Module manager: Dr Richard Checketts
Email: r.s.checketts@leeds.ac.uk
Taught: Semester 1 (Sep to Jan) View Timetable
Year running 2025/26
This module is not approved as a discovery module
This module interrogates the history and legacies of the discipline of Art History, with a view to a critical reflection on what art history can do in the world we face today. We explore the distinct formation of Art History as a discipline rooted both in historical or antiquarian studies and in philosophical aesthetics, while also reflecting on its complex entanglements with discourses of nationalism and racial hierarchies and other more or less hidden structures of power. The module equips you to deal critically and reflexively with complex and often difficult legacies, and to take up now the transformative potential of the discipline. Please note this is an optional module and runs subject to enrolments. If a low number of students choose this module, then the module may not run and you may be asked to choose another module.
The module attends to the discipline of Art History in its historical formation, its distinct critical concerns, and its place within broader social frameworks. Through close readings of key texts within the ‘canon’ of art-historical writing, an overarching objective is to build a critical, reflective, and ethically informed engagement with the discipline we are working within. Our aim is to face the discipline in its full intellectual complexity, acknowledging that this includes the complex ways in which it was clearly implicated in constructions of race, as well as with more or less subtle ideas of gender, class and other categories in which social hierarchies and exclusions take shape. We will engage both with the development of Art History as a highly sophisticated, nuanced approach to understanding the world, and with those aspects of the discipline where we can now reflect on its misrecognitions, or non-recognitions of the worlds it emerged from. With a view towards advanced-level research in Art History, through both close reading and ‘reading against the grain’, we will build knowledge of the critical resources we can draw from historical study of the discipline. Directly tied with this, the module aims to embed the analytical clarity and rigour needed for sustained engagement with sources that might challenge us, but whose challenges usefully complicate our sense of the relations between the intellectual and the social.
On successful completion of the module, you will be able to:
1. Demonstrate a critical understanding of the origins and formation of the discipline of Art History through ‘canonical’ sources
2. Analyse challenging and complex intellectual frameworks through close reading and reflective writing
3. Evaluate the social, as well as intellectual legacies of the discipline of Art History
4. Demonstrate creative thinking about the critical potential of the complex, and often problematic sources underpinning Art History’s legacies
Skills Learning Outcomes
On successful completion of the module you will be able to:
5. Demonstrate critical thinking and the ability to weigh up different arguments and perspectives, using supporting evidence to form opinions, arguments, theories and ideas
6. Demonstrate ethical reflexivity in relation to the formulation of research practices and questions
Details of the syllabus will be provided on the Minerva organisation (or equivalent) for the module.
| Delivery type | Number | Length hours | Student hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lecture | 10 | 0.5 | 5 |
| Seminar | 10 | 1.5 | 15 |
| Private study hours | 180 | ||
| Total Contact hours | 20 | ||
| Total hours (100hr per 10 credits) | 200 | ||
Emphasis, each week of the module, on seminar-based teaching (including group work) will embed formative feedback on both the acquisition of subject-knowledge, and the module’s key objectives and skills outcomes in critical, reflective reading.
| Assessment type | Notes | % of formal assessment |
|---|---|---|
| Coursework | Written | 50 |
| Coursework | Written | 50 |
| Total percentage (Assessment Coursework) | 100 | |
Normally resits will be assessed by the same methodology as the first attempt, unless otherwise stated
Check the module area in Minerva for your reading list
Last updated: 14/04/2025
Errors, omissions, failed links etc should be notified to the Catalogue Team