Study Art History in S2 2025
- ART HISTORY
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Study at the University of Sydney with our world-renowned scholars and award-winning teachers in partnership with key cultural institutions on campus and across Sydney. If you are a current art history or Sydney College of the Arts student, or interested in studying Art History we have a study pathway for you. Visit the Art History Discipline Site today. Take advantage of the international programs and events of the Power Institute and study in the Schaeffer Fine Arts Library. Study objects of art in the Chau Chak Wing Museum, Sydney College of the Arts Galleries or Verge Gallery on campus, at galleries and institutions across Sydney, or in Fieldwork intensives in Berlin or Paris. The Art History Major is the perfect pathway to postgraduate studies in Art Curating and a career in the arts and cultural sector.
Art is a profound and persistent human impulse. Art History explores the history of making, viewing and experiencing works of art and architecture. It asks key questions such as 'what is art for?', 'what does art mean?' and 'how does art function in broader culture?' These questions will be part of a dynamic encounter with complex and compelling works of art. Find out more about the Undergraduate Art History Major HERE.
Units on offer in Semester 2
ARHT1002 Shock of the Now: Global Art since 1900 (Core unit)
Teamtaught by Dr Keith Broadfoot, Associate Professor Donna Brett,and others.
Hannah Bronte, Still I Rise, 2018
Art shapes our cities, streets, galleries, phones and minds. It is now made with every conceivable material, and sometimes none at all. It shocks, challenges, soothes, entertains, engrosses and overwhelms us. This unit charts the history of Modern and Contemporary Art across the world, as it is shaped by and shapes society, politics and environment. It shows current concerns in art , with materials, landscape, self-image, politics, and the body are grounded in a century of global experiment.
This team-taught unit frames a century and a half of art-making by marking some of the key turns in artistic production and art historical thinking. This is set against the background of key moments leading to the rise of the global avantgarde commencing in the nineteenth century with the development of photography, new ways of seeing thanks to developments in colour theory and technologies leading to a turn toward the modern. We explore key moments in the turbulent twentieth century framed by war, fascism, major shifts in people across the globe, and the rise of America as the new centre of art in the post-war period. We investigate parallel modernisms, shifting the emphasis away from a Euro-American emphasis to explore the embrace of modernist principles in Asia. Next we consider the postmodern and contemporary periods of art by exploring the cultural and artistic revolutions of the 1960s-80s, Aboriginal art as central to the contemporary debate, and lastly we look at the tensions between the development of the digital in Contemporary Hollywood Film, photography and video, and the turn to relational art and identity politics. It is a jam-packed semester that promises a dynamic look at what constituted a vibrant, powerful, shocking and revolutionary period of global art making.
Keith Broadfoot lectures on modernism and Australian art, including theories of spectatorship.
Donna West Brett is Chair of Art History and specialises in modern and contemporary art, with a specific research focus on the photographic medium.
This unit critically analyses the visual culture of modern imperialism and cultural histories of resistance. We engage diverse artistic practices and multiple geographies: from imperial city planning in the metropole to parodic street theatre in the colonies; from exoticized and primitivist colonial imagery to the visual culture of wars of resistance. This unit engages with post-colonial and Indigenous perspectives, critical race theory and debates about global histories of art as tools for critically analysing the visual histories of economic and territorial imperialism, as well as their contentious contemporary legacies.
Roger Benjamin is an internationally renowned art historian. His research fields have included Matisse and the art of the Fauves; French Orientalist art and colonialism 1830-1930; contemporary Australian art, and contemporary Australian Indigenous art.
ARHT2680 Why Art Matters (CORE unit) Professor Mark Ledbury and Dr Caroline Paganussi
Barbara Kruger, We will no longer be seen and not heard, 1985 (detail), Chau Chak Wing Museum Collection. Why Art Matters explores the importance of art in the world, through object-based seminars, lectures and student led presentations. It asks why art is so fundamental to human experience, and how we might study it and articulate its importance. It builds key art historical skills of recognition, analysis, interpretation and expression, and introduces students to a wide variety of different material objects and artworks. The course is taught in small group streams, largely in the Chau Chak Wing museum and will help all majoring art history students build confidence and skill in researching, analysing and communicating about art.
Mark Ledbury's comprehensive research focus spans eighteenth and nineteenth-century European art, including artists Francois Boucher, Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Baptiste Greuze; as well as questions of genre in visual art and methods of art history.
Caroline Paganussi is a curator and a specialist in Early Modern European art and its intersections with the wider world.
ARHT3662 On Photography and the Wretched Screen (selective) Associate Professor Donna Brett, with India Urwin and Aiden Magro
This unit will draw on a wide range of photographic material, including university and museum collections, to examine the pivotal role of photography in recording and shaping our image-culture across diverse global contexts. The unit will engage with key debates to examine the social, cultural, theoretical, historical and art practice contexts of the photograph as an image and as an object. Key theories from Walter Benjamin to Hito Steyerl will be used to interrogate themes of memory, documentary and the real, witnessing, conflict, gender and sexuality, decolonisation, and the digital.
Donna West Brett is Chair of Art History and specialises in modern and contemporary art, with a specific research focus on the photographic medium.
Image: Catherine Opie, Pig Pen, 1993
ARHT3680 Text, Image, Sound: Islamic Book Arts (selective) Dr Peyvand Firouzeh
This unit provides a thematic study of historical and contemporary book arts in the Islamic world, drawing on the art of painting and calligraphy as well as key texts to engage with the foundational interrelations between text, image, orality and other forms of sensory experience. Starting with early Qur’ans, we move to pre-modern illustrated manuscripts, and modern and contemporary works of art inspired by manuscript cultures, exploring histories of authorship, portraiture, patronage, workshop practices, audience and perception, as well as the collecting and display of manuscripts in museums. Several site visits to Sydney’s various collections offer opportunities for object-based learning.
Peyvand Firouzeh teaches on a wide range of arts in the Islamic world, including both religious and non-religious material culture: from poetry and painting to sacred places, talismans and everyday objects. Her classes offer innovative hands-on, object-based learning to engage with important questions in the field of art history. As a student, you will get a chance to access behind-the-scenes contemporary and historical collections in Sydney, connect with contemporary artists and curators, and experience a breadth of topics and visual materials from the Middle East, South Asia, Australia, and beyond.
Image: Presenting the horse-riding cat to King Khusraw, Iran, 1648. The Royal Collection, Windsor Castle.
Honours
ARHT4113 Art is the Issue: Histories and Theories
This unit concentrates on key developments in the history of art history as a discipline. The seminar centres on selected polemical texts and disputes in the discipline, to demonstrate that much of what all art historians do is contested and problematic. From the question of what we should study to the always vexed question of 'how' we should study it, the aim of this unit is to give you a sense of both the history and the problematic of the discipline in which you will be engaged whether you intend careers as scholars, researchers, curators, or art writers.
Image: Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia 1514
Roger Benjamin is an internationally renowned art historian. His research fields have included Matisse and the art of the Fauves; French Orientalist art and colonialism 1830-1930; contemporary Australian art, and contemporary Australian Indigenous art.
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