On completion of this module students will be able to:

• Appreciate artistic expression of the human form through time
• Critically analyse significant issues pertaining to the human body from the deep past to the hypermodern era and across geographic space
• Appreciate the physical complexity of the human form
• Better understand the body’s responses to the external world and gain insight into human emotion, vulnerability and resilience
• Consider and contribute to design elements which might enhance human function
• Recognise, appreciate and celebrate the stages of a human body over its lifetime
• Have a heightened awareness of “gender”
• Gain insight into digital media and trends in bodily expression

A Brief Module Outline :

• Classical archaeologist, Amanda Kelly, will trace the Classical portrayal of the human body from Polykleitos to Bernini. Themes discussed will include mastering perspective, capturing emotion and physical connection, portraying aging and artistic interaction (covering audible, environmental and human agency).
• This artistic theme will be further developed by art historian, Sean Leatherbury, who will explore bodies and bodilessness, looking at representations of disability and illness followed by a study in the portrayal of ethereal beings.
• Bioarchaeologist and human osteologist, Jess Beck, will look at human skeletal remains from archaeological sites to answer questions about what peoples lives were like in the past.
• Anita Radini will explore the mummified body looking at mummification through time, from science to culture. She will be bringing us around the world in 8 mummies.
• David Cordova Bulens will provide an engineer’s perspective on human movement. He will look at human tactile physiology, drawing on his work on the replication of human touch. Stephen will outline modern advances in AI focusing on imagined movement/rehearsal to enable more intelligent dexterous manipulation.
• Neurobiologist, Mark Pickering, will explore how the body is represented in the brain. Mark will explain how the brain creates a model of the body relative to the world around it, and how the brain controls how the body interacts with its environment (constituting explorations on sensory perception and motor control).
• Katherine O’Donnell will investigate mythical foundation stories that explain how human bodies came into being. Katherine will also explore concepts of ‘Sex’ and ‘Gender’ and provide an overview of the changing feminist theorisations of the concept ‘gender’ including debates between ‘essentialists’ and ‘social constructionists’.
• Biological Anthropologist Robin Feeney (specialised in Forensic Anthropology) will present a scientific examination of the bio-cultural evolution and variation in the human bone and dental record as a means to understand our biological diversity as a species.

Not applicable to this module.

• Feedback individually to students, post-assessment
• Group/class feedback, post-assessment
• Online automated feedback

Not yet recorded.