Course Info

BA History of Art flexible honours provides a first-class rounded education and excellent intellectual training. While the primary focus is on the visual arts, the subject also touches on many other traditional humanities disciplines such as literature, history, religion, languages, classics, psychology and philosophy, with which it provides natural subject combinations. The programme covers a broad range of periods from Classical Greece through to the modern day.

Students acquire skills of critical and historical analysis and the ability to evaluate evidence and present arguments fluently, both orally and in writing.

Teaching & Assessment

Quality teaching

We offer high quality, traditional Oxbridge-style teaching, which leads to our degrees being recognised around the world. The standards of degrees and awards are safeguarded by distinguished external examiners – senior academic staff from other universities in the UK – who approve and moderate assessed work.

Assessment methods

The assessment of individual modules within each course varies according to the subject. Assessment is usually by examination, assessed coursework, or a combination of the two. Please check module information for more details.

After Your Course

Graduate employment

Our graduates have gone on to further study at most of the world’s leading universities, including Harvard, London, Oxford and Cambridge and secured jobs in senior positions around the world. Among our alumni we have a graduate who became the head of his country’s civil service and one who became a leading Formula One motor-racing driver. Another secured a position as the Minister of Sabah and one female law graduate became the first British lawyer to become a French Advocate.

Pathways to a career

As well as the wide variety of professional or management careers for which an arts and humanities degree is a useful preparation, art history and heritage can prepare graduates for employment or further academic study or graduate training in areas related to the subjects studied, which can include the art market, curating, museums and heritage organisations, specialist media and publishing, and to areas for which visual understanding is an asset such as in advertising. A knowledge of art history is also useful for conservation training in fine and decorative art and architecture.