LADES5261 Global Objects in Context Course Descriptor

Course Overview

This course engages with key topics in art history through the lens of specific objects. Using London’s rich collections students will benefit from direct encounters with ‘global’ objects: objects that originate in different parts of the globe (Africa, Asia, the Americas or Europe) and objects that move about the world, because they have been captured by imperial, colonial and post-colonial economies. Global objects are material and cultural manifestations of inter-connected economies, and they take and make different meanings in different contexts (craft and labour; materials and technology; ritual and heritage; use and identity; value and display). Students will learn that when art objects are understood as global objects they can offer valuable insights into strategies of innovation, communication, commodification, transculturation and appropriation.

Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of the course, students will be able to:

Knowledge and Understanding

Subject Specific Skills

Transferable and Employability Skills

Teaching and Learning

This course has a syllabus and online learning resources, including structured assignments to facilitate progress.

The teaching and learning activities for this course are:

• 40 scheduled hours (lectures, workshops, site visits, and scheduled assessment activities)
• 110 private study hours (with structured assignments)

Faculty hold regular ‘office hours’, which are opportunities for students to drop in or sign up to explore ideas, raise questions, or seek targeted guidance or feedback, individually or in small groups.

Students are to attend and participate in all the teaching and learning activities for this course and to manage their directed learning and private study.

Indicative total learning hours for this course: 150

Assessment

Both formative and summative assessment are used as part of this course, with purely formative opportunities typically embedded within interactive teaching sessions or office hours.

Summative Assessments

For any instance of the course, there will be only one AE1 assessment activity and one AE2 assessment activity. These will be confirmed before course registration opens.

The first assessment will give students an opportunity to communicate their ideas about their object of choice. The second assessment will enable students to develop this initial work into a fuller inquiry into the various contexts within which their object takes and gives meanings.

Further information about the assessments can be found in the Course Syllabus.

Feedback

Students will receive formative and summative feedback in a variety of ways, written (e.g. marked up on drafts or through email) or oral (e.g. as part of interactive teaching sessions or in office hours).

Indicative Reading

Note: Comprehensive and current reading lists are produced annually in the Course Syllabus or other documentation provided to students; the indicative reading list provided below is for a general guide and part of the approval/modification process only.

• Cooke, Edward S. Jr, (2022) Global Objects: Towards a Connected Art History, Princeton University Press.
• Findlen, (ed.) 2021, Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500-1800, Routledge
• Gerritsen & Riello (eds.), (2015) The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World, Routledge
• J. Robertson, Hutton, et al (eds. 2021), The History of Art: A Global View Prehistory to the Present, New York: Thames and Hudson College
• Sloboda, Stacey and Michael Yonan (eds.) (2019) Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies of Art. Bloomsbury Visual Arts.
• Myers, J. C. & Deirdre H McMahon, eds. (2016) The Objects and Textures of Everyday Life in Imperial Britain, Routledge.

Indicative Topics

Note: Comprehensive and current topics for courses are produced annually in the Course Syllabus or other documentation provided to students; the indicative topics provided below are used as a general guide and part of the approval/modification process only.

• Art and design in global locations
• Heritage, Display and Ritual
• Processes of craft and labour
• Types of materials and technologies
• Function and experienced meanings
• Imperial, Colonial and Post-colonial contexts as relevant