The students are uniquely skilled in their ability to look backwards and forwards at the same time: drawing on historical examples to envision and understand their own processes; sometimes to even further them and experiment with historic traditions, which have often fallen out of fashion. Their processes are innately research-led and this is due to the nature of their studies, inhabiting both practical and historical disciplines.

You can find their work here on this website.

In addition to their practice-based work, the breadth of dissertation topics produced by the MAFA students is indicative of the wide range of expertise of the teaching and research staff in the subject area, but also the levels of enquiry our students have for their subject. We often see in our MAFA cohort the blending of their own practice into their research for History of Art. This year, we've seen dissertations on a wide range of topics including the following: 

• Negotiating heritage on the island of Mozambique
• The complexities and contradictions of internet art conservation
• The depiction of forests in Finnish painting at the turn of the twentieth century
• Plasmaticity: the utopian potential of American animation
• Analysing the autonomy and perception of religious women in Pompeii through domestic frescos
• Aesthetics, politics and fantasy: The relationship between Surrealism and Artificial Intelligence

Congratulations to all of our students, and thank you for sharing your learning journey with us!