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Research Groups in Art History

Our research groups are wide-ranging and demonstrate our broad interests within the discipline of Art History and beyond. Research degree students have the opportunity to partake in these groups. Activities include reading groups, seminar series, conferences, impact and engagement, and more informal conversations.

Objects and collections

What stories do objects tell? The objects and collections group explores the different ways in which objects have been collected, interpreted and displayed in the past and the present, and how they gain meaning across time and space.

Convenor: Amy.Barnes@open.ac.uk

Experiencing spaces: from material to pictorial

This group investigates how artists and designers have explored the three-dimensional world, taking ‘space’ as both a physical environment and representational category. The group’s research spans architecture and material and visual culture, and includes an interest in methodological approaches to their experiential dimension and historicity.

Co-convenor: Susie.West@open.ac.uk; Claire.Taylor@open.ac.uk

State, power and ideology

Art in the modern sense emerged alongside the nation-state and has always had an ideological role to play within it. This research group explores the relationships between artworks, artists and the nation-state with reference to the wide field of histories and geographies in which they are configured.

Co-convenors: Warren.Carter@open.ac.uk; Andrew.Murray@open.ac.uk

Open Ecologies

Nature has been understood in different ways across periods and cultures. This group explores how visual cultures construct and mediate knowledge of the natural world. It considers how art shapes our sense of the environment, how it responds to the environment around us, and how it engages with the climate crisis. The cluster engages with the current interest in Ecocriticism across the Humanities, and with questions of agency and ethics that underpin scholarship on the Anthropocene and the decolonial.

Co-convenors: Samuel.Shaw@open.ac.uk; Carla.Benzan@open.ac.uk

Vision, sensation, emotion

This group is interested in the role of vision and its place in the sensorium. Inquiry is focused on the status of images and visual experiences, extending beyond representational and pictorial forms to include imaginative images. The group is fundamentally concerned with the interaction between images and beholders, as well as with the nexus between visuality and the social. Theoretical approaches to representation are of interest, as is the historicisation of visual perception and its connection to epistemological shifts.

Co-convenors: Emma.Barker@open.ac.ukCarla.Benzan@open.ac.uk

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