Art History and Museology: Translating Critical Approaches and Digital Tools into Innovative Pedagogical Practice

Their project aims to develop new thinking into the relationship between art history and museology and explore how this can translate into inventive forms of teaching. Building on the strong institutional links between art history and museums that exist at Charles and St Andrews, the team will work with students from both universities to probe the ways in which new critical frameworks and digital tools can help tell different stories about art and cultural heritage, surface hidden narratives and communicate marginalised histories.

In October 2024, colleagues from Charles will come to St Andrews to share best practice, explore new offerings in digital art history and discuss the value of recent critical approaches. In late spring 2025, a group of staff and students from St Andrews will travel to Prague to test how the theoretical and pedagogical questions of the first workshop can generate new thinking in relation to specific case studies. These include: the politics of public space in Artwall Gallery; the visibility of ‘non-collections’ in the photographic archive at Charles; communication of marginalised voices in the collections of the National Gallery and Jewish Museum; and rethinking Emil Holub’s African heritage collection in the Náprstek Museum.