Research Paper Due April 21st
Students must send proposal of Final Paper by Class 10
Students must meet with professor regarding Final Paper by Class 14
Analyze any work of art that you particularly like. It can be something we already covered or
something you found online, in an artbook, at a museum, or a film, magazine, TV Show, or
graphic novel (there are many options as long as it relates to visual analysis). Please check with
me first before you decide!
Your paper should include the following sections, more or less in this order:
1. An Introduction to your paper which should:
a) preview but not fully describe your work of choice
b) Present the central argument you’d like to make about your work
– Here you want to answer the question of why the work you choose is significant
in the context of art history. It could be a formal reason, a socio-political reason or
a combination of the two. Be creative!
2. Detailed description of your chosen work.
3. Summary of the artist’s biography and historical background.
4. Definition of a particular “critical problem” presented by the work, which
may involve either content or form. If there’s a mysterious figure or
object in it, what does it mean? Or if there’s something striking or
unusual about its composition, why does it look that way?
5. Brief survey of the scholarly literature about your artist. (I discuss how
to research this literature below.) Then summarize the two scholarly
approaches that you intend to make use of.
6. A detailed discussion of the work, showing how these two scholarly
interpretations offer two different answers to the “critical problem” you
posed in part 3.
7. Conclusion: Summary of what you have argued. Be sure in this section that you bring
everything together towards your central argument
Key point: Be sure that your paper flows as one cohesive unit. In other words, though you
will have separate “sections” don’t actually separate them, but think of them as parts of
the whole.
Length: Your paper should have 8-10 pages of text, double-spaced, not including
bibliography or illustrations.
Illustrations and formatting: Please include images of the work you are writing about and of
related works that you discuss in your interpretations. These illustrations should have full
captions, even if that information is also given in the text. You can place your illustrations
in a separate section called “appendix” at the end of your paper.
Researching the scholarly literature on an artist:
First, note that Wikipedia, Khan Academy, and sites like that do not qualify as scholarly
literature. I don’t mean that they aren’t informative – they often are and can be a good place to
start. But if you find important information or an interesting interpretation on one of those sites,
you then need to find the scholarly text that they got it from.
There are three basic ways of quickly researching an artist and/or a particular work.
1. Go into the Fordham library site and run an EBSCO or JSTOR search on your subject (also
a keyword search in the Fordham library site itself). This may yield dozens of texts, so you will
need to do some sifting to figure out which are important.
2. Review the Bibliography at the back of the textbook. This lists several dozen terrific
books for each chapter. A good place to start.
3. Review the essays and footnotes from a recent exhibition catalogue on your topic.
When a museum organizes an exhibition, the curators and their hard-working
research assistants usually assemble a comprehensive bibliography of everything
that has been published on the artist or topic. Out of this wealth of material, how
should you locate the texts that will be useful to you?
Here’s the answer. On any given artist, there are typically only 3-5 key texts, which
get cited over and over in the later literature on that artist. Begin by skimming
through the catalogue essays, first to see what the writers have to say and then to
see what sources they cite. When you look at the footnotes, pay attention to which
earlier texts get cited repeatedly. Those are the ones you want to read.
Getting More Advice on Research: If you are having trouble organizing your research or your
thoughts for the paper, please reach out to me for advice. We would
much prefer to give you feedback at an early stage, when it will be useful, rather than after
you’ve submitted your essay.
Footnotes:
Once you’ve located your key sources and begun writing your paper, please follow the basic
rules about citation:
1. Everything you learn must be credited to the source where you found it.
2. Ideas should be credited to their author in your main text. For instance, “As Michael
Baxandall has observed, the gestures in 15th-century paintings often correspond to
gestures described in contemporary manuals for preachers.”
3. Sources for factual information (for instance, the name of the patron who
commissioned an altarpiece) need to be footnoted but do not need to be mentioned
in the main text.
How should your footnotes be formatted? Please see:
https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide/citation-guide-1.html
You will notice that they distinguish between “Notes” and “Shortened Notes.” Please give a
full citation (a “Note”) the first time you cite a text. For later references, give an
abbreviated citation (a “Shortened Note”). There are many different ways of shortening
notes, all of them OK. The key thing is not to give the same long “Note” over and over again.
Another, related point about footnotes: if everything in a paragraph comes from the same
book or article, do not write individual footnotes for each sentence including information
from that source. Put one footnote at the end of the paragraph, listing the general
bibliographic information and then the individual pages that the information comes from.
However, if you cite multiple sources in the same paragraph, don’t do this. Instead, after the
first sentence drawing on source A, insert a full note to A. After the first sentence drawing
on source B, insert full note to B. Later references to sources A and B should take the form
of “Shortened Notes,” not just in this paragraph but also for the remainder of your paper.
If your paper is properly footnoted — with an initial full note for each source, followed by
shortened notes – you do not need to create a separate bibliography.
Please use footnotes and not in-text citations
No plagiarism: This is an obvious one so please don’t do it!
If you have any questions reach out to me
