sense’. Topics range from urban soundscapes to contemporary sonic art installations; from miasma theory to Smell-o-Vision; and from tactile film to the haunted house. The module invites experimentation with how we research, write and speak about the non-visual senses. Ultimately, Sensing Spaces aims to transform how we understand a world dominated by images.  

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 

Module tutor: Amanda Ju 
Timetabled: Spring Term: 11:00 – 13:00, Mondays. 
Module Description: This module examines art and mass culture in contemporary East Asia. Delving into an extensive historical context, it aims to account for the intricate legacies of colonialism, socialism, and neoliberalism that influence the rich cultural practices within this region. We will explore developments in architecture, photography, painting, film, and performance across East Asia from the mid-19th century to the present. In addition to examining specific objects and movements, we will study critical discourses on heritage, influence, historical transition, theories of subjectivity and affect (in relation to gender, sexuality, and race), as well as discussions of migration and diaspora. These theorizing tools will help us contextualize a diverse set of media practices including, colonial representations of East Asia in photography and world expositions, the “high” and “low” forms of socialist mass art, performance and painting in post-war Japan, as well as collaboration and trans-medial practice in Beijing’s East Village. Other topics include temporality, dislocation, and state terror in Taiwan New Cinema, labour, intimacy, and queer diaspora in Hong Kong film, as well as representations of race in Singaporean artist Ming Wong’s work. Even though class sessions are thematically and chronologically organized, artworks produced closer to our time will be examined alongside historical developments.    

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 

Module tutor: Kirsty Sinclair Dootson 
Timetabled: Spring Term: 11:00 – 13:00, Wednesdays. 
Module Description:  This module explores the role of sculpture in British visual culture from the Victorian era to the present. We will pay particular attention to the relationship between making and meaning, considering how different materials and techniques informed the aesthetic and political trajectories of the medium. Across a range of sculptural types we will examine the relationship between sculpture and other media (such as ceramics and painting) to understand the unique affordances of sculpture to explore questions of imperial power, gender, and the labour of art making. Each week is organised around a different material or technique (for example: bronze, plaster, wood, stone, metalwork, carving, casting) and takes up works by historical and contemporary artists (for example: Barbara Hepworth, Rachel Whiteread, Ronald Moody, Frederic Leighton, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Rasheed Araeen, Thomas J. Price, Kim Lim).   

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 

Module tutor: All Staff 
A 10,000 word essay 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 dissertation. 

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. 

Module tutor: All Staff 
A 10,000 word dissertation to be handed in at the beginning of the Summer term. 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.  

Module tutor: New MAT Lecturer 
This is a work placement module that entails work experience in a museum, heritage institution, collection, gallery, conservation studio or in the art trade. Students will produce a written portfolio to showcase their work and reflect on the experience of their placement. This module is available only to History of Art students on the MAT route.  
Duration of Module: 10 + weeks in Autumn Term. 
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours. 
Student Workload: Students carry out a work placement and write regular short texts related to their placement to form a portfolio. 
Means of Assessment: Portfolio (up to 3000 words) 
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year MAT module.  

HART0196 On Property: Photography, Land and Labour in America 
Module Tutor: Stephanie Schwartz 
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring Terms: 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. 

Module Tutor: Emily Floyd 
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring Terms: 11:00 – 13:00, Fridays.  
Module Description:  At the time of the Spanish arrival to Mexico and South America, the Aztecs and Incas controlled two of the largest empires in the world. What we know about these two empires is mediated through the violence of conquest: this is the problem at the centre of this module. Students will be introduced to both empires and the first hundred years of the post-conquest era, focusing on the problem of how the Spanish Empire came to absorb these two previous ones, how early modern European ideas about art, religion, and history shaped our understanding today of these empires, and how Europe was changed by its encounter with the “New World.” Students will be asked to interrogate historiographic narratives that have shaped our conceptions of the Aztecs and Incas and analyse the complicated biases, lacunae, and misunderstandings of the sources available to us in order to interpret these empires. We will also consider the viability of art historical methodologies for approaching the material culture of these civilisations.  

Duration of Module: 20 weeks. 
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours 
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art module or equivalent relevant experience. 

Module Tutor: New MAT Lecturer 
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring Terms: 16:00 – 18:00, Tuesdays.  
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. 

Module Tutor: Amanda Ju 
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring Terms: 14:00 – 16:00, Fridays.  
Module Description: This course examines the changing subjects of feminisms and the changing forms of feminist art that are shaped by the geopolitical imaginaries of Asia and the West in the 20th and 21st century. We will look at strategies of feminist critique based on mimicry, masquerade, opacity, and code-switching, and examine them in relation to the specific histories of colonialism, socialism and neoliberalism in East and Southeast Asia. We will also consider the political subject of “Asia America” and the enfiguring of the “Asian/American Woman.” Readings of this course excavate feminist knowledge and cultivate a sensitivity to difference articulated across continents, through corporealized and spectral bodies, within and beyond the histories of socialism and capitalism. The artworks we look at turn to strategies of the avant-garde and socialist visual culture to imagine new modalities of survival, resistance, and to cultivate more ethical ways of living. 

Duration of Module: 20 weeks   
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours   
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art module or equivalent relevant experience 

Module Tutor: Cadence Kinsey 
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring Terms: 11:00 – 13:00, Wednesdays.  
Module Description: In this module we look at the history of technology in modern and contemporary art, beginning with the development of photography, moving through film and video, to the emergence of digital media and internet art. We will consider core issues related to technology in art including: theories of production and re-production and the pressure this puts on the category ‘art’; artist film and haptic vision; the rise of the amateur and home-video in the 1970s; the intersections between performance and technology; questions of visual epistemology (the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’); the crossover between art and medicine in the 1990s; formations of the ‘post-human’; and ‘post-internet’ art and the self-image. Throughout the module there will be a strong thematic focus on ‘the Body’ and, following from pioneering scholarship within feminist science & technology studies, we will be working from the assumption that technology and subjectivity are always involved in processes of mutual co-constitution. As such, our discussions will attend to the ways in vectors of identification, such as race, class, and gender, have informed both artistic engagements with technology and theoretical interpretations of them. 

Duration of Module: 20 weeks. 
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours 
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art module or equivalent relevant experience

 Module Tutor: Bob Mills 
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring Terms: 14:00 – 16:00, Mondays.  
Module Description:  This module focuses on three interrelated categories—gender, sex and selfhood—as they pertain to the art and architecture of the Middle Ages in Europe and the Mediterranean world. Students will consider how ideas of sex and gender shape the production and reception of medieval art; explore the ways in which particular genres (e.g. self-portraiture), spaces (e.g. monastic architecture) and media (e.g. textiles) construct ideas of identity and selfhood; and seek to understand the interrelationship between artistic production and religious or courtly conceptions of desire and subjectivity. We will focus on images of women and femininity, works of art commissioned by or made for women, and women as artists. Crucially this material will be placed alongside artworks made by, for or about men, as well as imagery that cuts across binary categories of identity and desire. Students will develop a firm grounding in feminist art criticism, as well as having opportunities to evaluate the applicability of other relevant approaches such as those developed in queer and transgender studies, film studies, literary theory and critical race theory. These contemporary critical approaches to sex, gender and selfhood will enhance the exploration of specific works, makers and patrons in the period c.1000–1500, as well as introducing concepts and methodologies applicable to other areas of art history.   
Duration of Module: 20 weeks. 
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours 
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art module or equivalent relevant experience. 

Module Tutor: Mignon Nixon 
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring Terms: 11:00 – 13:00, Thursdays.  
Module Description:  Since its inception in Freud’s work, psychoanalysis has demonstrated its awareness that psychoanalysis and art share their operational terrain of unconscious processes: the question of how they do so is another matter - one which is largely still up for grabs. Juliet Mitchell, 2019 

This module investigates dynamic interactions of art, psychoanalysis, and politics. From the Surrealist revolution to the present, art, film, performance, and visual culture have seized on radical ideas of psychoanalysis to articulate—to connect--subjectivity and politics. Psychoanalysis for its part has looked to art to develop its theories of the unconscious, sexuality, violence, and death. The fundamental proposition of psychoanalysis, its core idea, is the unconscious. In this module, we look at the role of the unconscious in representation, focusing especially on trends of sexuality, gender, and violence. We reflect upon the family, war, sexual violence, and groups. Among the concepts we explore are: dream-work, free association, play, the drives, sexual difference, gender difference, bisexuality, the symptom, hysteria, polymorphous perversity, humour, the death drive, the uncanny, fetishism, work of mourning, melancholia, mastery, repression, resistance, and transference.  
 
We may read selections from the theoretical writings of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, Jacques Lacan, D.W. Winnicott, Marion Milner, André Green, Franz Fanon, Franco Fornari, Hanna Segal, Julia Kristeva, and Juliet Mitchell, among others. We may consider the work of artists and filmmakers including Louise Bourgeois, Claude Cahun, Sophie Calle, Andrea Fraser, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Mona Hatoum, Isaac Julien, Mary Kelly, Silvia Kolbowski, Yayoi Kusama, Glenn Ligon, Sarah Lucas, Steve McQueen, Ana Mendieta, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Senga Nengudi, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems. We may draw upon the critical writings of Parveen Adams, Sara Ahmed, Jo Applin, Leo Bersani, Rizvana Bradley, Judith Butler, Douglas Crimp, Tim Dean, Briony Fer, Shoshana Felman, Hal Foster, Margaret Iversen, Kobena Mercer, Jose Muñoz, Griselda Pollock, Jacqueline Rose, Christine Ross, Kalpara Seshadri-Crooks, Hortense Spillers, Susan Suleiman, and Michele Wallace, among others. There will be occasional film screenings and exhibition visits, and students will be encouraged to explore the plethora of lectures and public events on and around psychoanalysis and culture at UCL and in London. 

Duration of Module: 20 weeks. 
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours 
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art module or equivalent relevant experience. 

Module Tutor:  Jacob Paskins 
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring Terms: 11:00 – 13:00, Tuesdays.  
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. 
 
Indicative Weekly Topics and Suggested Reading 

Architecture as Mass Media 
Architectural Manifestoes I 
Architectural Manifestoes II 
The Architecture Book 
Modernist Histories of Architecture 
Exhibiting Architecture I 
Exhibiting Architecture II 
Architectural Magazines I 
Architectural Magazines II 
Architectural Photography I 
Architectural Photography II 
Architecture on the Radio 
Architectural Guidebooks 
Architecture and Cities on Film I 
Architecture and Cities on Film II 
Architecture on Television 
Comics and Architecture 
Digital Architectural Media 

Suggested Reading 

Colomina, Beatriz. Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Forty, Adrian. Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, 2000. 

Zimmerman, Claire. Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso, 2002. 

Module Tutor: Alison Wright 
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring Terms: 14:00 – 16:00, Tuesdays.  
Module Description:  This module offers a wide-ranging, artefact-focussed, study of aspects of Mediterranean cultural exchange in the late Middle Ages to the early sixteenth century. Emphasis will be on the interlinked territorial, trade and cultural politics of sites in Italy, Spain and the Eastern Mediterranean (with its routes to Asia). It will investigate the productive and disruptive impact of ideas, people and objects from Byzantium and the Arabic worlds as well as western Mediterranean cities in producing artistic change. Case studies range across tactile, material and imaginative re-evaluations of the period, including ways of envisioning unfamiliar places and peoples. ‘Moving Worlds’ will deploy the phenomenon of the movement of people and artefacts/artworks to access plural perspectives on the artistic, technological, social and cultural practices and developments of the period, including non-western and non-elite ones. It engages with debates over ‘centre and periphery’, the relative agency of objects in networks of social relations, models of cultural ‘translation’, appropriation or transformation and the role of the aesthetic/emotive in spatial practice.   

The module content will broadly move from the large scale - considering movements attendant on trade, war and diplomacy, pilgrimage - to the ‘local’ level, to encompass objects embedded in urban rituals. Through textual analysis of sources and close visual and material investigation of crafted works (many accessed first-hand in London’s collections), ‘Moving Worlds’ also aims to destabilise the static, musealised ‘work of art’, to imaginatively reanimate once-dynamic qualities, and find evidence of movements over time. 

Duration of Module: 20 weeks. 
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours 
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art module or equivalent relevant experience. 

Module Tutor: New Mod & Contemp Lecturer 
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring Terms: 16:00 – 18:00, Mondays.  
Module Description:  This final-year special subject will be taught by a new lecturer, who is being recruited in Spring 2026, specialising in Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Cultures. A full module description will be published once the appointment has been made. 
Duration of Module: 20 weeks. 
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours 
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art module or equivalent relevant experience. 

Module Tutor: New Early Modern Lecturer 
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring Terms: 11:00 – 13:00, Mondays.  
Module Description:  This final-year special subject will be taught by a new lecturer, who is being recruited in Spring 2026, specialising in Early Modern Art and Visual Cultures. A full module description will be published once the appointment has been made. 
Duration of Module: 20 weeks. 
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours 
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art module or equivalent relevant experience.