Film Studies and Art History

Film studies and art history are disciplines that both ask how visual objects make meaning, how they are shaped by their historical moment, and what they reveal about the societies that produce and consume them. Taken together, they give you a double lens: one trained on the moving image and the institutions of cinema, the other on the longer history of artistic practice across painting, sculpture, photography, and the built environment. The conversation between these fields is genuinely productive, because cinema emerged from and continued to be shaped by the visual arts, and contemporary art practice is often deeply entangled with screen culture.

At the University of Essex this five-year programme builds in a year abroad, giving you the opportunity to study within a different academic and cultural context and to encounter different national traditions of film and art. You will study a variety of films across genres, periods, and national cinemas, and you will engage with the methods of art-historical analysis applied to objects from multiple periods and places. The curriculum draws on the most current developments in both fields, including questions about representation, identity, medium specificity, and the digital turn.

You will develop skills in close analysis, archival research, and sustained critical writing that are valuable well beyond the boundaries of either subject.

Graduates from combined programmes in film and art history work in museums and galleries, film programming and curation, arts journalism and criticism, publishing, broadcasting, education, and cultural policy. The research and analytical skills developed in both disciplines are transferable to many professional contexts, and a number of graduates go on to postgraduate study in film, art history, cultural studies, or museum studies. For anyone drawn to the visual and to the question of how images shape how we see the world, this combination offers a rigorous and wide-ranging education.