Art History and Film & Visual Culture

Art history and film and visual culture is a combination that addresses visual experience across different media and historical periods, developing both an appreciation of the long traditions of art-making and an understanding of how moving image has reshaped visual culture since the late nineteenth century. Art history asks how visual objects, including paintings, sculptures, prints, architecture, and design, come to look the way they do, and what their relationship is to the societies, technologies, and ideas of their moment. Film and visual culture examines how the moving image tells stories, constructs meaning, and shapes the ways in which modern audiences encounter and understand the world.

At Liverpool Hope University this three-year programme includes a sandwich year, a year abroad, and work placement experience, giving your studies a strong professional and international dimension. You will engage with art history from early periods through to the contemporary, developing skills in formal analysis, contextual interpretation, and critical writing, while also building your understanding of cinema, television, photography, and digital visual culture through the methods of cultural analysis and media theory. The year abroad gives you the opportunity to study visual and film cultures in a different national context, enriching your comparative understanding of both disciplines.

Graduates from art history and film and visual culture programmes work in museums and galleries, film programming and curation, arts journalism and criticism, heritage organisations, broadcasting, publishing, education, and the cultural industries. The combination of historical knowledge and contemporary media literacy is particularly valuable in roles that require understanding visual culture across time and medium. Many graduates go on to postgraduate study in art history, curating, film studies, or cultural studies.

The placement and sandwich year experience provides professional networks and demonstrable skills before graduation, which is a significant advantage in competitive cultural sector employment.