History of Art

The history of art is the discipline that asks how and why human beings have made images, objects, and spaces, and what those things mean in the contexts in which they were created and received. From cave paintings to Renaissance altarpieces, from nineteenth-century photography to contemporary installation art, the subject spans the full range of human visual and material culture, and asks questions about aesthetics, power, identity, religion, technology, and the nature of meaning itself. It is a discipline that trains you to look carefully and to think rigorously about what you see.

At the University of East Anglia, this three-year, full-time programme benefits from an institution with a particularly distinguished relationship to the visual arts. UEA is home to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, one of the most significant university art collections in the UK, which provides an extraordinary resource for students who want to engage directly with original works rather than reproductions alone. You will study art and visual culture across a wide chronological and geographical range, developing skills in formal analysis, contextual interpretation, and critical argument.

The programme draws on art history, cultural theory, and related disciplines, encouraging you to bring multiple perspectives to bear on the objects and images you study. You will develop strong research and writing skills alongside an increasingly sophisticated visual intelligence.

Graduates in history of art go on to careers in galleries, museums, and cultural institutions, as well as in auction houses, arts journalism, publishing, education, heritage management, and the commercial art world. The skills in research, critical analysis, and written communication that the programme develops are also genuinely transferable to a much wider range of professional fields. Many graduates also choose to pursue postgraduate study in art history, curating, conservation, or related disciplines, and UEA has a strong track record of graduates who go on to distinguished careers in the arts.