Minor Overview
- About this minor
Objects surround us. They carry meaning, hold memory, and record the full complexity of human life across cultures and time. Yet most of us never learn to read them properly: to ask what they are made of and why, how they were made, what they did in the world, and what they continue to do in collections, exhibitions, and archives today.
The Minor in Material Culture and Object Analysis teaches the ability to approach any object - an ancient ceramic, a contemporary artwork, a colonial artefact, an industrial material - as a form of evidence requiring rigorous, methodologically informed analysis. Drawing on art history, anthropology, and archaeology, students gain a practical and critical command of the different ways disciplines look at the same object and reach different conclusions.
The minor moves from hands-on engagement with materials and making at Level 1, through theoretical and contextual study of object lives and meanings at Level 2, to advanced object-based analysis in museum and collection contexts at Level 3. Across all three levels, students work directly with objects, not just texts about them.
Graduates of this minor will be well placed for careers in heritage organisations, auction houses, museums, conservation, arts administration, and cultural policy, as well as any field requiring careful analysis of material evidence, from design and architecture to forensic science and cultural diplomacy. The skills developed - close observation, cross-disciplinary research, written and oral object analysis, and direct collection experience - are highly transferable and genuinely distinctive in a competitive graduate landscape.
- Outcomes
- Students are able to (1) Read artworks and artefacts through their physical properties and making processes, demonstrating how materials shape meaning and use; (2) Apply more than one disciplinary framework to the study of objects - drawing on art-historical, anthropological, or archaeological approaches as appropriate - and reflect on what each approach reveals; (3) Explain how the meaning of an object changes as it moves through time and between contexts; (4) Engage critically with the role of collections, display, and institutional frameworks in shaping how objects are interpreted and valued; and (5) Communicate object-based analysis across multiple formats, including oral assessment and written analysis, using appropriate disciplinary vocabulary.
Units
Key to availability of units:
- S1
- Semester 1
- S2
- Semester 2
- N/A
- not available in 2026 – may be available in 2027 or 2028
For students taking a minor which shares units with their other unit sets (majors or minors): in order for minors to be recognised on academic and graduation documents, students may only have a maximum of one unit overlapping between their unit sets.
Take all units (12 points):
| Availability | Unit code | Unit name | Unit requirements |
|---|---|---|---|
| S2 | ARCY1002 | Experimenting with Archaeology |
|
| S1 | HART1000 | Ways of Making: From Pigments to Plastic in the History of Art | None |
Take the following unit:
| Availability | Unit code | Unit name | Unit requirements |
|---|---|---|---|
| S2 | HART3332 | Art Object Lab: Materiality, Meaning, and Display |
Take one unit to the value of 6 points from this group:
| Availability | Unit code | Unit name | Unit requirements |
|---|---|---|---|
| S2 | ANTH2902 | Entangled Objects |
|
| N/A | HART2040 | The Lives and Deaths of Objects |
|
| N/A | HART2370 | Global Art Histories |
|