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The University of Western Australia (UWA)

  • 22% international / 78% domestic

Bachelor of Art History and Curatorial Studies

  • Bachelor

Focused on Art History and its curatorial applications, this degree cultivates transferrable skills in visual and spatial analysis, critical thought, and oral and written communication.

Key details

Degree Type
Bachelor

Entry requirements

About the Bachelor of Art History and Curatorial Studies

The Bachelor of Art History and Curatorial studies blends knowledge of art history with practical curatorial skills, giving students the opportunity to work in arts management, museum and gallery curation, as well as art criticism and analysis.

About the course
The Bachelor of Art History and Curatorial Studies major combines art historical knowledge with curatorial methods, leading to a variety of career pathways, including arts management, museum and gallery curation, as well as art criticism and analysis. Offering opportunities for foreign study, industry placements, and object-based learning, this degree activates Art History through hands-on experience, engagement with exhibitions and curatorial institutions.
About the course
The Bachelor of Art History and Curatorial Studies is the first and only degree of its kind offered in Western Australia. By combining art historical knowledge with curatorial methods and techniques, this degree equips students with a variety of career pathways, including arts management, museum and gallery curation, as well as art criticism and analysis.

Though focused on Art History and its curatorial applications, this degree also cultivates transferrable skills in visual and spatial analysis, critical thought, and oral and written communication. Offering distinct opportunities for foreign study, industry placements, and object-based learning, this degree activates Art History through hands-on experience in the field and engagement with exhibitions and curatorial institutions. Areas of study include the history of art and exhibition making from early modern times, to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Paris to Beijing, Papunya to Bidydanga. The unit empowers students with a working knowledge of how art has been made and exhibited in order to give them the language used in current curatorial and scholarly contexts. It educates students in how to write about art in various ways, including exhibition proposals and critical reviews. In this way the course empowers students with the ability to work for collecting and exhibiting institutions, as well as independently.

With an honours level degree, the course also offers opportunities to enter postgraduate study, at Masters or PhD level, or around the world. Current graduates are studying in American and English universities, and working across Australia in art galleries and museums.
Bachelor of Art History and Curatorial Studies
Quick details
STATUS
  • Available from 2025
MINIMUM ATAR
  • 78
COURSE INTAKE
  • Semester 1, Semester 2
FULL TIME COMPLETION
  • 3 years full time; 4 years full time with Honours
COURSE CODE
  • BP070
DEGREE TYPE
  • Bachelor's Degree
CAMPUS LOCATION
  • UWA (Crawley campus)
CRICOS CODE
  • 116871M
Why study Art History and Curatorial Studies at UWA?
  • Explore the ongoing significance of art as a public platform for shaping and interpreting the world we live
  • Obtain a qualification that will give you access to inspiring careers in the art world
  • You may take units taught overseas - recent destination include Paris, Rome and China
  • You'll be taught by internationally recognised historians
Why study Art History and Curatorial Studies at UWA?
Life at the School of Design
Life at the School of Design

UWA's School of Design is a collaboration of creative thinkers and makers that includes landscape architects, urban designers, experimental artists, historians and architects.

You'll learn to
  • speak and write clearly about visual art
  • understand the history of visual art and its contexts
  • work with objects through object-based analysis
  • gain experience with exhibition design and exhibition proposals
  • explore opportunities for work placements in galleries, museums and remote Aboriginal art centres
You'll learn to
WHO YOU'LL BE TAUGHT BY
Our academics
UWA's School of Design is home to a group of internationally recognised teaching staff, including Emily Brink, Susanne Meurer, Arvi Wattel and Darren Jorgensen.
WHO YOU'LL BE TAUGHT BY
Our academics
Dr Emily Brink

Dr Emily Eastgate Brink is an Associate Professor in the History of Art at the University of Western Australia, where she focuses on the art and visual culture of the global eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her scholarship explores the European engagement with Asian 'otherness,' monstrosity, marginalised communities, and health. In this work, material meaning informs the interpretation of objects, engaging the poetics of mediums, such as porcelain, silk, wax, and paper. This research has broad applications to the visual study of science, the history of material economies, as well as the construction of identity in the modern period. Brink's work has received support from a variety of organisations, including: The Australian Institute of Art History, the National Library of Australia, the Mellon Foundation, and the Stanford Humanities Center.

Susanne Meurer

Susanne Meurer worked in archives and the museum sector for seven years prior to becoming a lecturer in early modern art and curatorial studies. As part of her museum and archive work, Susanne handled letters by Albert Einstein, catalogued prints by Albrecht Durer and couriered medieval manuscripts. She has contributed to major international exhibition catalogues on Renaissance Art and entered more than 13000 prints on the British Museum online database. Her research focuses on cultural and technical aspects of printmaking from 15th century Europe to 21st century Australia, on biographies of artists and on the history of collecting and curation. She has published in leading international journals and held fellowships at the Warburg Institute in London, the Max-Planck Institute for Art History in Florence, and Harvard University's Houghton Library.

Arvi Wattel

Arvi Wattel received his education from the Radboud University Nijmegen and is a lecturer in the History of Art at UWA. Before moving to Perth, he was awarded grants from the Prince Bernhard Culture Fund and Dr Hendrik Muller's Vaderlandsch Fonds, was a visiting fellow at the Department of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University, held fellowships at the Fondazione Ermitage in Ferrara, the Kunsthistorisches Institut (Max Planck Gesellschaft) in Florence, the Dutch Institute for Art History in Florence and the Royal Netherlandish Institute in Rome. Previously, he lectured at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the University of Maastricht and for Oberlin College in Arezzo.

Darren Jorgensen

Darren Jorgensen is most recently the author of Clyma Est Mort (Bloomsbury, 2023) and was with Tami Xiang a co-curator of the 2023 exhibition Beijing Realism that was part of the Perth Festival. With UWA undergraduate students Darren edits the journal Guan Kan: Thinking with Contemporary Chinese Art and contributes to Perth's leading art review, Dispatch Review, as well as to the national publication Artlink. His writing on Australian art has appeared in Art Bulletin, Aboriginal History, History Australia, Third Text and World Art. He is currently running a research project on illustrated literature from remote Aboriginal communities, and is finishing a study of art and literature from sheep and cattle stations in nineteenth and twentieth century Australia.

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The UWA ALVA Student Society is affiliated with the UWA Student Guild and represents students within the School of Design. Visit the ALVA Student Society on Facebook.

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Study locations

Perth

Graduate outcomes

Graduate satisfaction and employment outcomes for Humanities, Culture & Social Sciences courses at The University of Western Australia (UWA).
86.7%
Overall satisfaction
83.8%
Skill scale
79.7%
Teaching scale
48.1%
Employed full-time
$54k
Average salary