Master of Arts in Museum and Artefact Studies

at Durham University United Kingdom

The course is designed as a research preparation masters. It is intended to encourage you to be intellectually ambitious by inducting you into a community of historians. It invites you to understand the relationship between your own specialist field and the historical discipline in general as well as to communicate with wider audiences. You will feel sufficiently confident in your own disciplinary identity and mastery of the subject to be able to converse with those in other fields.

The course is taught with an emphasis on disciplinary training supplied by the Department’s subject specialists with expertise in an outstanding range of areas (Europe, Britain, North America, Africa, China and Japan) and interdisciplinary engagement, while offering opportunities for supported independent study. You will be able – and are indeed encouraged – to access and use Durham’s exceptional cluster of libraries, archives, and special collections.

All students on the MA in History are required to take the team-taught core module Themes, Reading and Sources (30 credits) which runs throughout Michaelmas (Autumn). Depending on whether you opt for the 60-credit Dissertation pathway or the 90-credit Dissertation pathway, you will also take either 3 or 2 optional modules (each worth 30 credits) which run either in Michaelmas or Epiphany or throughout both terms. The options may also be language, skills and content modules, provided by other centres, courses and departments with the consent of all parties concerned. All these elements have embedded within them a range of content, subject-specific skills, and key skills.

Our specialist BSc Finance degree places considerable emphasis on the key quantitative and analytical skills needed to pursue a career in finance and financial markets. The degree prepares you for a career in the financial environment by providing a technical curriculum to strengthen the link between academia and practice. The BSc Finance enables you to acquire a critical understanding of theories, empirical evidence and practical application whilst maintaining a rigorous academic underpinning. In particular, you will learn about corporate finance, investments, financial institutions and the vast array of sophisticated financial products traded in today’s global financial markets. Furthermore, you will develop the quantitative techniques needed to analyse, in depth, financial data and financial securities.

The MEng Engineering degree is a four-year first degree that delivers the breadth and depth that you will need in the world of engineering. It is designed to produce graduates who will go on and lead engineering teams. Your first two years offer you a broad-based engineering education. You are then able to specialise in your third and fourth years.

At Durham in each year of your degree you will take six modules, the year is divided into three terms and there are examinations at the end of each year.

Graduates of the course typically go on to work in museums or large heritage organisations. Graduate students are drawn from a wide range of disciplines, but manual dexterity, a knowledge of chemistry and an enthusiasm and desire to work with museum objects are essential.

The course is delivered through a mixture of lectures, seminars and practical classes as well as a dissertation. Typically lectures provide key information on a particular area, and identify the main areas for discussion and debate among Conservators in that area. Practicals then provide opportunities for you to implement and develop your skills, based on the knowledge that you have gained through your lectures and through independent study outside the programmes formal contact hours. Self-development learning packages allow you to continue your learning in a structured way outside of the practical sessions. The dissertation allows you to develop advanced research skills in an aspect of conservation or artefact studies.

The balance of activities changes throughout the course, as you develop your knowledge, skills and ability as independent learners and practitioners. The course therefore prepares you for work or further study once you have graduated, with an emphasis on taking your learning from the classroom to real life situations in Museums and conservation laboratories. All teaching is delivered by qualified conservators.

The MA in Archaeology can be studied on a full-time and part-time basis. Through sets of specialist modules, skills-oriented classes and workshops, and dissertation research it provides the opportunity to advance your skills and knowledge in archaeology with a view to progressing either to doctoral-level research or to gaining specialist and transferable skills to develop a career in commercial archaeology or in the wider employment market.

The MA Archaeology is designed to take advantage of the exceptionally wide research interests of the staff in Durham Archaeology, which range from the Palaeolithic of western Europe, through Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age Europe, to the Classical archaeology of the Greek and Roman worlds, through Egyptology, the archaeology of the ancient and Islamic Near East and Arabia, to Buddhism in South Asia and trade in the Indian Ocean, and the archaeology of the medieval, post-medieval and historic periods.

From this widespread students are able to select a combination of specialist taught courses and a dissertation topic in precisely the areas that interest them. At the same time, they will form part of a large cohort of students taking this and associated courses creating a student community amongst whom some courses in research, presentation and practical skills are shared, along with discussions and events. This structure offers the opportunity for interdisciplinary exchange combined with specialist training in key archaeological skills and knowledge, as well as making friendships and contacts from around the world.

Durham’s Psychology and Anthropology Departments pride themselves on excellence in both teaching and research. The breadth of complementary research strengths across the two Departments means that you are guaranteed to be taught by staff who are actively engaged in the interaction of psychological and anthropological approaches, and are leading figures in their field of research.

In Anthropology, you will use perspectives from human biology, cultural evolution, animal behaviour, and human evolution to illuminate inquiry into the mind and behaviour of past and present human and primate populations. You will learn how anthropology and psychology provide complementary and contrasting perspectives on what it is to be human, as well as a variety of quantitative and qualitative ways of addressing major questions. The interface of anthropology and psychology explicitly integrates intercultural, international and global issues. For example, in anthropology’s traditional focus on cultural diversity and the burgeoning recognition of psychology’s need to address cross-cultural issues and move away from studies biased by Western Educated Industrialised and Rich (WEIRD) samples.

The degree provides the opportunity to develop extensive subject-specific, interdisciplinary, and transferable skills. The course follows the British Psychological Society(BPS) guidelines with an extensive range of options in the final year, drawing both from work in fundamental scientific research and in applied areas of psychology and anthropology. You may choose to take modules that deepen your understanding of a smaller number of anthropologically and psychologically relevant topics or choose to take a more broad and varied selection. Several coherent pathways – for example in animal behaviour, infant and child development, and health – are possible, using complementary modules from the two departments.

Excellent research facilities are available, including a virtual reality suite, developmental testing facilities, and EEG labs (in psychology), as well as extensive collections of fossil hominin casts and material culture artefacts from around the globe, a sleep lab, hormone lab, and field station for primatology in South Africa (in Anthropology). You are encouraged to get involved in research being carried out by your lecturers, thus gaining a deeper and more hands-on understanding of the issues you are learning about in your degree, and adding to your contextual experience.

The LLB degree is a highly flexible three-year, full-time course. There are approximately 300 students on each year of the LLB. While providing a solid grounding in the main areas of English and Welsh law, it also allows for individual specialisation through a variety of optional modules offered by the School and other departments in the University.

The degree course provides the opportunity to obtain a Qualifying Law Degree as recognised by the Solicitors Regulation Authority and the Bar Standards Board. (Please note: whether or not a degree exempts a student from the academic stage of training to be a solicitor or barrister depends on the modules that the student studies. In practice, virtually all of our students choose to study the modules that are required by the Law Society and Bar Council, and do gain a Qualifying Law Degree.)

Study abroad
The LLB with a Year Abroad (YA) comprises all of the content of the three-year regular LLB, plus an exciting additional year spent at one of our European or international partners during the third year of study. At present, Durham Law School has partnerships with universities in Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy and Singapore.

This Economic and Social Research Council approved MA provides training in research methods with a focus on methods used by researchers in anthropology. At the end of this course, you will be well-prepared to go on to do research in Anthropology or a related discipline. Most students expect to move on to a PhD.

The course includes training in qualitative and quantitative methods needed by researchers in social sciences and draws on expertise within the Department of Anthropology to provide specialised training in either sociocultural anthropology, medical anthropology, the anthropology of development or cultural evolution (depending on your chosen pathway). It is affiliated to the Northern Ireland and North East Doctoral Training Partnership, which offers funding to British and European Union students interested in taking the course preparatory to moving on to a PhD at Durham.

Our taught MA course offers choice, flexibility and the opportunity to specialise. You can learn from the rich variety of research expertise in the Department and you also have the chance to concentrate on a particular area of literary study. Our commitment to research-led teaching means that students are able to explore the cutting edge of the discipline - from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day, from medieval manuscripts to contemporary crime narrative. We provide an intimate, dynamic and supportive environment for students of all backgrounds and nationalities.

Our courses offer up-to-date training in research methods and skills and a wide selection of literature modules from which you choose three; you will also write a dissertation. You will have the opportunity to follow up particular interests by studying a named pathway, or to designate your own area of study within the broad MA in English Literary Studies, tailoring an individual course based on period, theme or genre.

The MSci degree offers you the chance to also take research-based study in your fourth year. There are two types of MSci degree available via the Natural Sciences route:

• The MSci in Natural Sciences allows you to take modules from a range of subjects, but you would normally specialise in at least one of the following subjects in your fourth year: Chemistry, Computer Science, Earth Sciences, Mathematics and Physics.
• The MSci Joint Honours degrees are available in the following combinations: Biology and Chemistry, Biology and Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics, Chemistry and Physics, Computer Science and Mathemetics, and Mathematics and Physics.
• The two degrees above allows you the option of completing a replacement Year Abroad in Year 3. Note that the Year Abroad is competitive and so applicants cannot apply for these pathways through UCAS.