Art History staff and students benefit from a range of excellent resources. The University is home to a well-stocked library, a range of archives, an international arts venue and a dedicated Art History Lab.
Art History Lab
The Art History Lab provides a dedicated space in which students can work and meet.
It houses over 100,000 slides and over 10,000 high resolution digital images. The collection is diverse and covers all areas of Art History taught at the University of Sussex. There are extensive sections on Western, Byzantine, Chinese and Indian art, covering painting, sculpture, prints and architecture. The slides and photographs are used by students and teaching staff for presentations, lectures and research.
The Lab is continually developing research facilities. It houses a range of current periodicals, including Art Monthly, Art Newspaper, Museum Journal, Photoworks and Visual Culture in Britain. There are also important reference books on Art History and a selection of CD-ROMs, videos and audiotapes. Copies of all weekly course readings are also available.
There are a number of computers and scanners in the Lab, enabling Art History students to illustrate essays and presentations. It also has information on current exhibitions and events within the art world.
The Art History Slide Library is open from Mon-Fri 9.00 - 17.00. For further details contact Simon Lane, the Slide Librarian.
The Library
The University library was refurbished in 2011. It contains an extremely well-stocked Art History section. Art History students also benefit from the wide range of books relating to other disciplines, from Media Studies to Philosophy, History to Politics. The library also provides students with online access to tens of thousands of journals and e-books.
The Library’s Special Collections holds a number of internationally acclaimed archival, manuscript and rare book collections, mostly relating to twentieth-century literary, political and social history. Our special collections include the New Statesman Archive, a series of collections relating to the Bloomsbury Group, including the Monks House Papers (Virginia Woolf), and the Mass-Observation Archive, containing the papers of the social research organisation of the 1930s and 40s.
The Keep
The Keep is a new historical resource centre located next to the University of Sussex campus. This is a major partnership project between East Sussex County Council, Brighton & Hove City Council and the University of Sussex.
It provides a home for all the archives and historical resources of East Sussex and Brighton & Hove, and the Special Collections of the University of Sussex. The building will also include the library and headquarters of the Sussex Family History Group. The Keep will house over six miles of archives and historical resources dating back over 900 years.
The Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts
The Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts is due to re-open in 2014, following a complete refurbishment.
The Centre will build on and enhance interdisciplinary research and teaching, which are core to the University of Sussex’s mission. It will bring together researchers and students from many areas – drama, music, creative writing, media, cultural studies, art history, business studies, philosophy, cognitive science, design and engineering – to engage with a wide range of artistic methods, mentors and projects.
A dynamic and exhilarating cultural focus for the campus and wider community will be created by giving faculty and students space to pursue research; housing residencies for artists; engaging with festivals; hosting conferences, workshops and exhibitions; staging music, live performances, film and media events; and encouraging learning through creative and experimental activity.