Digital Media, Culture and History of Art

Digital media, culture, and history of art is a combination that develops your capacity to interpret visual and digital culture across time, placing the contemporary media landscape in dialogue with the long history of how images, objects, and spaces have been made and understood. History of art is a discipline of close visual analysis and contextualised interpretation, asking how artworks function within their social, political, and intellectual environments and what they can tell us about the cultures that produced them. Digital media and culture extends these questions into the present, examining how digital technologies have transformed how culture is produced, distributed, and consumed.

At the School of Oriental and African Studies this combination benefits from the institution's distinctively global perspective. History of art at SOAS engages with visual traditions from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and beyond, challenging the assumption that art history is primarily a Western discipline. Digital media and culture is examined with equal attention to its global dimensions, exploring how platforms, algorithms, and content industries operate differently across national and cultural contexts.

The three-year programme includes a foundation year, providing a structured entry into both disciplines, and the SOAS environment means you will engage consistently with non-Western visual and cultural traditions alongside the European canon.

Graduates from this combination work in museums and galleries, arts education, publishing, cultural journalism, digital communications, arts marketing, and media organisations. The history of art component provides strong preparation for curatorial and heritage roles, while the digital media element connects to a wide range of contemporary media and communications careers. Many graduates also go on to postgraduate study in art history, curatorial practice, digital media, or a regional specialism at SOAS or elsewhere.