Art History & Visual Culture and Classical Studies

Art history, visual culture, and classical studies is a combination that brings together two disciplines in which the visual and the historical are inextricably connected. Art history and visual culture teaches you to read images, objects, and the built environment as cultural texts, asking how visual meaning is made, contested, and transmitted across time and societies. Classical studies grounds this inquiry in the foundational period of Western culture, asking what the ancient Greek and Roman world was like, how it understood itself, and how its visual, literary, and material inheritance has shaped everything that came after it.

At the University of Exeter, this three-year, full-time programme combines these two disciplines in a way that allows you to bring art historical analysis to ancient material, and to understand the classical world through both textual and visual evidence. You will develop skills in formal and iconographic analysis, historical contextualisation, and critical engagement with the long tradition of classical reception in art and visual culture. The programme includes a sandwich placement year for extended professional experience, a year abroad that allows you to study and visit the ancient and artistic sites relevant to your degree, and work placement integrated throughout.

Past students have had access to work experience at local arts centres, museums, and galleries, giving them direct professional contact with the institutions that art historians and classicists typically work in.

A typical entry tariff of 152 points reflects a competitive but accessible admissions profile. Graduates from art history and classical studies programmes go on to careers in museums, galleries, heritage organisations, auction houses, arts administration, publishing, arts journalism, cultural policy, and education. The combination of visual literacy and classical knowledge is particularly valued in roles concerned with the ancient world's legacy in art, architecture, and culture.

Many graduates continue to postgraduate study in art history, classical studies, curatorial practice, or heritage management.