Ruins: The Creation of the Past

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 6
• Convenors: Professor Jen Baird, Professor Catharine Edwards
• Assessment: an 800-word coursework assignement (20%) and 3200-word essay (80%)

Why do we value ruins, and what do they mean? Since the Renaissance, ruins have been a site of reflection in the West. In this module we ask:

• Why are some decayed monuments considered rubble to be discarded? 
• Why are others considered ruins to be treasured?

We will investigate how ruins have been represented in a variety of media, from eighteenth-century engravings of Classical sites, to the representation of ruins in nineteenth-century painting, to contemporary ruin photography, and across a range of discourses, from the role of ruins in the politics of contemporary Rome to the use of ruins to create positive ecologies in the future.

With a chronological range from antiquity to the present day, we investigate why the ruins of the past, and images of ruins, matter in the contemporary world.

Indicative syllabus

• Introduction: historiography and terminology of ruins
• Creating and destroying the ruins of Palmyra
• Romantic ruins: the Colosseum in the early nineteenth century
• Restoring ruins: the politics of antiquity in modern Rome
• Designing ruins: conceptual architecture
• The ruin as positive ecology
• Ruins as relics: medieval spacetimes and broken bodies in the landscape
• Conflict and the ruins of supermodernity
• Underground ruins and the senses in WWI
• Conclusion imperial ruins

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• understand major themes in relation to ruination and how they are approached by scholars
• interpret primary sources and relate them to secondary sources
• evaluate and critique visual sources in archaeology, e.g. archaeological plans, photographs and drawings
• evaluate archaeological evidence, and through writing and visualisations, make new interpretations of it
• engage critically with:
• archaeological remains and ancient textual documents, in archival and museum contexts
• the relevant historiography, particularly with regard to the history and philosophy of archaeology
• the ways in which ruins have been conceptualised and what might be at stake in different ideas of the ruin.