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Art History Rules

Your guide to writing and researching art history!

  • Home
  • Essay Writing
    • Visual Analysis
      • Line
      • Color
      • Shape
      • Form
      • Naturalism
      • Symmetry
      • Balance
      • Proportion and Scale
      • Rhythm
      • Composition
    • Contextual Analysis
    • Theoretical Analysis
    • Structure
    • Citations
    • Formatting Example
    • Web Resources
    • Plagiarism
    • Evaluate Your Essay
  • Grad School
    • Researching Schools
    • Personal Statement
    • Letters of Recommendation

This site is intended as a guide for art history students! It has information and advice on how to write art history papers, how to find and cite sources, and how to apply for graduate school.

Art history does rule! It is the finest and noblest of subjects, the most challenging and wonderful of studies! You will have the chance to hold thousand-year-old books and two-thousand-year-old sculptures, to travel the world (often on someone else’s dime), to gain access behind closed doors, to the insides of the vaults, beyond the red velvet ropes that stop the tourists from getting any closer to the masterpieces of the world.

Every discipline has its own particular (and often peculiar) rules to be followed. I have tried to assemble here a list of the Art History Rules. I hope you find it useful!

Essay Writing

Art History essays are not radically different from other sorts of essays you may have written before, but they do have some specific concerns. This section contains the Art History Rules for Essay Writing, and they should help.

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Web Resources

Anyone can put up a website and make it look pretty slick (heck, if I can do it, anyone can). Just because something is online, this does not make it correct.

Read more Web Resources

Grad School

Applying to graduate school in art history can either be a straightforward, rigorous, scholarly toil, or an agony akin to having the flesh ripped from your bones.  My hope is that this page will help you to find your way through the process with as much of the former and as little of the latter as possible!

Read more Grad School

About me

I am a professor in the Department of Art & Art History at California State University, Chico, where I teach courses on ancient and medieval art, monsters, and film.

Links

My faculty page
My academia.edu page
The Material Collective
MEARCSTAPA
Blog at WordPress.com.
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