Work Placement (HISTART5072)

Semester 2

Valuable work experience in a museum, gallery or other cultural institution is provided through the Work Placement. The Department has developed close links with a number of institutions, giving students the chance to engage in a project-based work placement, where they can explore a possible future career, while meeting professional practitioners and developing skills and experience. A work placement might also provide the opportunity to develop a research subject for a dissertation.

A project is drawn up between the host institution, the student and the programme convenor. Projects may involve archival, curatorial or related work. Considerable emphasis will be placed on practical skills.

Convenor: Liz Hancock

Independent Study (HISTART5037)

Semester 2

The aim of this course is to make an extensive independent study of a particular subject area through the study of texts/ objects and assess their value to the establishment of particular theories or issues. It is anticipated that the choice of subject area will be linked to the individual student’s special interests.

The work on the elective project will be based on a series of guided reading with regular supervisory meetings / tutorials/ visits. These will support the development of literature review skills and the ability to summarise issues and approaches relating to a relatively broad field of study.

The approval process involves the student submitting a proposal (400 words with an indication of initial bibliography), which is then defined and approved through discussion between the student and tutor. The acceptance of a proposal will be at the discretion of the tutor and programme director.

2D Digitisation (ARTMED5002)

Semester 2

Tutor: Dr Ian Anderson, Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII)

The availability of high-quality digital content is central to research and teaching developments in the arts and humanities. Archivists, curators and librarians are among the many groups that are heavily involved in creating digital resources from analogue collections. Skills in understanding the principles and best practice in the digitisation of primary textual and image resources have even broader value in the cultural and heritage sector. Students will examine the advantages of developing digital collections in the arts and humanities and issues involved in creating, curating, and managing access to such collections. For their project students will apply the practical skills they acquire to the digitisation of an analogue collection (print, image e.g. photographic or slide, music, manuscripts, or map). The focus will be on working with primary source material not otherwise available in digital form.

Hunterian Exhibition Development (HISTART5096P)

Semester 2

Taught by staff from The Hunterian, this course offers students an insight into professional museum practice, including collections management, front-of-house, administration, museum education and communications and marketing, but with a special focus on exhibition development. Students undertake a variety of practical orientated exercises and are assessed by a diary and portfolio.

Timetable Information: The course comprises 20 two hour sessions split between 10 two-hour classes and 10 two-hour supported drop-in sessions.

Convenors: Ian Anderson and Ruth Fletcher

Collecting Landscapes (HISTART5101) (Not offered 2013-14)

Semester 2

In 1824, King George III’s Topographical Collection was donated to the British Library in London.  It is now by and large kept in some 500 or so large folio volumes, arranged by place and including maps, plans and elevations as well as views and vignettes, prints and original drawings. These works were but part of a still more vast geographical and topographical, civilian, military and naval collection held in the monarch’s library, surveying his kingdom and the wider world, including his imperial territories, and the celestial realm above. On one hand, this royal enthusiasm was traditionally princely, a territorial form of statecraft above political faction. On the other hand, it was a popular, highly commercial, form of citizenship, an accomplishment and fascination the king shared with his subjects, who travelled the country in search of the picturesque or collected views of Britain’s localities in the form of serial prints.

This course will explore this interest in collecting, exploring and recording the national landscape as it emerged over the course of the long eighteenth century, with particular reference to the ways these activities shaped the landscape arts of the period. It will consider landscape architecture and garden design, topographical and antiquarian writing and illustration, poetry, painting and sketching, as well as tour accounts combining visual and written material. It will also range widely geographically, over the three kingdoms but also subject territories, on the Indian subcontinent and in North America, as well as in the southern hemisphere, exploring the connections between places. It will consider urban prospects as well as rural views, agricultural and industrial landscapes, raw mountainous scenery, rivers, roads, coasts and skies. Of particular interest is how dramatic changes being made to the national territory were documented and evaluated, but also how new roads and navigable rivers, enclosed fields and urban planning shaped the act of record itself.  There will be an emphasis on contemporaries’ awareness of being in an environment and moving through it, aware of its changeful qualities, the air, weather, and seasons, the interaction and process of nature and culture. In traversing the varied topographies of land and life in Britain, cultivated and raw, rural and urban, modern and historic, artists and writers might take pleasure, but equally be disturbed by this sense of flux and change in the natural and human world. This course will explore attempts to order that experience, to take its measure. Accordingly, it will place emphasis on encounters with particular places and environments, attending to responses of delight and discomfort as well as issues of mobility and duration, and how the movements of nature and culture in space and time were charted in drawings and print series, the laying out of grounds and travel accounts, animated by plots of various kinds, seasonal and atmospheric, autobiographical, mythic and historic.

This course will address these issues by exploring the use and representation of a range of diverse rural and urban landscapes, considering the work of leading landscape architects like William Kent, Capability Brown and Humphrey Repton, influential theorists like William Gilpin, Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price, as well as the painters Paul and Thomas Sandby, Thomas Gainsborough, Richard Wilson, and J.M.W. Turner. It will be focused around close readings of primary materials, poems, histories and travel accounts, maps, drawings, paintings and prints.

Convenor: Dr John Bonehill

Antiquarianism (HISTART5103) (Not offered 2013-14)

Semester 2

This course will explore aspects of antiquarianism from the late sixteenth century through to the early decades of the nineteenth century, with particular reference to how a search for national origins among the ruins of the past connected with related fields of enquiry.

It will consider the activities of Elizabethan antiquarians and the founding of the Society of Antiquaries in London in 1717 and a society in Edinburgh in 1780, the work of figures like William Camden and Michael Drayton, William Dugdale and Robert Plot, in the 1600s, as well as William Stukeley, Richard Gough and Thomas Pennant in the eighteenth century, and Richard Colt Hoare and William Cunnington in the years after 1800. However, it will also be concerned with the ways in which antiquarian projects overlapped with or came to shape other forms of cultural practice, painting, poetry and gardening as well as tours and natural histories of the national landscape.

Antiquarianism was a form of social practice, an enterprise involving professional and amateur artists, engravers and publishers, men and women of all ages, who collected, lent and exchanged letters, books, maps, plans, drawings, prints and objects, as well as making group tours to sites of interest. Antiquarianism was also by the end of the eighteenth century an increasingly commercial venture, allied to the market for accounts of the country’s localities and closely associated with the rise of domestic tourism. Concerns to preserve or collect the remnants of the country’s history, whether materially or in paper form, as drawings or prints, before they crumbled away or were destroyed by modern improvements, demonstrate a marked interest in evaluating the place of the past in the flow of present day circumstances. These activities were also in accord with a wider culture of observation and record, and overlapped with the work of naturalists and travel writers, surveyors and cartographers, as well as artists and poets, including J.M.W. Turner and Walter Scott, engaged in representing the nation. In this sense, antiquarian investigations of the country’s history, of its ancient stone circles and Roman remains as well as medieval crosses and ruined abbeys, were of apart with a wider making and remaking of Britain and Britishness in this period.  

This course will examine these issues through a close focus on primary documents, on the writings and drawings, maps, plans and collections of prominent and less well known antiquarian scholars concerned to document Britain’s many pasts, Celtic, Druidic and Roman, Danish and Norman.

Convenor:  John Bonehill