Arts and Humanities at the University of Aberdeen is the insitution's most improved discipline in the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings by Subject 2025, placing us in the top 200 globally.
The newly released tables based on individual subject areas from the School of Divinity, History, Philosophy and Art History and the School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture reflect teaching environment, research environment, research quality, knowledge transfer with industry and international outlook.
Arts and Humanities has moved into the 176th to 200th ranking band globally.
The improved ranking follows a number of key successes across the subject areas.
Dr Isabelle Gapp, Interdisciplinary Fellow in Art History, was recently awarded £260k from the British Academy to lead From the Floe Edge: Visualising Local Sea Ice Change in Kinngait, Nunavut. This four-year project engages art, science, and local knowledge to better understand the relationship between the community and artists in Kinngait and surrounding sea ice change.
Dr Johannes Heim in Linguistics is the recipient of a £325k collaborative award from the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The QuBisM project (Questions, Bias, Multimodality: Negotiating Meaning in Interaction) aims to disentangle the roles of sentence structure, meaning, context, sentence melody and physical gesture in biased questions in conversation.
And the University’s WayWORD Festival, bringing audiences to Aberdeen to celebrate literature and the arts, has recently been awarded £150k from Creative Scotland to secure its expansion over the next three years.
New teaching programmes ensure Arts and Humanities at the University of Aberdeen continue to offer world-class study options. Online postgraduate degrees in Christianity and the Visual Arts, Translation Studies and Philosophy and Society open our subjects to global audiences, while our Global Business Communication course is one of several Aberdeen programmes now taught at our Qatar campus.
Professor Beth Lord, Head of the School of Divinity, History, Philosophy & Art History, said: “I am delighted to see Aberdeen move into the global top 200 for Arts and Humanities. This is testament to the excellence of our teaching and research, and the hard work of all our staff and students.”