BA Third Arts
Third Arts
Our final-year programme is challenging and rewarding. It is designed to bring your knowledge and skills in the subject to a higher level, building on the foundations laid in the first and second years of the BA. Students in the 30- or 40-Credit Subject take two core modules that focus on broad questions within the discipline: HA3015 examines major matters relating to method, theory, and approach in Art History, while HA3029 investigates art and gender from the Renaissance to the present. The elective modules — HA3031, HA3032, HA3033, HA3034, HA3035 and HA3037, as well as
HI3141 for students taking 40 credits — offer the freedom to shape your final-year programme to suit your individual interests and to investigate particular issues in the context of a skill-based, small-group learning environment.
For the three credit pathways on offer, see the
Academic Programme Catalogue.
Dr
Flavio Boggi, Third-Arts Convenor.
Modules - Third Arts
HA3015 Approaches to the History of Art
Coordinator: Dr
Sabine Kriebel
Semester 2: Thursday, 09:00-10:00 and 15:00-16:00
Location: C_ORB_202 (09:00-10:00) and C_GG_LT (15:00-16:00)
This module offers a critical introduction to some of the more recent approaches to perception in art history and visual studies. Moving between the object of analysis and the human subject who analyses, we will explore the context, applications, and interconnections of these interpretive strategies. Among the thinkers we will discuss are Michel de Certeau, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Kaja Silverman, Laura Mulvey, Judith Butler, and Brian Massumi. Although lectures will extrapolate upon a given theme, this is a text-based core module that requires active participation from students, including critical reading, class participation, and group discussion.
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HA3029 Art & Gender Identities
Coordinator: Laurence Counihan
Semester 1: Monday, 11:00-12:00; Thursday, 15:00-16:00
Location: Connolly Building B (Mon); Connolly Building S3A (Thurs)
This module explores the various ways that artists—male, female, and genderqueer—have used their work to examine, question, and criticize the relationships between gender and society. The course involves sustained visual analysis, as well as a critical engagement with both primary and secondary texts.
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HA3031 Global Artistic Interventions: (RE)Making Identities After 1945
Coordinator: Laurence Counihan
Semester 2: Thursday, 11:00-13:00
Location: Student Hub G12
This module explores global art history and theories from 1945 to the present. Via a series of specific case studies, we will investigate the concept of the ‘artistic intervention’ and its shifting agenda as it crosses time, cultures, traditions and geographical borders. Drawing on works of key theorists, we will explore discourses surrounding specific artists and scrutinise the social purpose of their works—considering important themes such as identity, human rights, self-agency, the body, space, nation, heritage and memory.
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HA3032 Impact: Or, How Art Matters
Coordinator: Dr
Sabine Kriebel
Semester 2: Friday, 15:00-17:00
Location: West Wing 5
Through a series of modern and contemporary case studies, this seminar will investigate the various modes (material, political, affective, psychoanalytic) with which art seeks to intervene in the life of its beholders. Combining object-based and text-based study, we will interrogate how material form solicits attention and shifts knowledge in different historical contexts. The question is not if art matters, but
how.
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HA3033 Themes in Modern Art
Coordinator: Dr
Sabine Kriebel
Semester 1: Tuesday, 12:00-14:00
Location: Student Hub G12
The module examines the art of the Weimar Republic, beginning with Dada and Expressionism in the immediate postwar period and ending with the advent of National Socialism in 1933. We will consider a range of artistic practices and media in their localized historical contexts, including postwar Expressionist film, New Objectivity, the Bauhaus, left-wing photography and photomontage. Among the themes we will consider are capitalist consumer culture and aesthetics, the politics of technological mass reproduction, and representations of gender.
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HA3034 Visualizing War
Coordinator: Dr
Kylie Thomas
Semester 1: Wednesday, 11:00-13:00
Location: Connolly Building C
This module will focus on the ways in which artists and visual activists engage with war and its aftermath. We will consider the history of visual representations of war as well as the documentation of current conflicts and visual interventions that seek to draw attention to them. We will examine works that depict the wounded and the dead in relation to works that employ landscape as metaphor for the trauma of war. We will also consider the relation between violence and memorialisation and modes of experience that remain largely undocumented and invisible. Working closely with this material can be traumatising and this will be something we will discuss as part of the course.
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HA3035 Roma Caput Mundi: Artists and Patrons in Renaissance Rome
Coordinator: Dr
Flavio Boggi
Semester 1: Friday, 15:00-17:00
Location: West Wing 5
This course offers a detailed investigation of the productive relationship between artist and patron in Rome during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Special attention is devoted to Popes Julius II and Leo X and their interactions with Bramante, Michelangelo and Raphael. Through a sequence of case studies, students will explore crucial debates concerning the transformation of Rome into a magnificent capital, as well as the unique political and social structures that influenced creative activity there.
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HA3037 Feminist Visual Activism
Coordinator: Dr
Kylie Thomas
Semester 2: Wednesday, 11:00-13:00
Location: Connolly Building J1
This module will engage with multiple forms of critical and creative practice that seek to challenge gender inequality and address gender-based violence. The course will provide an introduction to some foundational ideas in feminist theory and will focus in particular on critiques of ‘mainstream’ or liberal western feminism. We will read a series of critical essays by feminist thinkers and will consider works by visual activists, artists, photographers and performance artists from across the world. It is important to be aware that some of the artists whose work we will consider engage with subjects such as slavery; sexual violence; femicide and reproductive rights. Working closely with this material can be traumatising and this will be something we will discuss as part of the course.
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