About the Faculty of Arts

The Faculty of Arts provides world-class academic and professional training for over 600 postgraduates. Our researchers deal with subjects at the core of human experience. Students write and think about the cultural, intellectual and social inheritance of the world's people, past and present.

Programmes in the Faculty of Arts

Find out more about our postgraduate programmes, including application deadlines, fees and modes of study.

Taught programmes Research programmes

Staff

Many of our staff are well known in their subject area and in the media. Our students are taught by leading academics who specialise in a variety of disciplines. The distinctive combination of these disciplines with cross-disciplinary collaborations creates vitality and vibrancy.

Professional development

A postgraduate degree in the Arts can lead to careers in sectors such as education, the civil service, charity, heritage and the media. The transferable skills our postgraduates gain while studying make them excellent candidates for roles in industry as well as further research.

Facilities and resources

We pride ourselves on offering unique resources for research. Within the University's Special Collections, resources relating to Arts include:

  • Bristol's Theatre Collection, one of the largest archives of British theatre history in the world. It features 1.5 million items dating from 1572 to the present, shedding light on many disciplines.
  • The Brunel Collection – the world's finest archive of Isambard Kingdom Brunel source material.
  • The Allen Lane Penguin Archive – containing an archive of Penguin Books from its foundation in 1935.

Research

We are a key member of the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership (SWW DTP) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This is a scholarly community linking ten leading universities and prestigious sector partners. The DTP offers bespoke training and resources for groundbreaking academic research and a lifetime of intellectual endeavour.

The faculty hosts six research centres, which nurture and promote individual and collective research across the Faculty of Arts. They reflect a research environment in a faculty where interdisciplinary collaboration flourishes. They also encourage ongoing conversations with the public, engaging new audiences with our research activities and helping us shape emerging ideas.

Through these centres, we seek to redefine what we think of as the arts and look beyond what has historically characterised our discipline.