MSt in History of Art and Visual Culture

Instructor: Cora-Gilroy-Ware

In Western Art, so the story goes, the emergence of the Modern depends on the death of “the antique”. A dry, lifeless, academic notion of beauty had to be destroyed to make space for more exciting, democratic, and relevant modes of representation. The relics of Greece and Rome, not to mention the many tedious neoclassical objects they inspired, were stripped, once and for all, of their claim to universal aesthetic supremacy. Not only does this grand narrative risk replacing one hierarchy with another; it also works to eclipse the work of visual artists who, positioned outside or marginal to the centre of artistic discourse, take up Greco-Roman forms and figures well after the ousting of the classical. In short, it is a narrative that does injustice to the artists of colour who engaged with the classical on their own terms and in their own time.

Seeing beyond the binary of classical and modern, this course looks at the work of Black artists working in the Anglo-American world between the 18th century and the present. Rather than structured chronologically, we will look at so-called “historic” (pre-1900) material together with later work, exploring, for example, the continuity between the art of queer Harlem Renaissance artist Richard Bruce Nugent and the designs of the British sculptor and illustrator John Flaxman. The course will also touch on non-traditional media, including vinyl-cover album art, and we will deploy works of fiction and poetry as a means of illuminating both art objects and their history.

Other case studies will include the verse of Phillis Wheatley and its connection to the art of the Royal Academy, the sculpture of Edmonia Lewis and Selma Burke, Romare Bearden’s 1977 cycle of Homeric collages A Black Odyssey, the 2006 series Roaming by Carrie Mae Weems, and Kara Walker’s recent installations for the Tate Modern: Fons Americanus and Shell Grotto. In addition to exploring cases of Black Classicism in visual art, our goal will be to gauge how associations between classical form and whiteness offered a creative challenge to artists of African descent. We will also determine whether the humanist integration of classical form and liberty made the art of Greece and Rome especially appealing for artists whose humanity, and claim to freedom, had been undermined for centuries by the powers that be.

Instructor: Professor JP Park

Since the 18th century the binary of “East and West” has functioned as a paradigmatic cultural comparison. In many people’s minds, these constructs represent two opposite poles of human experience. Right up to the present day, some Western writers argue the uniqueness (and thus superiority) of European art, while others have advocated learning from Asian ideals. Likewise, some scholars, such as Friedrich von Schlegel, believe that Chinese is the most primitive of languages, while other scholars believe that it is the most advanced. With increasing globalization and the rise of China as a world power, the need to stretch our imaginations beyond the constraints of traditional constructs has become a serious concern for fields ranging from business and law to anthropology and social work.

One of the major goals of this course is to offer you the tools to critically examine popular accounts of China, its art and cultures. Exposure to logical, historical, artistic, and literary modes of analysis will prepare students to recognize common misconceptions and formulate questions about Chinese art and culture in more rigorous and sophisticated ways. In addition, through a careful examination of scholarly research on both Eastern and Western arts, you can acquire a fuller appreciation for the diversity of cultural expression and shared human experience. In this process, you will gain an understanding of how the field is structured and how it has grown by tracing important debates of recent years. While providing a range of topics, this course hopes to produce future scholars who are well equipped with balanced and critical perspectives.

Instructor: Nancy Thebaut

This course will consider the ways that medieval objects figure and facilitated relationships between people and the divine. From marriage to mystical union, medieval works of art played a central role in shaping notions of family, fantasy, and care. It also examines the visual vocabulary of desire with close attention to gender, considering the ways that gender-fluid bodies could express individual desires and effectively enable religious experiences for their viewers. Beyond secondary source literature, readings will include several primary sources (love letters between nuns, treatises on friendship, exegesis on marriage, legal texts on sexual crimes), as well as more recent writing on love (e.g., bell hooks, Lauren Berlant), friendship, and sexuality, particularly from queer and feminist perspectives. The course will also draw from Oxford collections, including manuscripts at the Bodleian Library and a range of objects at the Ashmolean. During the 2025-2026 year, the class will be taught at the same time as an exhibition of a similar topic at The Cloisters (Metropolitan Museum of Art), co-curated by the instructor. There will accordingly be opportunities to think together about the exhibition’s objects and methods in relation to course topics.