Set the Pace of Critical Arts

Warwick shapes culture. Always proud to challenge the status quo, we give a platform to those who are overlooked, enabling and amplifying powerful stories from unexpected places.

The arts and humanities hold the power to help us understand our rapidly changing world, but too often shutout the voices that most need to be heard. When the arts fail to reflect our world, we lose relevance, empathy, and connection.

In the Faculty of Arts, we are creating pathways for a new generation of creators and thinkers. Fully funded scholarships from undergraduate through to PhD level will ensure students from all backgrounds are encouraged to pursue arts and humanities degrees. In addition, we will create structural change by offering Continued Professional Development to arts and humanities teachers, while growing the diversity of our own Faculty through global visiting professorships.

Warwick Arts Centre is one of the defining features of our campus. It brings performances and exhibitions of international quality to our region, enriches the University’s creative life, and shows that a university education is more than academic study alone.

A key purpose of the Arts Centre is to engage people who would not otherwise visit campus. Its nationally recognised public engagement programme hands over spaces and activities to the community, empowering people to carry a love of the arts through their lives.

Philanthropic support will sustain and grow this programme – reaching everyone who wants to attend a play, create art, or work in theatres and galleries.

It will also enable the Arts Centre to train the next generation of cultural leaders. Over the next five years, five Level 3 apprenticeships across Creative Learning, Marketing, Visitor Experience, Gallery, Programming, and Technical departments will equip young people with the skills and experience to help communities shape and own the arts.

The UK is losing the skills needed to care for and interpret its cultural heritage. Training routes into galleries, libraries, archives, and museums have all but disappeared, meaning valuable expertise is being lost. As this knowledge fades, so too does our ability to learn from the physical evidence of our past.

That loss matters because heritage speaks directly to the present. Medieval manuscripts can inform modern drug discovery, while art history shapes how we understand and map climate change. When we lose the skills to read artefacts, we lose insights that help address today’s challenges.

The Centre for Material Humanities will be a national flagship for change, combining rigorous academic study with hands-on experience to rebuild this capacity. Through placements with heritage partners, co-taught modules, and co-supervised research, students will graduate as sector-ready professionals. Working alongside Warwick’s Centre for Imaging, Metrology, and Additive Technologies (CiMAT), the Centre will train its students in advanced technologies such as micro-CT scanning to preserve fragile objects and make our shared heritage more accessible and engaging.

Society understands itself through stories. Today, the forms through which stories are told are evolving at extraordinary speed. Video games invite players into morally complex worlds shaped by multiple perspectives. Global streaming platforms and international film studios are opening space for voices long excluded from mainstream production.

Warwick will establish Creative Technology as a rigorous interdisciplinary field, uniting the humanities, social sciences, computing, and design to shape the future of storytelling.

The Centre for Creative Technology will equip students with the creative, technical, and critical skills required to lead in emerging narrative forms. Historians, scientists, economists and artists alike will revitalise their disciplines through new models of expression and engagement. As a result, Warwick graduates will be prepared to define the new landscape of storytelling.