By Cara Turner, Second Year BA History of Art Having spent time at the Pitt Rivers Museum whilst researching a Nigerian mask for the extended ‘Object Essay’ in first year, I was keen to see beyond the surface of the museum. The collections placement, a co-ordination between the Department of History of Art and a variety of Oxford’s incredible collections, allowed me to do this as part of the second-year course. During the Michaelmas and Hilary terms, I spent one morning a week in the Photograph and Manuscript Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum. The museum has a vast and varied collection of ..read more

By Hannah Debson, MSt History of Art and Visual Culture (2019) The Laurence Binyon Prize The famous historian of Chinese art Laurence Binyon created a prize open to Oxford students of all disciplines, to encourage students to engage with the arts in other cultures. Specifically the prize enables travel to Asia or another area outside of Europe. This type of academic grant is unusual, given that it requires your topic of interest to be completely independent from any current academic projects, and as such it encourages students to follow passions and interests beyond their studies. There is a ..read more

By Mary Caple, MSt History of Art and Visual Culture (2019) When I was asked to put together a blog post for this site, I tried to think of what I would have wanted to know going into the History of Art MSt degree. Most of the tips that follow might seem obvious at the outset; these are pieces of advice repeated to postgraduate students all over the country at the start of each academic year. There is so much going on – many student magazines! committees! museums! – that differentiating one from another and figuring out which speaks to you can take months, and by then you’d be a third of the ..read more

By Madeleine McCarthy and Michael Kurtz (BA History of Art 2019)   1. Learn to love the Sackler Library It’s easy (cool, even) to go your whole degree without really using the purpose-built art history library, especially if your college has a well-equipped internal library. But if you give the Sackler some time and let it become one of your spaces in Oxford, it can be a saving grace. After all, what it lacks in glamour, natural light and beauty it makes up for with large desks, comfortable chairs and every history of art book you will need. Having a place to escape to (from the occasionally ..read more

By Helena Guzik and Sylvia Alvares-Correa (DPhil History of Art) On Friday, June 7th, Oxford welcomed over 70 international delegates to the “Pilgrimage and the Senses” conference, hosted in the historic St Luke’s Chapel in the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter. Organised by Oxford History of Art DPhil Students Helena Guzik and Sylvia Alvares-Correa, with assistance from Shanti Daffern (MSt Student, Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford), the interdisciplinary conference shed light on how sensory perception shapes and is shaped by the experience of pilgrimage across cultures, faith ..read more

By Sofia Garré, (MSt History of Art and Visual Culture 2018) This research project was made possible by generous funding awarded by the Edgar Wind Benefactors Committee and the John Fell Fund. It concerned the provenance of a set of photographs by Adolphe Braun of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, housed in the Visual Resources Centre. Also of interest was the possibility of a connection with Professor Edgar Wind, first Professor of History of Art at Oxford, who specialised in the work of Michelangelo. Last year, like many fellow Master’s students, I was busy writing my dissertation, preparing for ..read more

By Dr Sarah Griffin (DPhil History of Art 2018), Research Assistant at the Oxford Internet Institute and Junior Teaching Fellow at the Ashmolean Museum. As art historians, we don’t need to be persuaded of the importance of visual culture to the study of the past. The pedagogical value of interacting with and reading objects and images is central to the ways in which we teach and research. In recent years, other Humanities subjects have become increasingly interested in material culture, moving away from traditional text-based teaching to incorporate more object handling and museum visits, dem ..read more

By Alex Solovyev and Michael Moore-Jones, MSt History of Art and Visual Culture 2019 In March 2001 the Taliban government of Afghanistan destroyed the two monumental Buddhas carved into a cliff in the Bamiyan province of central Afghanistan. Less than a year later, Professor Finbarr Barry Flood, Professor of Humanities at NYU, wrote an article for Art Bulletin responding to the widespread public perception of Islamic iconoclasm that the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas engendered. He wrote in that article, in 2002: To many commentators, the obliteration of the Buddhas seemed to hark back t ..read more

A valedictory post by Craig Clunas, Professor Emeritus of the History of Art The Professorship of Art History at Oxford comes attached to a fellowship at Trinity College, but Trinity is a small college and cannot provide accommodation for its professorial fellows, so in the eleven years I have held this role my place of work has been Littlegate House. Certainly not the most beautiful building in the collegiate university, but it is serviceable and practical and the allocation of space to the professor is very generous, with its two sunny rooms far exceeding anything I’ve been given in either ..read more