COURSE CURRICULUM

The History of Art BA offers a comprehensive study of visual culture through a wide range of compulsory and optional modules that build strong analytical, research and critical thinking skills. In Year 1, you are introduced to art history as a dynamic practice, exploring how we see, interpret and question visual culture, while examining key myths, institutions and critical approaches that shape the discipline. Year 2 deepens your research abilities and strengthens your understanding of art history’s origins, methods, and social contexts, with options to study areas such as Asian visual culture, modernism, the Grand Tour, the art market and gender in visual arts. In Year 3, you complete an independent dissertation refined through specialist supervision and choose from advanced modules that explore topics like the Holocaust in cultural memory, anthropology of art, Renaissance materiality, photography, postcolonial feminisms and art’s relationship with ecology and empire. Across all years, the course emphasises global perspectives, critical engagement with power and representation, and an understanding of how art influences and reflects wider social, political and cultural structures. This degree equips you with versatile, transferrable skills and a rich awareness of the role of visual culture in shaping human experience.