The Association of Art Historians dissertation prize has been won by an OU student on the art history MA programme for the second year in a row. This is great news and testifies to the strength of graduate art history at the OU. It is quite exceptional for students from the same institution to win the prize two years running. This success is all the more impressive in view of the fact that the OU MA in art history was only set up relatively recently.
Against competition from students at other UK universities, Marie Palin was awarded this year's prize for her dissertation, "Hans Bellmer's Poupées, Fritz Lang's Metropolis and the Subversion of Female Gender Stereotypes in Interwar Germany". Marie argues that during a period when women – together with Jews, homosexuals and gypsies – were characterized as 'others' responsible for Germany's woes and were conventionally portrayed as culprits in need of being punished, this stereotype was subverted by the work of Lang and Bellmer. The markers praised the high quality of the thesis and Marie's success in demonstrating that art is not simply shaped by its historical context but can also challenge and construct identities through its representations. In addition, another of our students, Alan Davidson, was highly commended (one of only two students to be so) for his dissertation, ‘Interpretations of Cindy Sherman's work based on a comparison of her 2006 and 1997 retrospectives: Aspects of Contingency of Identity'.
In 2008, the prize went to Anthony McGrath for his dissertation "Challenging Hogarth: A Revisionist Account of the Authorship of the Court Room at the Foundling Hospital London". Anthony questioned the widely-held assumption that the famous scheme of decoration for the Foundling Hospital in London, initiated by Hogarth in the 1740s, was the first example of a public display of works of art donated by artists in London. The markers described it as 'a richly informative and clearly written dissertation that presents an original and important argument'.
Since the first MAs in art history were awarded in 2006, the programme has produced some extremely impressive dissertations. This testifies not only to the excellent students that the programme has recruited, but also to the rigorous and challenging nature of the curriculum and to the calibre and commitment of the associate lecturers who teach on the MA. Marie's dissertation was supervised by Dr Ekaterina Morozova, and Anthony's was supervised by Dr Nicholas Grindle. Another of Dr Grindle's students, Ruth Jochum-Glasser, won the Dr Maria Schaumayer Foundation prize in her native Austria in 2008 for her MA dissertation, ‘Gender and Transgression in J.M.W Turner's Landscape Imagery 1810-1840'.
It is great to see the achievements of OU art history MA students being acknowledged by the wider art-historical community.
Follow this link to find out more about AAH student funding and awards.
Follow this link if you would like to find out more about the OU's 3-year part-time MA in Art History programme.