University of Glasgow

During the 19th century painting flourished in Scotland and its artists made a significant contribution to British artistic developments. This course traces the development of Scottish painting during this period and introduces students to the discipline of art history. Focusing on some of the major artists of the period, such as Raeburn, Nasmyth, Wilkie, Paton, Orchardson, McTaggart and the Glasgow Boys, the course highlights the principal characteristics and innovations of their art and the context in which it was created. The development of Scottish painting within the wider framework of European art are also be explored.

This course offers a timely reassessment of the practice of child acting in the early modern theatre. Exploring the output of companies such as the Children of the Chapel Royal alongside works by Shakespeare, Marlowe and Middleton, it questions the repeated use of child and adolescent actors to portray female and sexually marginalized characters on stage; and situates the strategies attendant on boy playing in relation to embryonic queer art-forms such as drag and punning cant.

This course provides students with the opportunity to gain an understanding and awareness of graphic design, the theory, and context associated with the subject. The course also provides the opportunity to explore a range of strategies applied effectively for recording and developing visual communication, exploring conceptual ideas to be documented in a sketchbook or visual research journal, supported by contextual secondary references where appropriate.

This is a single-semester course taught in semester two: Art History in Action. It examines some long lasting issues in the history of art between Antiquity and the present day, including the relationship between the depiction of the natural world and a culture of idealism during the Renaissance and more recently. It also looks at dialogues between past and present, classical order and romanticism and between art as personal expression and as collective experience.

This course examines the relationship between Northern European and Italian Renaissance pictorial cultures with particular reference to Dürer's exposure to and adaptation of Italian art and ideas. A comprehensive survey of Dürer's prints, drawings and paintings will form the main visual material, together with the work of selected earlier German artists and of Dürer's German and Italian contemporaries. The course poses the question of what the Renaissance means in the North, of what is involved in the importation of one culture into another, and it examines the validity of the terms Late Gothic and Renaissance and of notions of artistic progress based on the use of such terms.

This course examines Dada and Surrealism, two hugely influential international art movements of the 20th century, and focuses not only on the links between them in terms of their membership and artistic concerns, but also on establishing key differences in their approaches to social and political change and their ideological and philosophic positions. The course includes the study of a diverse range of Dada and Surrealist practices including: collage and photomontage; literary texts and publishing; chance and found objects; live performance; film; and photography.

This course examines gendered and sexual attitudes and behaviors in Scotland during the period c.1800-1918. Traditionally perceived as an era of change from a time of repression to a more liberated modernity, recent historiography points to diversity, ambiguity, and continuity as well as change.

This American Studies course is a critical and intersectional examination of the United States' ever-evolving, if often paradoxical, racial politics. Beginning with the colonization of North America to present day the course interrogates the politics of difference through several key themes including overlapping definitions and representation of ethnicity, race, and racism and its continuous impact on modern American identity, politics, its legal system, society, arts, culture, and economy.

This course studies the literature, art, history, and politics of Classical Athens. It looks at a variety of myths that were popular in Classical Athens, the contexts and mediums through which these myths circulated. It discusses the relationship between these stories, democratic ideology, and the Athenians' understanding of their history.