Independent Work in the History of Art
NB: Practice of Art students, please refer to the Undergraduate Handbook for details on your independent work. An Independent Work Guide for PoA is in the works.
In general, most independent work in Art & Archaeology begins with the selection of an object or objects or a theme on which to focus. In all cases except for the fall JIW, the student then develops an original interpretation of this material—one that does not already exist in the scholarly or critical literature and that employs modes of reasoning or methods that reflect original thinking—based on examination of the object of inquiry, review of the secondary literature, archival research, primary documents, and examination of other relevant or useful literature from other fields. A student’s particular course of research will be determined by the nature of his or her topic, thus the preceding list represents just some of the types of sources on which a student will draw in conducting his or her research, formulating his or her argument, and writing his or her paper or thesis.
Undergrad Forms and Files contains several important documents for you to view as PDF or download to use as guides including but not limited to the following:
The Independent Work Guide assists in the process of formulating your paper.
The Department Style Guide will assist you in formatting your work, including the structure of citations.
The Thesis Template should be downloaded and used from the beginning of writing your paper to aid in proper formatting. Your thesis must be written in Word from the beginning. Transferring it from another program like Pages will result in style and format issues, particularly with footnotes and section breaks.
All relevant files are on the Undergrad Forms and Files page.