Curious about studying Curating with History - 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
3 Year
Are you an aspiring curator? Do you want to know how to display objects in ways that reveal their wider historical impact? This degree will help you develop the skills you need to become a curator who makes bold connections between different forms of art and visual culture, historical developments, and broader social and political forces. BA Curating with History offers a multidisciplinary foundation in the histories and theories of art history, curating, heritage studies and public history. You will learn the intellectual and practical skills necessary to realise your career ambitions, combining classroom-based learning with hands-on experience in museums and galleries. You will also learn about 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.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past’. In a world of conspiracy theories, toppling statues, and ‘culture wars’, the novelist William Faulkner’s most famous line resonates more than ever. Across the globe, History is co-opted to multiple causes and used to justify contradictory positions. Such uses of History often rely on myths, stereotypes, and misunderstandings. How can we separate political belief, personal opinion, and false information about the past from historical knowledge and understanding? Rebellious Pasts looks at the creation, consolidation, and operation of historical myths and stereotypes – and at how we, as historians, can use the tools of our trade to identify and challenge misleading representations of the past, replacing them with richer forms of understanding. The module helps you to develop the critical mindset needed to analyse historical arguments wherever you find them, but also the constructive skills essential to researching and writing your own histories. It combines lectures and seminars exploring how history “works” in different contexts with archive visits and library workshops that expose you to the raw materials of History. On Rebellious Pasts, you will undertake self-directed research drawing upon digitized collections, archives, and heritage sector institutions, and translate your findings into accessible public history artefacts. At its heart, History is the refusal to accept easy assumptions and the insistence on negotiating with evidence, no matter how tricky that is. By the end of the module, you will understand why History is a rebellious discipline – and how to harness its unruly powers.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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