History of Art

You'll explore practices and interpretations of art across an exceptionally wide array of intersecting cultures and different periods. In a world increasingly defined through images and material culture, we approach art history as a vital and dynamic framework for understanding both our shared histories, and some of the most pressing questions we are faced with now.

With an emphasis on the interconnections between art and larger social dynamics, the course offers an active engagement with questions of power, politics and society, and the potential for a deep understanding of art history to illuminate the wider frameworks that shape our culture, such as those of race, our relations to nature and the environment, class, gender and sexuality.

Our students are equipped to become global citizens, as experts in their fields of study and as socially aware thinkers with dynamic, relevant and transferrable skills.

Our learning community
The course has a distinct position as a degree in a Russell Group university where art historians study alongside fine artists, within a purpose-built space that includes studios and a gallery alongside seminar rooms and a shared student common room.

We have expertise in the social history of art, feminist art history and the critical study of race and global cultural encounters, with emerging interests in our historical and contemporary relations to nature through issues of sustainability, climate and the environment. We offer the second oldest art history course in the United Kingdom.

All our teaching is driven by cutting-edge research, with a dynamic approach based on emerging issues and questions that matter to us as a community of academics, practitioners and students. The course covers an exceptional variety of specialist areas of study ranging from Africa to Asia, from the Medieval world to New York in the 20th century, from the Renaissance to contemporary art markets and exhibition cultures and from interrogations of art and capitalism to structures of power within the portrait. Across the areas we teach, we attend critically to the institutions and spaces in which art is encountered, drawing on ongoing professional collaborations and long-standing expertise among many of our staff who have worked in major museums, galleries and related arts and cultural organisations.