MSc Cultural Heritage Futures joins the School

Building on its growing success, the programme will be based within the School and this transition reflects the University's commitment to the programme, and will create new opportunities for teaching, research and collaboration.

Since its launch in Year 2024, MSc Cultural Heritage Futures has been growing in breadth and scope. The move will ensure that the programme continues to champion its interdisciplinary and future-oriented approach, while also fully benefiting from the School’s global expertise in understanding the implications of the human past for contemporary society.

The MSc Cultural Heritage Futures explores the relationships between past, present and future. Students investigate how heritage is created, contested, governed, communicated and transformed, and how it can contribute to addressing contemporary social and environmental challenges. These include climate change and sustainability, decolonisation, conflict and contested lands, technological transformation, online hostility and hate speech, inequalities, tourism, ocean and coastal change, difficult pasts, and the politics of memory and identity. The programme takes an interdisciplinary and challenge-driven approach. Rather than considering heritage solely as something inherited from the past, students will explore how decisions about heritage influence communities, institutions, landscapes and future generations.  

Based within the University of Edinburgh's School of History, Classics and Archaeology, students will have the opportunity to learn from a School with long-established international expertise in heritage, archaeology and history, while engaging with real-world processes and case studies in heritage policy and practice. Students will also benefit from a wide range of partnerships with UK-based and world-leading heritage organisations and professionals, who regularly contribute to teaching. This combination of critical scholarship and applied learning will prepare students to understand heritage not only as an academic field, but also as an area of professional practice, public policy and global action.

The programme's leadership team is made up of Dr Chiara Bonacchi, Dr Arturo Rey Da Silva, Dr Jonathan Gardner

You can find out more about the programme and research in general at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology below.