Design History

This exciting Master’s degree offers you the opportunity to study design history and material culture, with a view to creating your own specialist focus.

This fascinating Master’s degree offers you the opportunity to study design history, providing you with a body of knowledge and experience which will potentially support a future career in areas such as auction houses, curation, heritage properties, teaching, design journalism and areas of the museums and galleries sector.

This Master’s degree is for students who wish to study design history from a theoretical and/or practice perspective. The programme will offer access to artefacts, heritage properties, museums, auction houses and archives as well as our costume and design study collections.

The curriculum focuses on research methodologies and ethics, how materials work and transform material culture, design cultures and a work-related project that may utilise experience in an external institution or focus on the design study collection. Further modules will develop research application through seminars on critical thinking and debate. The dissertation will bring together the research and application skills learnt in previous modules.

The programme has a range of approaches to the study of design history including the identification, evaluation and application of material culture from the viewpoint of historical and social debates as well as textual, material and/or performative narratives.

Lectures, seminars, tutorials, object analysis workshops and self-directed study will form your learning on this degree. Your studies will benefit from:

Small, focussed group activities

Access to expert staff

The opportunity to focus your research on your own specialist area of interest