Program Overview

Our four-year BA Art History and History (including foundation year), will be suitable for you if your academic qualifications do not yet meet our entrance requirements for the three-year version of this course and you want a programme that increases your subject knowledge as well as improves your academic skills in order to support your academic performance.Our five-year version of this course enables you to study abroad during your fourth year of study.

This course includes a foundation year (Year Zero), followed by a further three or four years of study depending on whether you choose to study abroad for a year. During your Year Zero, you study three academic subjects relevant to your chosen course as well as a compulsory academic skills module, with additional English language for non-English speakers.

You are an Essex student from day one, a member of our global community based at the most internationally diverse campus university in the UK.

After successful completion of Year Zero in our Essex Pathways Department, you progress to complete your course with our School of Philosophy and Art History.

Our course promotes awareness of the interactions and differences between history and the visual arts in history and investigates the ways in which the two disciplines can be integrated. ‘Histories’ are a challenge and we encourage you to look beyond superficial ideas which offer works of art as merely a way of documenting a kind of ‘truth’.

You can learn to understand the ways in which history, ideas and ideologies are manifested in images, and challenge the definitions and perceptions of what documentation and evidence might be. You study the disciplines of history and art history together in order to appreciate the relationships between them with a degree of critical awareness. In so doing, you are offered a unique approach to develop skills which are now vital in a society dominated by the visual image and visual forms of communication.