Art History and Visual Culture BA

This module aims to further your understanding of research processes and practices with specific focus on the process of developing a research question and design.

You will practice identifying appropriate and operable research questions, reflecting critically on published research to understand its processes. Through encounters with guest researches, you will be shown research in a variety of contexts as an embedded practice and the importance of research skills in your future careers.

This module is worth 10 credits.

In this module you will carry out a small group project which will give you further insight into the principles and processes of research as practice in your chosen discipline.

You will be instructed in a range of academic and transferable project leadership and management skills, preparing you for life after your degree. By the end of this module you will have practiced the process of going from a research topic to a question, to a methodology, to practical research design, to a completed project.

Through tasks such as writing research proposals, project documentation, effective communication, and ethical conduct, you will have gained a grounding in project management, setting you up for success in the working world.

This module is worth 10 credits.

How does your social and cultural position effect the impact and value you perceive from media, art, and screen culture? 

Learn how experiences with media, art and screen culture are shaped by factors such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability, and how this influence can change over time. 

You will examine the history and critical theories of cultural experience and reception and discuss questions of interpretation and meaning. You will be encouraged to reflect on your own experiences and how they have been influenced by various forms of technology and your daily environment.

After studying this module, you will be confident to:

•  identify how an individual’s position influences how media and art is received 
• reflect on your own experiences with media, art, and screen culture
• describe how factors such as race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability shape experiences
• consider relevant theoretical models and practical methodologies
• use academic and cultural industries research methods
• understand and reference empirical audience research methods and analytical approaches.

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module explores the historical development of the technologies and objects through which media is created and experienced.

You will interrogate the concepts of ‘technology’ and ‘object’ and question your own assumptions about what constitutes both categories.

You will directly engage with academic debates concerning the role of technology in shaping media, are and screen experiences, and the impacts of technologies and objects on the environment and global communities.

This module will explore a range of case studies revolving around technologies and objects from the printing press, paints, and paper to the internet, smartphones and automated systems such as algorithms and AI.

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module introduces students to revivalism as a fundamental aspect of the history of art and visual culture and explores the enduring phenomenon of cultural historical revivals from the Renaissance to the contemporary era, examining their wide-ranging political, ideological and conceptual motives and meanings.

Through case studies drawn and by examining revivalism as a creative and innovative practice, the module considers a variety of attitudes to the past, such as anachronism, nostalgia, utopianism and romanticism.

This module explores histories and critical theories of monuments, cities and urbanism. There is normally an extensive fieldwork element in which students study art, architecture, monuments, and museums in situ, both locally studying sites in Nottingham and then through a guided visit to a European city.

A key objective of this module is for students to research, describe, and analyse a site that they have visited, explored and read about. This module allows students to engage with the material properties of our objects of study and introduces them to key terms and a range of critical and theoretical approaches to describing and analysing cities and historical sites. Structuring themes may include the city as site of memory; material and cultural heritage; alternative sites of display of art. 

This module will explore the British Empire not simply as a vast political and administrative entity driven by trade and commerce (and in many places rooted in slavery and indentured labour), but as an exercise in institutionalised cultural power which laid the foundations for the global and local cultural flows, as well as the neo-colonial structures, characteristic of today’s globalised world.

Students will be equipped with the theoretical tools to analyse the ways in which the Empire promoted a visual, auditory, and material culture - ranging from art and literature, to radio, cinema and television - that shaped the everyday lives of millions of people. 

This module invites students to consider the histories, cultures, and politics of collecting and collections, cutting across art, audio-visual media, memorabilia and fan objects, animals and specimens, archives, museums, galleries, zoos, and public and private cultures of display. It will examine the processes of curation, both institutional and personal, and link these to the social, cultural, and political contexts that shape these practices.

The module will examine the history of collecting and collections and will account for both professional practices of collecting and amateur, private cultures of collecting.

Students will gain an insight into issues of conservation relating to art, object, and media collections. Students will also gain a sense of the contemporary politics of collections management and custodianship.

This module will introduce students to key concepts of narratology and storytelling. Using an interdisciplinary perspective, we will learn how to identify narrative patterns in media texts of different genres and origins, how narrative structures shape world views and how many stories are deeply embedded in global popular cultural narratives, travelling through historical time.

The module will also interrogate the neo-coloniality of popular media narratives and story journeys that include long-standing powerful colonial and racist registers and codes. 

This module tackles the politics of emotion, affect and the senses within art, media, and culture, concepts which have not always been taken seriously within analytical, intellectual contexts.

Emotions and feelings are experienced individually, but are shaped and impacted by cultural norms, linguistic formulation, and social organisation. The module involves questions of how emotions and affect have been captured, represented and expressed in art and across media forms. It asks what role art, audio, visual, and haptic media play in shaping our sensing bodies and private emotional selves. It addresses the methodological challenges posed by researching affect, emotions and the senses, as well as engaging with how we might study emotion, affect and the senses in a rigorous fashion. 

This module involves employability skills training in the Autumn semester followed by a part-time placement (one day a week, or equivalent, up to eight weeks) in an external organisation in the spring semester. The module is aimed at developing hands-on work experience and enhancing employability skills in a workplace relevant to arts graduates. Skills developed during the placement will be intrinsically relevant to various work environments.  

Students will apply for placements in relevant local organisations from an established list created by the faculty placement team, but may also use personal contacts to arrange their own placement, subject to approval. Placements will be provided across a range of sectors relevant to the arts including the creative and cultural industries, media, marketing, heritage and museums, the music industry, education, charitable and third-sector organisations, but are subject to change each year. In the autumn term lectures and workshops will be organised across the faculty, with input by the Careers and Employability Service to provide learning support on professional development and skills assessment, networking, successful applications and interviews, self-presentation and self-reflection.   

Assessment will comprise an online portfolio of materials, including application materials, reflective writing and a research report situating the work and function of the placement organisation in the context of the wider sector of which it is a part. Throughout, students will be encouraged to reflect individually and in groups on their own employability, and plan for their ongoing professional development.