Professor Gaby Neher Art History lecture with students in class teaching

Art History and Visual Culture

Answering big questions through art history and visual culture

Here at Nottingham, we view art as a powerful way to explore and express our cultural identities. When you embark on our art history degree, you’ll not only begin to explore visual cultures across periods but you’ll be inspired to question, reflect, and appreciate the power that art represents for the future.

Through our engaging and inspirational modules, we enable you to answer the big questions that arise through art history and visual culture. 

Art and Architecture in Nottingham


How do buildings shape the identity of a city? How does this change over time?


Art, Methods and Media


Would these be as valuable if they’d been made from wood? How about plastic?


Renaissance to Revolution


Can you fully appreciate these paintings without understanding the historical context?


Modern to Contemporary


How important is it to understand the relationship between art and ideas?


Reading and Writing Art History


How do past ‘readings’ affect our understanding of art?


The Language of Art History


How do the words used to describe a work of art affect our understanding of it?


Art at the Tudor Courts


Did the Tudors invent self-promotion?


Black Art in a White Context


Did the civil rights movement have an impact on the arts?


European Avant-Garde Film


How can we understand film in relation to other art forms?


International Study


Is art best viewed in its country of creation?


Los Angeles Art and Architecture 1945–1980


How has the American dream shaped LA architecture?


Memory, Media and Visual Culture


How does visual culture shape our understanding of the past?


Media, Art and Screen Experience


How can we think critically about our experience of media, art and screen culture in our everyday lives?


Surrealism, its Legacies and Sources


How did concepts of the dream and the unconscious change art and thought in the twentieth century?


Gender and Power in the Renaissance


Did women have a role in the Renaissance art world?


Fascism, Spectacle and Display


What should we do with the buildings left behind by Fascism?


Art Criticism in Twentieth-Century America


How did art critics write and respond to the development of American art in the twentieth century?


Art and Science: 1900–Present


How do developments in science impact art?


Open Day June 2022