History of Art with Photography (MA) - 2013/2014 entry

Photography has become the major form of image-making and visual communication since its development in the nineteenth century. Its importance has been recognised in many areas of scholarship – history of art, media and cultural studies, literature, memory and memorialisation, gender and identity, philosophy, and law. Its role in all fields of the arts and sciences, including those most personal, is being expanded, renewed and questioned by the mushrooming of digital culture.

This programme enables you to learn about – and to negotiate your individual path through – historical and contemporary photographic cultures, in order to develop your interests, whether your engagement with the medium is academic, artistic, personal or vocational.

After an initial introductory core module, and with tutorial guidance, the programme allows you to specialise through your selection of option modules and topics for your research projects and dissertation. Options cover a wide range of photographic practices and cultures, past and present, and allow you to explore diverse methodologies and internationally ‘local’ practices.

You will develop subject-specific and transferable research, critical and writing skills that will enhance your career opportunities in the field and beyond, whether in academia or teaching, photography as a practice, galleries and museums, or in the media. The programme is also ideally suited to preparing students with a practice-based background considering a PhD, academic or practice-based.

Find out more about why you should choose Birkbeck and about studying with us.  

• Unique international coverage of photographic cultures, making use of modules offered across the School of Arts.
• Taught by renowned research-active academics and writers from a variety of disciplines, including history of art, media and cultural studies, journalism, modern languages and the humanities.
• Cross- and interdisciplinary approach to the study of photography in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

You begin with a compulsory core module (including research skills sessions), which introduces different current approaches, methodologies and debates involved in the study of the histories of art, visual culture and photography.

You then choose two option modules, which vary from year to year but typically may include:

• Art and Identity: 'Race', Ideology, Culture
• Art and War 1814–2004
• Exhibiting the Pain of Others: Museums, Violence and Memory
• Fashioning the Body
• Histories in Transition: Visual Culture, History and Memory in South Africa and Beyond
• Nineteenth-Century Media: Photography/Sound/Movement
• Photography and Art since 1970
• Photography and the Brazilian 'Image World' circa 1840–1950
• Photography and the Index.

A research project, which reflects on the process of research, and the final dissertation give you further scope to focus your interest on specific aspects of the history and theory of photography.

You will have access to the Birkbeck Library and an in-house slide library and self-access centre (including the Vasari Digital Media Research Centre). Our location in Bloomsbury offers excellent access to specialist libraries and archives in the University of London. These include the University of London Library, the Institute of Historical Research, the Warburg Institute, the School of Oriental and African Studies, together with the major national resource of the British Library.

You will also have easy access to specialist libraries and photographic archives, including the Courtauld Institute of Art, the National Art Library and the photographic collection in the Prints and Drawings Study Room at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum of London, the National Portrait Gallery (Heinz Archives), the Photographers’ Gallery, and the Tate Gallery. We are also near many commercial galleries, photography book specialist dealers and exhibition spaces such as the Barbican, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Hayward Gallery, INIVA, and the many other places that exhibit photographs from time to time.

Find out more about our world-class research resources, as well as our specialist resources.

If you are interested in further research, we offer a PhD/MPhil in History of Art.

Graduates go on to careers in academia or teaching, in photography as a final art practice, in galleries and museums, or in the media.

• In addition to the online application, you will need to complete and submit a written exercise or a sample recent undergraduate essay.

• Early application recommended, but later applications also considered.
• Interviews March–September.