Preventive Conservation

Do you want to make a difference to the future preservation and care of our shared cultural heritage? The MA Preventive Conservation is a unique one-year full-time programme that will prepare you for a professional career in the heritage sector.

Preventive conservation does not involve the treatment of damaged cultural heritage, but rather addresses the causes of potential damage before it happens. These threats can take many forms, some more obvious than others – fire and flood damage may quickly come to mind, but cumulative deterioration caused by higher light levels, or very dry or humid conditions, can require specialist monitoring equipment to detect. Working as a preventive conservator, you could be using these monitoring systems daily, behind the scenes in a museum, to keep an eye on environmental conditions or even track the movements of insect pests. You could be asked to advise on the design and maintenance of museum spaces and new exhibitions, to make sure that collections are safely housed inside, or come up with strategies for salvage in the event of fire or flood.

The course will equip you with a sound understanding of the principles and practicalities of preventive conservation, giving experience in identifying, measuring and addressing potential threats to objects and allow you to collaborate with others to put these into practice through the development of new methods and strategies to preserve collections.

The MA Preventive Conservation at the Courtauld offers face-to-face teaching, tuition and mentoring in this fast-developing discipline. The degree is taught by in-house conservation and science specialists complemented by outside professionals with particular areas of expertise. While a strong emphasis is placed on the scientific underpinning of preventive conservation and the ethical frameworks used in decision making, students also acquire practical skills in identification of hazards to collections and the measurement of environmental parameters. The Conservation Department at the Courtauld possesses cutting edge scientific equipment, allowing students to carry out imaging and analysis that helps them to understand the materials they will encounter in collections.

Students benefit from studying alongside peers on the well-established and highly regarded MA programmes in easels painting conservation and wall painting conservation. In addition, collaboration with the Courtauld Gallery and with the department’s existing partners in the cultural heritage sector, all of whom who have day-to-day responsibility for the preventive care of collections, provides a setting for field trips and practical monitoring exercises, and potential topics for the end-of-programme project and dissertation.