Curious about studying Curating (Including Placement Year) - BA (Hons)at University of Essex? We've gathered all the key details—entry requirements, modules, fees, and more. Hear from real students by checking out reviews, or take the next step by booking an open day to explore it for yourself.
Bachelor of Arts (with Honours) - BA (Hons)
University of Essex
Full Time
Oct 2026
4 Year
Our BA Curating provides you with a solid understanding of the major developments in art history including the history and theory of exhibition design, with a particular emphasis on how curatorial choices shape our experiences while viewing artworks and the other objects on display in museums and galleries. Frequent, staff-led visits to London museums and galleries will also expose you to the latest developments in curating, and you will be strongly encouraged to conduct a placement in order to gain exposure to the inner workings of a museum, auction house or gallery. To ensure you are prepared to meet the challenges facing curators in the 21st century, opportunities to cultivate digital skills will be available throughout the course. For example, for your final project, you will curate an online exhibition, for which you will produce a virtual walk-through of the exhibition space and develop digitally-accessible interpretative material for all objects on display. You also have access to The Essex Collection of Art from Latin America (ESCALA), based at the University of Essex and Europe’s largest collection of Latin American art, which will offer you a place to experiment with installing artworks. You spend your third year on a placement gaining relevant work experience, giving you a competitive edge in the graduate job market and providing you with key contacts within the industry.
This module is intended as a skills-building course for first year art history students, to develop writing skills across a range of assessed and non-assessed writing types (essay, critical review, reading summary, label text, catalogue essay etc). The module will also present an introduction to research methods in art history, and a historical overview of art historical writing.
This module offers an introduction to the history of museums and galleries. We will consider the basic human instinct to collect and the creation of the first museums. We will examine ideas about taxonomy, ordering the world and the first museum spaces of display, asking questions about privilege and power. How have museums and galleries shaped history and science? What ethical issues are there today around these spaces? Should tobacco, oil and arms companies sponsor museums? Can museums be tools of ‘urban regeneration’? Do online archives and 3D scanning make museums themselves obsolete institutions?
This module tackles some of the biggest questions surrounding the history of art. You will explore some key theoretical issues in the history of art, such as the nature of representation, by engaging critically with seminal texts and artworks. In this module, you will develop your analytical and interpretive skills, and leave with a solid foundation for the study of the history of art.
This module provides an introductory overview to the field of heritage and museum studies and explores some of the conceptual, political and ethical issues faced by those working within and researching in the area of heritage and museums.
This course introduces key academic, professional and personal skills to support a successful transition beyond undergraduate study. Students develop confidence in critical thinking, communication, teamwork and self reflection while exploring future study and career options.
How did our society decide what counts as ‘art’ and what is ‘culture’? Is there really such a thing as high vs low culture? What are the political stakes of these divisions? This module looks at the shift in ideas from ‘art history’ to visual and material cultural studies. This module will engage with these debates and teach you new methods for seeing, interpreting and understanding art, design, craft, performance, fashion, film and videogames. These new ways of seeing are often driven by new theoretical ideas , and allow us to look at culture to draw out new perspectives on social and political issues of activism and social change, sex, technology, police violence, migration, austerity and crisis, state surveillance, and our relation to animals and the environment.
This module explores not only how we can use archives to help understand the history of heritage and museums, but also how archives can be used to relate new and underrepresented types of heritage. Examining different types of archives, we will explore how and why those archives have shaped heritage and museum work today. Simultaneously, we will think about how archiving offers the potential of more representative heritage futures.
In this module you will produce a capstone project, taking the form of either of an 8,000-word written dissertation, or a curatorial project or heritage project of equivalent scope. The finished capstone project should show an all-round grasp of your subject and the ability to present your material clearly, succinctly and in the most appropriate sequence. It should also demonstrate evidence of a serious engagement with your topic, a mastery of the information currently available, and the inclusion of your own reasoned, critical judgements. A supervisor will help guide you as you begin to develop a research question, start researching the topic and write the dissertation or develop the curating or heritage project. This is a capstone module, available to final-year students on Art History, Curating, or Heritage courses with permission only.
This third art and ideas module deepens your existing thematic and historiographical knowledge building on Art and Ideas II. In this module, we will familiarise ourselves with some of the most influential and insightful theoretical approaches to art in the 20th and 21st Century.
Placement Year
4.3
