History of Art (MA) - 2012/2013 entry

This programme aims to increase your historiographical awareness, to stimulate critical debate and to develop your research skills. It will help to widen your understanding of debates and traditions in art history and visual culture, and develop your ability to explore historical and critical issues independently. In addition to developing critical skills with written and visual texts, you will have the opportunity to practise your oral presentation skills.

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

• Gain a thorough grasp of art-historical methodologies and develop your capability for independent research.
• Prepare for further postgraduate work or for progression to careers in arts-related fields.
• Access to many specialist art libraries, galleries and museums, and research institutes near Birkbeck.

The programme consists of a combination of a core module, a choice of option modules, a research project, and a dissertation.

The core module is designed to explore methodologies and issues involved in the current study of the discipline (around such topics as exhibition, reception and interdisciplinarity), as well as research skills and methods.

Option modules allow you to pursue specific interests and areas of research in selected topics from the Italian Renaissance to the present. These may include:

• Architecture and Spectacle in Late Medieval Europe
• Fashioning the Body
• Gender, Modernity and the City
• Inventing the Victorians
• Italian Art c.1300: Evidence and Interpretation
• Museums and Memory
• Museums and the Art of Remembering in the Twentieth Century
• Rome and Memorialisation.

The research project offers you the chance to undertake independent research and to reflect on the process of research.

You will complete the programme with a 15,000-word dissertation.

You will have access to the Birkbeck Library and an in-house Resources Centre. In addition, our location in Bloomsbury offers excellent access to specialist libraries in the University of London. These include the University of London Library, the Institute of Historical Research, the Warburg Institute and 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 art libraries not far from Birkbeck, including the library of the Courtauld Institute of Art, the British Architectural Library and the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). The great visual resources of the British Museum, the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, Tate Gallery and the V&A, commercial galleries and salesrooms, and temporary exhibition galleries like the Barbican Gallery, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Hayward Gallery and the Royal Academy also make London a particularly good place in which to undertake research.

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

Students who successfully complete the Graduate Certificate in History of Art at Birkbeck with merit will be guaranteed a place on this programme. If you are in this position, you do not need to provide an admissions exercise.

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

Graduates go on to careers in museum and gallery education and curating, in auction houses, as curators or researchers, and in journalism.

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

• Interviews from March onwards.
• Early application recommended.