The Yale Center for British Art offers annually a two-semester, two-credit Undergraduate Special Term Course. The course is designed to enable a student to undertake a focused research project on British visual and material culture in conjunction with a major exhibition at the Center. The student’s project will form part of the intellectual preparation for the associated exhibition; thus the course will allow the student both to develop high-level research skills and to experience firsthand the intellectual and logistical processes involved in the creation of a major exhibition and its associated scholarly programming.
Travel
The course of study includes two field trips in North America and abroad. The trips are funded by the Center and coordinated with the course instructor. In most cases, field trips are scheduled in the fall and spring recess periods. Funding for Special Term Course travel is generously provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Apply
Sophomores and juniors majoring in any subject may apply. Though the course will be for two semesters, the student’s first semester work must be satisfactory in order to proceed to the second. The course is Cr/Year only.
Applications for the Special Term Course offering for academic year 2012–13 are now closed. The Special Term Course for 2013–14 will be posted in fall 2012.
Recent Special Term Course Offerings
The current course for the academic year 2011–12 focuses on an exhibition planned in conjunction with a major UK-based project, “Representing Re-Formation: Reconstructing Renaissance Monuments,” funded by The Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. This interdisciplinary project is being developed by space scientists, historians, art historians, archaeologists, and museologists at English Heritage and the universities of Leicester, Oxford, and Yale. It focuses on a group of Renaissance tomb monuments at St. Michael’s Church in Framlingham, Suffolk. The tombs, which belonged to the 3rd and 4th Howard Dukes of Norfolk, were moved to Framlingham from Thetford Priory in Norfolk, but how their construction may have changed upon the move from Thetford is the issue to be examined. They will be analyzed along with sculptural and architectural fragments excavated from the ruins of the priory in 1934. The instructor is Lisa Ford, Associate Head of Research at the Center, and a member of the project research team. The Special Term Course student for 2011–12 is Lingyuxiu Zhong (MC ’12).