MA History of Art and Archaeology

On successful completion of the Dissertation the student will have: Demonstrated their capacity to carry out a substantial piece of academic work on a selected topic in the field of art & archaeology;
defined a topic for examination and articulated a coherent scheme for examining the topic;
gathered the relevant information and analysed and presented this information in a way which satisfactorily assesses the topic.

Engaging with debates surrounding race, gender, colonialism, modernity and decoloniality, this module critically introduces theories and methods prevalent in art history and explores the discipline’s increasing inclusion of forms of knowledge salient to understanding artistic production and reception in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and their diasporas.

This module aims to examine the imageries of power, status and authority in Japan. The material covered may address a particular theme - such as Buddhist Art in Japan or Art and Power during the Tokugawa Shogunate - or address the intersection of art and authority in a particular period in Japanese history, such as the Edo (1603-1868) or Meiji (1868-1912) periods. The material examined may range from wall- and screen-paintings to the art and architecture of temple, court, state and/or empire. Class discussion will be complemented by study-visits to museums.

Japanese Art and Visual Culture

This course enriches the existing range of courses on Islamic art and architecture by considering a wide range of artefacts within the particular perspective of cultural contacts with Europe, examining the ways in which Islamic artefacts were acquired, appreciated, utilized and imitated, and placing them also within the wider framework of the developing European intellectual awareness of Islam.

This module will complement the aims and objectives of the MA Curating Cultures degree by providing teaching which focuses on the physical spaces for works of art/artefacts across cultures. It will also be object based, providing students studying any region with transferable skills. It will further use a wide range of displayed objects, including those in SOAS collections and the Brunei Gallery as the primary teaching resource. It will thus provide students of the MA Curating Cultures programme with direct experience of diverse contemporary and historical display practices in museums, galleries and commercial spaces, as well as digital modes of display.

How might we understand art as a site of politics?  In this module we consider how visual artists and art collectives have taken positions on political change in Africa since the early twentieth century, spanning from anti-colonial resistance and the struggle against apartheid to the Arab Spring and Rhodes Must Fall movement.  Through case studies ranging from early portrait photography in West Africa to recent live art protests, we think through aesthetic approaches to the political.

The course explores the multi-polarity of the field of Chinese art history today by investigating the historical methodologies, canons, practices and other forces by which it has been shaped. The course is primarily focused on the various arts of dynastic China.

Art and Visual Culture of Modern and Contemporary China

This module explores maritime connectivity and the dynamic role played by Southeast Asian Buddhist and Hindu polities, circa 200 – 1400 CE. It does so through the art historical and archaeological evidence, drawing on a diverse range of material including sacred sculpture and monuments, textual sources, archaeological sites, and shipwrecks. The course critically investigates the role maritime Southeast Asia played in the formation of regional religious identities and art styles. Incipient Southeast Asian polities drove the development of the first millennium CE maritime networks linking the region with the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia. By highlighting interconnectivity, the module complements other offerings within the department that focus on the aforementioned areas by enabling students to situate these cultures within a larger Indian Ocean World context.

This module addresses the development of Korean art and visual culture in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The material may address a particular theme or period and may assess art produced on the Korean peninsula – North and South - as well as that by the Korean diasporas in Asia, Europe and the USA. By placing local production of the arts within a wider understanding of key issues, such as modernity, nationalism, globalisation and gender, the development of a Korean visual aesthetic will be addressed.

The material examined may include paintings, sculpture, textiles and/or ceramics, produced in North and South Korea as well as by the Korean diaspora in addition to recent developments within the art world including the use of performance, installation and video art.

This module examines the movement of porcelain from China and its impact in regions around the world, including: East and West Asia, South and Southeast Asia, Europe and Britain and the Americas. A main emphasis will be on the impact of these porcelains in the regions where they were encountered including: reception, imitation, display and collecting, design and daily life practices.

This module studies Islamic visuality, or the cultural construction of vision in the Islamic world. Attention is paid to 1) the sociological factors that influence vision and help determine what is visible and invisible for any given region of this world; and 2) the elements of the built environment that reinforce and index aspects of this culturally constructed vision.

This module will explore the curating, exhibiting and display of Buddhism and Hinduism in institutions (museums, galleries, auction houses, and so forth) worldwide. In doing so, it investigates the question of sacred space in museums and the displaying of sacred objects in general. It begins by problematizing the transformations of Buddhist and Hindu objects as they move from sacred contexts in Asia to museums in the West. It analyzes the interpretive and museological frameworks under which this occurs, looking at case studies in both non-western and western contexts. The module examines a range of curatorial strategies, methodologies and paradigms of knowledge production employed by exhibitions and museums. The module also looks at the collecting histories and strategies of the major Buddhist and Hindu museum collections worldwide. Doing so provides students with a thorough understanding of these collections and how they continue to play an integral role in the shaping and production of knowledge particularly in regard to the disciplines of the art history and archaeology of Buddhism and Hinduism.

This course is designed to introduce the material culture (art, architecture, numismatics, and so-called 'minor arts') of the different peoples and polities of medieval and early modern Anatolia in the Seljuk, Beylik, and early Ottoman periods. Students will learn to analyse the totality of material cultural production and how it changed as the result of economic, social, and historical forces. They will learn to analyse the artistic interplay between Islamic and Christian societies, as well as the artistic manifestations of such subjects as mysticism, chivalry, and Eurasian steppe traditions

This course explores the image of the so-called Historical Buddha as a product of theoretical and practical concerns – and as a site of their (re)production, past and present. We gauge the difficulties and potentialities of developing interpretive tools engaging with and derived from Buddhist points of view.

Curating Cultures is designed to equip students with a range of critical, theoretical and practical approaches to curating. Themes and issues addressed on the course will include: histories and ideologies of curating; theories of collecting, interpreting objects and writing exhibition texts; contemporary issues and critical debates; exhibition programming and design; collections management and conservation. In particular, the course will provide an in-depth knowledge of the practical, intellectual and ethical issues involved in the interpretation and display of the SOAS teaching collections, and will culminate in student-led, group exhibitions of these collections in the SOAS Library. By providing practical, hands-on experiences of curating, the course will develop students’ knowledge and understanding of aspects of the exhibition development process, as well as team-working, organisational and communication skills. The course will appeal to students wishing to pursue careers as curators in museums or galleries in Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

This course examines the Islamic art and architecture of the Mediterranean basin between the 12th and 14th centuries, the period of the Crusades. It was a time of dynamism, with the rise of Latin Christian cultures in the north and west, the Reconquista, the Crusades, the eclipse of the Byzantine Empire, and the rise of Turco-Islamic states in its stead. While this course concentrates on Islamic art, it will examine overlaps between Islamic and Christian arts in the eastern Mediterranean during the two centuries of the Crusader states of the eastern Mediterranean. Emphasis will be on dynastic and regional developments, but will also track the rise of the commercialisation of material culture production. It also aims to sample the full range of material culture, complementing traditional emphases on arts of the court and religious art with commercial architecture, numismatics, and archaeological finds.

This course will introduce students to key themes, methods, and movements in the history of contemporary art through the lens of the global, with sustained attention to the transition from modernism, the spectres of colonialism and communism, transnational and diasporic subjectivities, the role of expanding markets, and the assertion of the self and the collective. To this end, recurring questions will include how contemporary art both embraces and critiques the effects of globalization, and how contemporary art has influenced the presumption of a global(ising) art history. By using case studies that include West Africa, Iran, Pakistan, India, China, Korea, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and their diasporas, this course will push students to critically question the binaries of local/global, centre/periphery, modern/primitive, East/West, and North/South.

The mandala is one of the most intriguing artistic expressions of Asian art due to its wide adoption and continuous reinterpretation. Of multivalent symbolism and meaning in religious practice, mandalas occur in numerous forms, formats and functions. This module examines the meanings and uses of the Buddhist mandala in the history of Buddhist art and architecture in Asia.

This module covers the period from the 5th century of the Common Era through to the collapse of the Yuan dynasty in the 14th century . It focusses primarily on the overland routes (Silk and Steppe) that connected China with Central Asia and also Northern India and Persia. Using both archaeological and textual materials, it examines the role of contact, interaction and exchange on the development of material culture (tombs, architecture, textiles, metalwork, ceramics, painting, sculpture, glass) in Central Asia and China.

The creation of sacred images and sacred spaces has been a major feature of the Hindu tradition for the last two thousand years. This module examines key themes and issues in the study of Hindu art and visual culture. The material discussed may include images, sculptures, paintings and/or prints from the early centuries CE through to the 14th century in South and/or Southeast Asia, and/or c.1500 to the present in South Asia. Central issues addressed include: anthropomorphism and the Hindu image; iconography, aesthetics and Hindu imagery; body, gender and Hindu images; narratives in sculpture and painting; materials, media and methods; image, ritual and performance; art and pilgrimage; the historiography of Hindu art. Class teaching will be complemented by visits to museum collections. Students will acquire not only a wide-ranging knowledge of approaches to Asian religious art in general, but also a deep understanding of the role of the visual arts in the Hindu tradition.

In this module we review the principles which underpin the UNESCO treaty, the shift from cultural preservation to cultural sustainability, questions of ownership, authenticity, economics, and rights. We take a case study approach to intangible cultural heritage across East and Central Asia, exploring the gaps between the principles enshrined in the convention, the priorities of the nation states which are signatories to the convention, and the management of heritage on the ground.