MLitt Art History: Dress & Textile Histories

This Masters provides you with the skills to research and interpret everyday clothing, fashion and textiles in historical contexts. The programme introduces you to theoretical and object-based approaches through a combination of taught and research-based components, showing you how historic dress and textiles can be studied both in their own right and as a means to understand the past. Close links with local and national archives, libraries and museums, including Glasgow Museums and the Victoria & Albert Museum, means the programme offers you a unique insight into the study, curation, interpretation and preservation of historic dress and textile collections.

• This programme is unique to Scotland and the UK as it combines aspects of art history and law and places them in a broad international context.
• You will learn from world-leading researchers and develop expert knowledge in this specialised area of art history.
• Glasgow’s civic and university collections are some of the richest and most diverse in Europe and are of international standing. The University’s own Hunterian Museum and Art gallery is the oldest public museum in Scotland and has extensive holdings covering fine art, geology, anatomy and the history of medicine. Furthermore, the facilities at Kelvin Hall support object-based study as a number of courses will include handling sessions of the objects in the collections.
• Work placement opportunities are offered within the programme on a competitive basis. In addition to Scottish institutions, work placements may take place at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.
• Our research forum provides you with a lively and stimulating introduction to methodological debates within art history. It provides a sense of art history’s own history as well as contemporary concerns and practice, examining the beliefs and values that have informed various forms of historical and visual analysis and enquiry. It is focused around a series of seminars or workshops run by members of staff and visiting academics.