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The UC San Diego Visual Arts PhD Program grants two PhD degrees: Art History, Theory and Criticism and Art History, Theory and Criticism with a Concentration in Art Practice . The program embodies the department's commitment to innovative research by embracing the close intersection of art, media, and design practice with history, theory, and criticism, and by offering training in the history, theory, and criticism of a range and mix of areas represented in our MFA faculty, including studio art, film, video, photography, computational media, performance art, public art, design, visual culture, and socially engaged art practice. Regional and cultural frameworks of study include European and Latin American art, Chinese art, nineteenth-century French visual culture, Mesoamerican, Native American, and Indigenous art and material culture, Medieval art and culture, queer and feminist art, material culture, science, technology, and art; and ocean, environmental, and land art.

The Art Practice Concentration degree, which must be applied for at the time of application to the PhD program, follows the same course of scholarly training, research, and writing as the Art History, Theory and Criticism degree, with additional requirements in research-based art practice that span all years of coursework, qualifying, and doctoral research. Two students are admitted to this concentration annually.

Information for Current and Prospective Students

Requirement overview, program requirements.

• Coursework, 88 units

Language Requirement

• Qualifying Materials and Exams

Dissertation and Defense

• For VA77 Only- Art Practice Project and Exhibition

Full Time Enrollment

In order to remain eligible for financial support all graduate students must be enrolled   in 12 units of upper-division (100-199) or graduate level (200 and above) courses each quarter during the regular academic year. Graduate students must also maintain a minimum GPA of 3.0 to maintain good academic standing. The majority of students will choose to complete the majority of their academic coursework for a letter grade.

Pre-Candidacy

Coursework should be chosen in consultation with the Advisor and should be taken in preparation for the Qualifying phase. During the first three years in the program, students should aim to fulfill the following requirements:

• MA en Route Requirements (if interested and eligible)
• Qualifying Materials and Exams (year 3)

Advancing to candidacy occurs when the student has passed all course, language, and qualifying requirements and is ready to research and write a dissertation. Doctoral candidates, sometimes referred to as “all but dissertation” or ABD, work on their dissertation with Advisor and Committee consultation and feedback for two or more years. During this time, Art Practice candidates additionally produce the required art practice components. Each quarter, most doctoral candidates typically enroll in 8-12 units of VIS 299 and/or 4 units of a 500, in consultation with their Advisor. Candidacy concludes when the candidate completes and successfully defends the dissertation (and, for VA77, the additional Art Practice requirements) and is awarded the doctorate.

Degree Paths

The program consists of two degree paths: Art History, Theory and Criticism (VA76) and Art Practice (VA77), a concentration designed for artists engaged in advanced research who wish to pursue their work in an environment geared to doctoral study, and to produce studio, media, performance or public facing work alongside a written dissertation. See Handbook for further details.

Interdisciplinary Specializations

Students within the PhD program who are interested in the opportunity to undertake specialized research may apply to participate in an interdisciplinary specialization. Students accepted into a specialization program would be expected to complete coursework in addition to those required for their PhD program. The department offers interdisciplinary specializations with the following campus programs.

• Anthropogeny:   for students with an interest in human origins
• Critical Gender Studies:   providing specialized training in gender and sexuality
• Interdisciplinary Environmental Research : for students interested in environmental solutions

Curriculum: VA76 Art History, Theory and Criticism

VA76- 22 courses, 88 units

GENERAL FIELD EMPHASIS

During the first year of study, students declare a general area of study in consultation with their Advisor and with the approval of the Faculty Director. This general field emphasis will be considered as they choose courses and, toward year three, plan their qualifying materials. See the Handbook for general field options.

CORE REQUIREMENTS (8 courses, 32 units)

Required (4 courses, 16 units):

• VIS 200- Methods and Theories
• VIS 204- Rethinking Art History
• VIS 500 (1 course, 4 units)- Apprentice Teaching
• VIS 502- Graduate Teaching in Visual Arts

Breadth (4 courses, 16 units), choose from 4 different areas with 3 different faculty:

• Medieval, Renaissance or Early Modern Art- VIS 251, VIS 252
• Modern and Contemporary Art- VIS 254, VIS 255
• Media Studies- VIS 256
• Meso-American Art or North American Indigenous Art- VIS 257, VIS 260
• Asian Art- VIS 258
• Latin American Art- VIS 259
• Material Culture- VIS 261
• Design Studies- VIS 262

ELECTIVE REQUIREMENTS (14 courses, 56 units), choose from the following options:

• Art History Seminars (VIS 230-269), a minimum of 6 MUST be taken for the elective area
• Graduate Research (VIS 299), during 1st year with provisional advisor
• Professional Practice Seminar (VIS 220)
• Art Theory/Practice (VIS 206, VIS 210-219), a maximum of 2 may be taken
• Other Department, a maximum of 3 graduate level courses may be taken 
• Reading Courses (approved undergrad courses), a maximum of 4 may be taken 
• Directed Group Study (VIS 298), a maximum of 1 may be taken
• Individual Studies (VIS 295), a maximum of 12 units may be taken with Advisor

Curriculum: VA77 Art History, Theory and Criticism- Art Practice

VA77- 22 courses, 88 units

CORE REQUIREMENTS (12 courses, 48 units)

Required (9 courses, 36 units):

• VIS 206- Seminar in Art Practice Research
• VIS 207 (repeat 3 times for 12 units)- Working Practice for Art Practice
• VIS 210-219, 1 course from Art Theory/Practice 

Breadth (3 courses, 12 units), choose from 3 different areas with 3 different faculty:

ELECTIVE REQUIREMENTS (10 courses, 40 units), choose from the following options:

• Art History Seminars (VIS 230-269), a minimum of 3 MUST be taken for the elective area
• Art Theory/Practice (VIS 210-219), a maximum of 2 may be taken
• Other Department, a maximum of 3 may be taken 
• Reading Courses (approved undergrad courses), a maximum of 2 may be taken 
• Directed Group Study (VIS 298), a maximum of 4 units may be taken

For the VA76 PhD students, competency in reading, understanding, and interpreting texts in two languages other than English is required before advancement to candidacy (Qualifying Exam stage), and competency in at least one language is expected at the time of application to the program. Art Practice Concentration students (VA77) will be required to satisfy competency in one language other than English before advancing to PhD candidacy. The student and their Advisor will jointly determine examination languages. 

The Program’s language requirement may be met in one of three ways: 

• Passing the department’s in-house Language Exam  
• Passing one approved graduate-level language course 
• Passing two approved upper-division undergraduate language courses 
• Passing a two-year sequence of approved undergraduate language courses in a single language  

Required Paperwork

For each language exam or course sequence taken to satisfy a language requirement, a Language Completion form must be completed by the student, the proctor/instructor and submitted to the Student Affiars Manager in order to receive credit for completion of the language requirement. Submitted forms are automatically routed via DocuSign for approval and processing.

In-House Language Exams

In-house Language Exams test ability in reading and comprehension (by translation into English) only, not writing or spoken fluency in the designated language. The exam consists of two short texts, one less difficult to be translated into English without a dictionary, and one more difficult to be translated with a dictionary. The dictionary may be either a printed volume or an on-line resource. One hour is allowed for each section (total test time: 2 hours). The translations may be written on a computer or by hand. Exams are corrected by the faculty member responsible for designing the exam, who also invigilates the test. If adequate reading knowledge is not demonstrated, the student’s Advisor will review with the student and the faculty setting the exam the steps necessary to master the language and a new exam will be scheduled within a reasonable amount of time. 

Students requesting an in-house language examination should consult with faculty responsible for particular languages:

• Chinese and Japanese : Professor Kuiyi Shen 
• French : Professors. Jordan Rose and John Welchman 
• German : Professor Alena Williams 
• Italian : Professor William Tronzo 
• Korean : Professor Kyong Park
• Mayan languages : Professor Elizabeth Newsome 
• Spanish : Professors Elizabeth Newsome and Mariana Wardwell 
• Turkish: Professors Memo Akten and Pinar Yoldas

Individual arrangements for determination of competency will be made for those languages that cannot be tested by department faculty . 

Committee Constitution and Management

About the committee.

This is the group of four faculty who agree to the student’s request for mentorship and evaluation during the qualifying and doctoral years. The Committee is chaired by the Advisor(s). In addition to mentoring and guiding the student’s research, this team serves as the Qualifying Committee and the Doctoral or Dissertation Committee, conducting the Qualifying Exam and the Dissertation Defense. The committee must be formally appointed by Graduate Division in the process outlined below.

Committee Constitution

The Committee Chair is the student’s Faculty Advisor/Co-Advisors and is selected by Year Two through mutual agreement with the student. The rest of the Committee is constituted through request and consent between the student and other faculty, with the guidance and approval of the Advisor(s). 

Makeup of the committee:

• 3 Visual Arts Faculty (including the Chair/Co-Chairs), 1 member may be a non-PhD faculty
• 1 tenured or emeritus faculty from outside the department

For each option, Assistant or Acting-Associate Faculty may serve as a general member or Co-Chair but not as sole Chair. The Graduate Division website has  additional information  about committees and a  Committee Membership Table  which may be helpful in determining what role a faculty member may serve on a committee.

Submitting Your Committee

After faculty have agreed to serve on the Committee, and the Faculty Advisor has approved the list, the student must complete and send the  Committee Constitution form  which will be routed to the Student Affiars Manager for processing.  This form must be approved by the Graduate Division by Week 5 BEFORE the Qualifying Exam .

Changing Your Committee

There are times when committee membership must change after the intial review and approval. All changes to committee membership need to be approved by the Department and then Graduate Division. Committee reconstitution must be completely reviewed and approved by Week 5, the quarter PRIOR to QE/Defense. When changing committee membership:

• Review the Committee Membership requirements 
• Discuss the change in committee membership with the Committee Chair/Co-chairs
• Discuss the change in committee with impacted committee members
• Complete the   Committee Reconstitution form   which will be routed to the Student Affairs Manager for processing.

Committee Management

It is the responsibility of the student, in consultation with their advisor/committee chair, to engage with and request feedback on drafts of written materials and (for VA77) documentation of artwork progress with all committee members during research and writing of their qualifying materials and dissertation. The student also must email final copies of all materials to their Committee prior to their Qualifying Exam and Dissertation Defense. 

Qualifying Exam, Advancement to Candidacy

About the qualifying process.

The Qualifying process occurs throughout Year Three. The student, under the supervision of the Advisor and with the advice of the Committee, prepares two bibliographies (one on the chosen field of emphasis and the second pertaining to the proposed dissertation); writes a qualifying paper and a dissertation prospectus; and takes written and oral examinations pertaining to these documents. The Art Practice PhD additionally requires a practice prospectus and a third bibliography.

Qualifying Exam

The Qualifying Examination has two parts: A Written Examination in which the student writes two essays over five days in response to questions provided by the Committee; and two weeks later,  a 2- or 2.5-hour Oral Examination led by the Committee, during which the student is asked questions and put in dialog about all of the qualifying materials.

Qualifying Timeline

A student must have completed all required course work and passed all language examinations before taking the qualifying examination, which will be held no later than the end of the third year. Upon successful completion of the qualifying examination, the student will be advanced to candidacy.

Qualifying Exam Administrative Checklist  

Qualifying Exam Failure

Should a student fail the examination, the Faculty Committee will clarify the weaknesses in the exam, so that the student can prepare to take it a second time. If a second oral examination is warranted, they will have to re-take and pass the exam prior to the end of the Pre-Candidacy Time Limit (or they need an extension approved to continue). They can always take a leave and return but if the PCTL is expired, they will have to advance before returning or an exception to extend the time would be need to be approved prior to retuning. If the student fails the oral examination a second time, their graduate studies in the department will be terminated.

MA en Route

• Five Art History seminars 
• VIS 200 Methods and Theories
• VIS 204 Re-Thinking Art History 
• One Theory/Practice seminar (chosen from VIS 210-219)
• Four breadth courses, from four different breadth areas

We do not offer an MA with an Art Practice concentration. Therefore, Art Practice concentration students must make a formal change in their degree aim to designate Art History, Theory, and Criticism (VA76). This change must take place at least two quarters prior to the Qualifying Exam. 

Note:   Students who wish to receive an MA as part of the Ph.D. program   must apply for master’s degree candidacy by the end of the second week of the quarter in which they expect to receive the degree.   Please see the Graduate Coordinator regarding this process.

Necessary Documents for the Qualifying Exam

• Report of the Qualifying Exam

Necessary Documents for the MA on the Way

• Application for MA (due week two) 
• Final Report for MA 

Best Practices for Completing the Report of the Qualifying Exam and Final Report via DocuSign:

• Ahead of your exam/defense ask faculty to add [email protected] as a “safe sender” so those emails are less likely to go to junk/spam. Although campus IT has taken steps to identify DocuSign as a safe sender, it is still recommended that individual users do so as well.
• At the end of your Exam/Defense ask your committee members to check their email for the DocuSign email with the link to the form and sign while you're all online together. 
• ask the faculty to check their junk folder, spam quarantine, or other spam folders
• next, ask them to log into their DocuSign account using their @ucsd.edu email address and SSO credentials to access the form/s directly (https://docusign.ucsd.edu) *some people have personal DocuSign accounts so ask them to ensure they are logging into the UCSD DocuSign account
• Get verbal confirmation of who has signed and who has not, then follow-up with the Student Affairs Manager to resolve any issues your committee members have with signing the form.
• Once the appropriate form is submitted to the Graduate Division, the appropriate fee will be charged directly to the student’s financial TritonLink account. 

About the Dissertation

Following successful completion of the qualifying examinations, the candidate will research and write a doctoral dissertation under the supervision of their Advisor and with the input of the Committee. Students in the art practice concentration (VA77) will submit a written dissertation that observes the same regulations and conventions as VA 76, except that the length requirement is slightly shorter and there must be one additional chapter devoted to discussion of the art practice. In addition, Art Practice candidates will additionally produce and exhibit a visual component. See the Handbook for details. 

About the Defense

After the committee has reviewed the finished dissertation (and art practice components, for VA 77), the candidate will orally defend their dissertation (and art practice work and exhibition), responding to questions from the Committee in a meeting that may be public (the student may invite visitors), as per university policy. The Dissertation Defense is the culmination of all of your work within the Ph.D. program. Please read all of the information on the Graduate Division's website about " Preparing to Graduate " and make an appointment to speak with the Student Affairs Manager one year prior to when you plan to defend.

Roles and Responsibilities for the Defense

Student will:

• Schedule the Dissertation Defense with their committee. This is normally scheduled for three hours. (You are responsible for reserving a room or scheduling the zoom meeting). 
• Complete the PhD Dissertation Defense Notificaiton form which will notify the Student Affairs Manager of the date and time of the defense. This form is required so that the Final Report paperwork can be initiated and sent to your committee members on the date of the defense.
• Follow-up with your committee, the Graduate Division, and the Student Affairs Manager about any issues surrounding the completion of your degree.

Faculty Advisor will:

• Ensure the   policy   appropriate participation of all members of the committee at the Dissertation Defense. It is also helpful to remind all committee members to sign the forms by checking their inboxes for the DocuSign request to sign the forms. These sometimes end up in a person's spam folder.

Student Affairs Manager will:

• Fill out the Final Report form via DocuSign and route the form the morning of the exam/defense for signature to all committee members, the department chair, and the Graduate Division.
• Follow-up with committee members regarding signatures on the Final Report and general petition forms (if needed).
• Send out the announcement of the defense to department faculty and graduate students.

Additional Information and Tasks

Preliminary Dissertation Appointments with the Graduate Division: Students will schedule their preliminary and final appointments with Graduate Division Academic Affairs Advisors utilizing the online calendaring system they have in place:   https://gradforms.ucsd.edu/calendar/index.php

Committee Management : If you need to make any changes to your doctoral committee please follow the instructions above in the "Committee Management" drawer. 

Embargo Your Dissertation:   Talk to your faculty advisor about embargoing your dissertation. You may want to embargo your dissertation if you are planning to turn it into a book. The embargo will delay the university's publication of your dissertation and prevent other academics from using your research.   https://grad.ucsd.edu/_files/academics/DissertThesisReleaseTemplate.pdf

Necessary Documents for the Dissertation Defense

• Final Report (routed for signature by the Student Affairs Manager)

Best Practices for Completing the Final Report via DocuSign:

• At the end of your Defense ask your committee members to check their email for the DocuSign email with the link to the form and sign while you're all online together. 
• Get verbal confirmation of who has signed and who has not, then follow up with the Student Affairs Manager to resolve any issues your committee members have with signing the form.

Paying Associated Fees:  For students who will need to pay fees (advancement to candidacy, thesis submission fee, filing fee, re-admit fee), they will be charged on the financial TritonLink account once the form is received by the Graduate Division. There is no need for students to go to the cashier’s office.

Grades and Evaluations

Only courses in which a student received grades of A, B, or S are allowed toward satisfaction of the requirements for the degree. Note that a “C” is generally regarded as unsatisfactory within this department. In satisfaction of all program requirements and electives, A, A-, and B+ are regarded as acceptable grades for seminars and courses. Grades of B, B- indicate weaknesses and are cause for concern. Grades of C+ or below are regarded as unsatisfactory and may lead to academic probation. University policy states that any student with more than 8 units of “U” and/or “F” grades is barred from future registration including the next available quarter. It is not recommended that VIS 295/298/299 are taken for a letter grade.

Grade Point Average

A graduate student must maintain a minimum grade point average of at least 3.0 (B average) to continue in good standing. A student is subject to dismissal if the overall grade point average falls below 3.0 at any time.

Spring Evaluation

Every Spring quarter, Advisors (in the first year Provisional Advisors) will submit an evaluation of their advisee’s progress to Graduate Division. Students are expected to submit a summary of the past academic year to their advisor. These evaluations serve as an important tool for students and advisors in assessing student progress, while also providing suggestions and goals for students’ successful completion of their projects.   

The Graduate Division will review the evaluations when student/departments are making specific requests for exceptions

The duration of the Ph.D. program is five to eight years. University and departmental regulations stipulate that the maximum tenure of graduate study at UC San Diego or Total Registered Time Limit (TRTL) is eight years; while seven years is the limit for receiving any type of university financial support or a student's Support Time Limit (SUTL). For the Department of Visual Arts, the "normative" time to degree is 6 years. Students are expected to pass their qualifying exam and advance to candidacy in year three, but no later than year four which is the university's Pre-candidacy time limit (PCTL).

To learn more about time limits please visit the Graduate Division website.

Time Limits:  https://grad.ucsd.edu/academics/progress-to-degree/time-to-doctorate-policy.html

You can check your time limit by logging into the Graduate Student Portal.

Graduate Student Portal:  https://gradforms.ucsd.edu/portal/student/

PhD Current Students

Phd handbook.

The department website and catalog are great resources for students to learn generally about the PhD program and progress towards their degree. There are detailed instructions and robust program information available in the full PhD Handbook. Each student should refer to this resource throughout their academic career.

2023-24 Academic Year

2022-23 Academic Year  

2021-22 Academic Year

How to Apply

• Join our PhD Art History Program (VA76)
• Join our PhD Art Practice Program (VA77)

School of Art

• Graduate Programs
• Ph.D. in Fine Arts

School of Art Fine Arts Doctoral Program (Art)

Fine arts doctoral program (art).

The Art track of the Fine Arts Doctoral Program centers on art praxis, which we define as theoretically informed action aimed at creating change in academic, social, and community contexts. We have chosen the word "praxis" instead of "practice" to signal a different relationship to theory than assumed by the theory-practice binary, and to indicate a fundamental difference between MFA programs in studio practice and the PhD. For Aristotle, praxis meant an action that is valuable in itself, as opposed to that which leads to creation, and for scholars of modernity from Marx to Lefebvre, praxis was, and remains, infused with an ethical and political imperative, and designated a more grounded and intentional mode of social and political transformation.

The Art track is part of a College-wide Fine Arts Doctoral Program , which includes students focusing on music, theatre, dance, and visual art. All areas of the Fine Arts Doctoral Program require a series of core courses that bring together students from across the College for innovative interdisciplinary and collaborative inquiry. These core courses support the art area's commitment to blurring disciplinary boundaries through original modes of investigation.

Students conduct interdisciplinary research integrating methodologies from a home discipline related to Art with methodologies from disciplines of Music, Theatre, and Dance housed at other Schools in the J.T. & Margaret Talkington College of Visual and Performing Arts or the University at large. Such interdisciplinarity is not simply additive, but transformative, blurring the chosen disciplines and even fundamentally altering them.

This program is for

• studio artists who want to transform their approach to making into a methodology for research,
• scholars who want to intervene in their home discipline by proposing novel ways of conducting research,
• curators and cultural practitioners who want to do community-engaged projects, and
• educators who want to rethink inquiry and develop meaningful practices organized around art and images that transform engagement through interdisciplinary initiatives.

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How to apply.

Interested candidates applying for admission to the Fine Arts Doctoral Program for Fall 2023 can do so through the Texas Tech University Graduate School portal.

A complete application - via the Graduate School application portal - will include the following:

• Official transcripts of all previous college-level study
• Official G.R.E. score report (The GRE score requirement has been waived for Fall 2024-entering applicants)
• 3 letters of recommendation
• Current resumé or curriculum vitae
• A scholarly writing sample (10-30 pages of academic writing)
• Art portfolio (optional)
• Statement of intent (800 words maximum; see tips on writing statements of intent). Please indicate in your statement the faculty members in the FADP(Art) program (see below) with whom you would like to work.
• For international students: passport and additional documents that prove your eligibility to study in the United States
• Registration fee

ENTRANCE QUALIFICATIONS

For acceptance into the doctoral program, the applicant must have completed a master's degree, or its equivalent, with emphasis in some area of the visual arts. Every effort is made to select candidates who show strong scholarship and professional competence.  Applicants who have not taken at least 15 hours of art history, art criticism, art education, arts administration, aesthetics, and/or visual culture courses at the college level may be required to meet the 15-hour minimum in the form of leveling courses taken here at TTU, which will not count toward the 60-hour minimum in the doctoral degree plan.

While the Fine Arts Doctoral Program (Art) takes applications year-round, please take into consideration the following dates:

JANUARY 15th for Fall semester entry, with full financial consideration.

OCTOBER 15th for Spring semester entry, with available/limited financial consideration.

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Degree handbook.

• PhD Handbook

ONLINE CATALOG INFORMATION

Student success, school of art alumni.

Class of 2012

Sara Peso White

Class of 2015

Bryan Wheeler, dissertation: “Painting ‘Section' or Painting Texas: Negotiating Modernity and Identity in the Texas New Deal Post Office Murals.” Lecturer in the School of Art and College of Media and Communication.

Class of 2016

Yuan-Ta Hsu

Lina Kattan, dissertation: “Conflicted Living Beings: The Performative Aspect of Female Bodies' Representations in Saudi Painting and Photography.” Associate Professor of Visual and Performing Arts, University of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Class of 2017

Norah Alqabba, dissertation: “Globalization and the Role of the Sharjah Biennale in the Transformation of Saudi Contemporary Sculpture”

Class of 2019

Kimberly Jones, dissertation: “Women in Contemporary Israeli Cinema”

Katharine Scherff, dissertation: “The Virtual Liturgy: An Examination of Medieval and Early Modern Ritual Objects as Media Technology.” Full-time Lecturer at TTU, Art History and Global Art Program, Affiliated Faculty Medieval and Renaissance Studies Center.

Jared Stanley, dissertation: “Working Through Grief: Continuing Bonds in the New Golden Age of American Television.” Division Chair, Division of Art and Design, School of Fine Arts and Communication, Bob Jones University.

Class of 2020 

Niloofar Gholamrezaei, dissertation: “Photographic Images, Distanced Realism, and the State of Being Modern in the Works of Mohammad Ghaffari and Otto Dix.” Assistant Professor of Visual Arts and General Education, Regis College.

Class of 2021

Ahmad Rafiei, dissertation: “Objects in Motion: Global Interactions and Cross-Cultural Exchange from Safavid to Twentieth-Century Iran.” Curatorial Fellow, Toledo Museum of Art, 2021-2024.

Sylvia Weintraub, dissertation: “Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Online: Why Making Matters on Pinterest.”

Assistant Professor of Art Education in the department of Visual and Theatre Arts at the University of Tennessee at Martin.

Class of 2022

Corina Carmona, dissertation: “Re-membering a Coyolxauhqui Pedagogy: Creative and Cultural Praxis at the Intersection of Ethnic Studies and Fine Art”

Deepika Dhiman, dissertation: “Using Autoethnography and Visual Storytelling to Examine How Identity is Informed by Social Normative Behavior in India and the United States”

Class of 2023

Kathryn Kelley: “Creatives Engage with Spontaneous Self-Affirmation as a Part of Their Writing Practices”

Quest ions?

Contact the interim coordinator.

Andrés Peralta, PhD Interim FADP Coordinator

Fine Arts- Art Doctoral Program Faculty

Klinton Burgio-Ericson, PhD

Kevin Chua, PhD

Theresa Flanigan, PhD

Rina Little, PhD

Jorgelina Orfila, PhD

Andrés Peralta, PhD

Maia Toteva, PhD

Heather Warren-Crow, PhD

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PhD Program

The UCLA Department of Art History offers a two-stage graduate program toward the PhD. Students are not admitted for a terminal master’s (MA) degree. The MA is awarded in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the PhD and is granted with the successful completion of the first stage of the program, typically at the end of the second year, 6th quarter, in residence. Normative time to degree for the PhD is seven years from the term of admission. For students entering with a MA in hand, the normative time to degree is five years from the term of admission.

All students are required to complete the M.A. requirements in the department. The Graduate Review Committee may waive the M.A. requirements, at the time of admission, for students matriculating with a M.A. degree in Art History or adjacent discipline from another institution. Following Academic Senate policy on duplication of degrees, a student who enters the program with a M.A. degree in Art History from another institution is not eligible to receive a second M.A. degree in Art History from UCLA.

Please see here for the official UCLA Art History Graduate Program Requirements published on the Graduate Division website.

• The student is assigned a faculty mentor upon admission to the program. The mentor is responsible for the student’s course of study and must be consulted at least once each quarter. A change of faculty supervision and/or change in field(s) must be approved by the Graduate Review Committee.
• The Director of Graduate Studies (DGS) offers intellectual guidance, approves any exceptions to the program requirements, and adjudicates disputes between a student and his/her faculty mentor. The DGS further serves as Chair of the Graduate Review Committee, which governs the admissions process.
• The Student Affairs Officer (SAO) assists students with all the administrative aspects of moving through the program.
• Each spring quarter, the entire faculty reviews the status of each graduate student to ensure appropriate time-to-degree progress.

Toward the MA

Requirements for the MA

• Satisfaction of the first language requirement.
• Successful completion of AH 200 with a grade of “B+” or better.
• Nine graduate and upper division courses (36 units) completed while in the program. At least six of those courses (24 units) must be at the graduate level, including four graduate seminars. AH 200 may be counted towards the required six courses.
• Successful completion of a qualifying paper (approximately 30 pages) according to the standards and procedures outlined below.

* Typically the above requirements are completed within the first two years of study (6 quarters).

Distribution of Coursework

The nine required courses must include at least two courses from Group A and two courses from Group B noted below.

Qualifying Paper for the MA

• The qualifying paper is a revised and expanded version of a paper written for a class from the first year of coursework. It should be approximately 30 pages in length (excluding footnotes, images, and bibliography) and should demonstrate the student’s ability 1) to formulate a thesis, 2) to present an extended argument, and 3) to conduct original research. Quality of the writing will also be evaluated.
• By the end of the fall quarter of the second year, student selects a class paper from the first year in consultation with his or her advisor to revise and expand as the qualifying paper.
• In the following winter quarter, student enrolls for 4 units of 598 (RSRCH-MASTER THESIS) to work on the paper under the supervision of advisor.
• Director of Graduate Studies (DGS) will contact each student during the winter quarter (usually early February) to appoint a committee of three faculty readers for the qualifying paper, one of which is the student’s advisor. At least one of the faculty readers will have had no classroom contact with the student. All students may suggest potential readers; however, the DGS will balance the student’s request against equity of faculty workload.
• On the first day of instruction of the spring quarter, students submits three copies of the qualifying paper to the Student Affairs Officer (SAO) along with a list of the three readers assigned to review the paper.
• The qualifying papers will be distributed to the three assigned faculty readers and each reader will complete an evaluation form and submit it to the SAO within three weeks of receipt of the paper.
• By the fourth week of the spring quarter, the SAO will make available the papers with reader’s comments to the student and these papers will be added to the student’s permanent file.
• The Graduate Review Committee, taking into consideration the faculty reader evaluations, will determine whether the student will be awarded the MA and permitted to proceed into the PhDprogram. In some cases, the Committee may recommend that the student receive the MA degree but discontinue further graduate study. It is also possible (although very rare) that the student’s work may not be judged adequate to receive the MA.

Completion of the MA

• Prior to the third week of the spring quarter in the second year, the student should complete the “Petition for Advancement to Candidacy for the Master’s Degree” (provided by and returned to the SAO).
• Once the Department has accepted the qualifying paper, the student must file it with Graduate Division by the Monday of the tenth week of the spring quarter, formatted as a thesis.
• Graduate Division guidelines for formatting MA theses are available  here . Workshops on thesis formatting are offered at the beginning of each fall and winter quarters. See the Grad Division website for more information.
• Following the Department’s annual spring review of graduate students, the student must submit a completed form for transfer from the MA to the PhD program (provided by and returned to the SAO).

Toward the PhD

Upon the completion of the MA or starting with a MA from another institution, the student begins the PhD program having chosen a major field of study within art history, often known at the time of application. By the end of the second quarter of residence at the PhD stage, the student also selects a minor field, which may be outside the department (e.g. Architecture, History, Anthropology, Comparative Literature, Archaeology, etc.). The major and minor advisors are responsible for the student’s course of study and completion of requirements within the selected field. Graduate Review Committee must approve any change of advisor(s) or the major and minor fields.

Requirements for the PhD

• Satisfaction of language requirements (minimum 2, including 1 from MA stage; more may be required depending on field of study)
• Completion of 8 graduate and upper division courses (32 units)
• Written comprehensive exams in major and minor fields
• Dissertation prospectus and oral qualifying exam
• Doctoral dissertation
• A total of 8 graduate and upper division courses are required, of which at least 4 must be art history courses at the graduate level.
• Of the nine courses (36 units) required for the MA, students may use a maximum of two of these (8 units) to count towards Ph.D. coursework. Students may also apply courses taken in excess of MA requirements towards fulfilling Ph.D. course requirements. (This does not apply to students who received their MA from other institutions/departments.)
• 5 courses in one field are required to claim it as the major field; 3 courses in one field are required to claim it as the minor field. The minor can also be from outside the department (e.g. Architecture, History, Anthropology, Comparative Literature, Archaeology, etc.).
• Students entering the PhD stage deficient in Art History 200 (Art Historical Theories and Methodologies) or its equivalent must add this to the total requirements. In some cases, Art History 201 (Topics in Historiography of Art History) may be required by faculty/advisor recommendation. Any additional coursework required by the Graduate Review Committee at time of admission must be completed during the first two quarters of residence and may not count toward the minimum course requirements for either the MA or PhD degree.

Written Comprehensive Examinations

• Upon completion of coursework and fulfillment of language requirements, the student takes the PhD written comprehensive examinations in the major and minor fields of study, designed and evaluated by the student’s major and minor advisors respectively.
• The purpose of the examinations is to test the student’s breadth and depth of knowledge in his/her fields of study. If a student fails to pass the examination or part thereof, the failed portion may be repeated once no later than the subsequent quarter of residence. No further repetition will be allowed. The written comprehensive examinations may be taken during any two-week period of the Fall, Winter, and Spring quarters. Typically, students take these exams during the winter quarter of the second year in residence, 5th quarter, in the PhD program.
• The Department offers two formats for the major and minor written exams, the details of which must be worked out in advance between the student and the examiner. Format A: Take-home. 2-3 essay questions to be completed in 1 week (for the minor exam, 1-2 questions to be completed in 3 days). Format B: Sit-down. 2-3 essay questions to be completed in 6 hours (for the minor exam, 1-2 questions to be completed in 3 hours). Many faculty incorporate designing of a syllabus as an exam question and the formats above do not preclude this possibility. Such an assignment would count as one question/essay.
• The specific format and dates for the major and minor exams must be submitted to the Student Affairs Officer at least three weeks in advance using the appropriate departmental form.

Doctoral Committee

• Upon passing the written comprehensive examinations in major and minor fields of study, the student selects a dissertation topic and nominates the members of his/her Doctoral Committee in consultation with his/her advisor.
• This committee minimally consists of the major advisor, now serving as committee chair, two additional members of the art history faculty (normally, but not necessarily, including the student’s minor advisor), and one member from another UCLA department. For details on the acceptable status of these members and for minimum university standards of the doctoral committee,  please see page 14-17 in the Standards and Procedures for Graduate Study manual .
• The student and committee chair must agree on all committee members. Any changes in committee constitution after formal nomination must be reported to and approved by the Graduate Division; replacing the committee chair can only occur by consent or if the faculty member leaves UCLA.
• Please note that the Graduate Division generally approves Committee nominations within 2-3 weeks, and the oral qualifying exam may not be taken before official approval has been received.

Dissertation Prospectus and Oral Qualifying Examination

• The dissertation topic should be identified in discussions with the advisor. These discussions usually evolve organically through the course of study and are highly individualized. Typically, the oral examination is scheduled during the quarter following the successful completion of the written examinations.
• Once the Doctoral Committee has been officially approved by Graduate Division, and after having conducted considerable exploratory research and preparation for his/her dissertation, the student submits to each member of the Doctoral Committee a dissertation prospectus. The prospectus should not be distributed to the full committee without the approval of the student’s committee chair.
• The dissertation prospectus should not exceed 20 pages and include a statement of purpose regarding the art historical topic/problem being addressed (what is at stake in the study), tentative chapter outlines, working bibliography, research plan, methodological strategies, and preliminary schedule for completion.
• Students should submit the prospectus to committee members 2-3 weeks before the oral examination date to allow sufficient time for the prospectus to be reviewed. If any member of the Doctoral Committee finds the prospectus inadequate, he or she must notify the committee chair at least one week prior to the oral examination date. In some cases, the prospectus must be revised and/or the examination date postponed.
• The student is responsible for scheduling the oral exam, consulting with committee members well in advance regarding the date and time of availability of each faculty member. The SAO helps the student reserve an appropriate space for the exam.
• The purpose of the oral examination is to assess the validity and feasibility of the proposed dissertation topic and its methodologies, as well as the soundness of the student’s projected approach to completing the project.
• At the end of the examination, each committee member reports the examination as “passed” or “not passed.” A student may not pass and may not be advanced to candidacy if more than one member votes “not passed” regardless of the size of the committee, or if the major advisor so votes. Upon majority vote of the committee, the oral qualifying examination may be repeated once. Students upon passing the oral examination are formally advanced to candidacy by the Graduate Division.
• At the time of the exam, the Doctoral Committee decides, by unanimous agreement, whether or not to waive the final oral examination (not normally required) and selects, again by unanimous agreement, a minimum of three members, two from the art history faculty and one from an outside department, who will read, approve, and certify the final draft of the dissertation. For details regarding the acceptable status of these certifying members, consult the publication, Standards and Procedures for Graduate Study at UCLA.
• Upon passing the oral examination, the student is officially Advanced to Candidacy (ATC).

Dissertation and Final Oral Examination (if required)

• After advancing to candidacy, the student works on the dissertation in consultation with his/her advisor, committee chair, as well as Doctoral Committee certifying members according to the rules laid out in the above named publication. Upon completion of the dissertation or individual chapters thereof, and with  approval  of the committee chair, the student circulates a copy of the dissertation  in Week 1 of the quarter  for comments and suggestions from the certifying members of the Doctoral Committee.  Each  reader is allowed  four  weeks in which to read it and make corrections and comments, and the student is allowed  three  weeks in which to respond and revise the dissertation. It is incumbent upon the student to communicate in a timely manner with all certifying members of the Doctoral Committee to ensure adequate time for review. Committee members must be consulted as each reader may require more time.  PLEASE REVIEW the timeline for dissertation completion  which clearly outlines the schedule for submission during the student’s final quarter.
• After incorporating into the final draft of the dissertation the recommended changes, the student will circulate the dissertation again among the certifying members of the Doctoral Committee. This draft should be circulated sufficiently in advance of the deadline for filing the dissertation so that each reader is allowed at least two weeks in which to reread it (see quarterly Schedule of Classes for filing deadlines).
• Each certifying member of the committee then decides whether or not to approve the dissertation. In cases where less than the entire committee acts as certifying members, approval of the dissertation must be unanimous. If the entire committee acts as certifying members, the dissertation is considered approved with one negative decision so long as that negative decision is not that of the committee chair. After final approval by the Dean of the Graduate Division, the student files the required number of copies of the dissertation with the Manuscript Advisor of the Office of University Archives. Deadlines for filing the dissertation fall approximately two weeks before the date the degree is to be awarded.
• Note: A final oral examination is not normally required for Art History, but in some cases it may be requested by the Doctoral Committee (determined at the oral qualifying exam), and is held prior to filing the dissertation. All members of the committee must attend and vote. A student may pass with one negative vote so long as that vote is not that of the committee chair. In case of failure, the Doctoral Committee decides, by unanimous agreement, whether or not the candidate may be re-examined.
• Upon filing the dissertation, the student receives the Ph.D.

Language Requirements

The completion of the PhD requires reading knowledge of a minimum of two foreign languages relevant to the student’s field of study (more than two may be required in some cases and must be determined in consultation with the faculty advisor). Applicants are expected to already possess reading proficiency in at least one of the two languages for which they will be responsible. New students shall sit for at least one language exam upon arrival at UCLA.

Students at the MA stage are expected to satisfy their first foreign language requirement by the end of the 3rd quarter in residence. It is highly recommended that they complete the second language requirement by the end of the 6th quarter in residence.

Students at the PhD stage are expected to satisfy their second foreign language requirement by the end of the 1st quarter and any additional languages by the end of the 3rd quarter in residence (or in consultation with the major advisor).

Fulfilling the Language Requirement

Option 1: Pass the Departmental Foreign Language Exam.

The language exam consists of translation of a text of 300-700 words chosen by the examiner to be translated into English in three hours (use of a non-electronic dictionary is allowed). Specific qualities of the language and expected level of proficiency in the field will impact the choice and length of the selected text. The Department expects accurate rendition in English rather than a strict translation, word for word, and values the quality of the translation over the completion of the exam.

Language exams are scheduled four times a year, approximately three weeks prior to finals week during the regular academic quarters. Entering students must sit for the first language exam in the first week of the fall quarter. Exam results will be sent out by email within three weeks of the exam date. If feedback on the exam is desired after the results have been announced, students are welcome to contact the examiner. If a student fails the exam and wants to appeal, he or she should contact the Chair of the Language Committee or Director of Graduate Studies.

Option 2: Complete UCLA courses  French 6, German 6, Italian 6, Spanish 25, or other relevant language classes with a minimum grade of “B”.

The following is a general guideline for language requirements in relation to specific fields of study. The final selection and number of languages is to be determined in consultation with the primary advisor.

African Indigenous African languages, Arabic, French, German, Portuguese Ancient/Mediterranean/Near East Akkadian, Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Latin Chinese/Korean/Japanese Two East Asian languages, for pre-modern studies additionally literary Chinese or Japanese Byzantine/Western Medieval French, German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Slavic Languages, Turkish, Spanish Indigenous Americas One European language, one indigenous language (e.g., Quechua, Nahuatl, Maya), one other language (depending on topic) Islamic Arabic, Turkish/Ottoman, Persian, French, German Latin America Spanish (mandatory), French, German, Portuguese Modern & Contemporary Europe & America French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian Renaissance/Baroque/Early Modern Italian, French, Spanish, German, Latin, Dutch, Slavic Languages, Latin and/or Greek (depending on topic) South Asia Sanskrit, Hindi/Urdu, Persian Southeast Asia Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian

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PhD in Art Education

The Doctor of Philosophy in Art Education degree is designed for students who want to make a scholarly contribution to the Art Education field.

Allison Rowe, PhD (2021). “Work Like a River” (participatory lecture, 2017). Photo by Larissa Issler

PhD Art Education

At the University of Illinois, faculty and graduate students build a vibrant community of inquiry within the context of a Research 1 university. This community, including faculty whose breadth of interests span topics including contemporary art and visual culture in education, formal and informal learning, cultural policy and urban studies, and teacher training and identity, provides an intellectually stimulating environment for graduate students to stretch themselves intellectually and become world authorities on the particular topic of their dissertation.

Some doctoral students receive funding and support as teaching assistants for 4 years, and this funding is conditional upon academic standing. This funding includes a tuition waiver, a salary, health insurance, annual conference funding, plus many opportunities to gain competitive grants. Students complete coursework, consisting of 5 courses in art education, courses in research methodology and writing, courses in a minor that complements individual student interest, and courses that prepare students for the qualifying exam (taken after one year of full-time study) and the preliminary exam (at the conclusion of coursework). Examples of minors include Asian Studies, Art History, New Media, Museum Studies, and Women’s Studies. Following the conclusion of coursework, students write a dissertation that contributes new knowledge to the field of art education. Finally, students defend their dissertation.

During this course of study, there are numerous resources available to graduate students in Art Education, both within our program and across the University of Illinois:

• At our major comprehensive research university, students have access to the broadest possible range of elective courses.
• Visual Arts Research is a scholarly, refereed journal and has been published through the Art Education program for over 40 years. It is edited by Art Education faculty.
• The Everyday Arts Lab offers an excellent local site for graduate research for those interested in arts and social practice.
• With a total of 14 million titles the University of Illinois Library houses the largest collection of any public university in the world. The Ricker Library of Architecture and Art has 120,000 titles and 33,00 serials.
• The Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory is a program that promote conversations among a range of departments in the humanities, social sciences, and performing arts by organizing lectures, panel discussions, and conferences, as well as the Modern Critical Theory lecture series.
• The Krannert Art Museum includes an archive of over 8,000 works of art and rotating exhibitions of traditional and innovative art works.
• The Spurlock Museum highlights the diversity of cultures around the globe.
• Illinois is host to the  International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry , which brings a large contingent of art education scholars to campus.
• Regular visiting speakers from other institutions including Kevin Tavin, Amelia Kraehe, David Darts, Olivia Gude, Luis Camnitzer, Matthew Goulish, Marjorie Manifold, and Stephanie Springgay.
• Devoted room for Art Education PhD students including carrels for your use.

Faculty Interests

• Arts-based research
• Community arts education
• Conceptual art practices and theory
• Creative cities
• Cultural globalization
• Emerging curriculum theory
• Performance studies
• Psychoanalysis
• Social practice
• Socially engaged art
• Teacher identity
• Urban education
• Visual culture
• Youth studies

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Sarah Travis  

Doctor of Philosophy

The Institute of Fine Arts is dedicated to graduate teaching and advanced research in the history of art and archeology and in the conservation and technology of works of art. The Institute strives to give its students not only a sound knowledge in the history of art, but also a foundation in research, connoisseurship, and theory as a basis for independent critical judgment and research. The student following the PhD course of study gains a deeper understanding of a subject area, beyond what is normally acquired at the master’s level and develops a capacity for independent scholarship. The PhD Program at the Institute of Fine Arts is a course of study designed for the person who wants to investigate the role of the visual arts in culture through detailed, object-based examination as well as historical and theoretical interpretation. The degree program provides a focused and rigorous experience supported by interaction with the leading scholars of the Institute, and access to New York area museums, curators, conservators, archaeological sites and NYU’s global network. The program is designed for up to six years of full-time funded study. A total of 18 courses (72 points) are required for the PhD degree. Each student registers for three courses per semester for the first five semesters. One course in the fifth semester is dedicated to developing the dissertation proposal. In the sixth semester students register for 12 points devoted preparing for the oral exam and beginning work on the dissertation. Exceptions to full-time study are made only for urgent financial or medical reasons and must have the approval from the Director of Graduate Studies.

Distribution Requirements

Students must take at least one seminar in four fields outside of their area of specialization. The Proseminar may count as one of these seminars. Students are required to take one course in technical studies of works of art. The minimum total seminars for PhD students is six. Students may take courses in other relevant disciplines in consultation with their advisor, and subject to the approval of the Director of Graduate Studies.

Distribution requirements are met by choosing courses in the following fields:

• Pre-modern Asia
• Pre-modern Africa and the Middle East
• The Ancient Mediterranean and Middle East, including
• Pre-modern Europe and the Americas
• Post-1750 Global
• Museum and Curatorial Studies
• Technical Studies of Works of Art
• Architectural History

Course Definitions and Requirements

Proseminar : The purpose of the Proseminar is to introduce students in the doctoral program to advanced research methods in the history of art. Because it is a dedicated course for the entering PhD student, it will serve to consolidate the cohort. It is taken during the first semester and is taught by a rotation of the Institute faculty, with a different faculty member chosen each year. Emphasis is placed on the specific practices of art-historical analysis in relation to visual and textual interpretation. The contents of the seminar vary each year according to the research interests of the chosen instructor. The class is structured around specific problems in the history of art rather than broad conceptual paradigms, with an emphasis on historical interpretation. Colloquium: A colloquium provides an analysis or overview of the state of the literature on a given art historical topic or problem, with extensive reading, discussion, and presentations. There may be a final paper.

Seminar: A seminar is a focused advanced course that explores a topic in depth. Seminars are often based on an exhibition in the New York area. Students are expected to produce a substantive paper that demonstrates original research. Lecture: Lecture courses explore topics or historical periods, giving overviews of major issues as well as detailed analysis of specific problems and works of art. Students are responsible for assigned and recommended reading, and may produce short papers and/or take an exam.

Curatorial Track

This doctoral-level program is offered jointly by the Institute of Fine Arts and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, under the supervision of the Joint Committee on Curatorial Studies composed of faculty, curators, and the Directors of both institutions. The purpose of the program is to prepare students for curatorial careers in specialized fields. Students are required to take two courses in Curatorial Studies, which are taught at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, before being offered an internship at the Museum.

Language Requirement

PhD students must demonstrate proficiency in reading two modern research languages other than English that are relevant to their studies. Proficiency is demonstrated by passing an examination administered by the Institute of Fine Arts. International students focusing on a field of study in which their native language is relevant may be granted an exemption from the language requirement pending submission of an exemption form signed by their advisor and the Director of Graduate Studies.

Qualifying Paper

The Qualifying Paper may be developed from seminar work or might be on a topic devised in consultation with the student’s advisor. Normally, the student will be advised to produce a detailed study on a subject that leads towards the dissertation. It should be no longer than 10,000 words (excluding bibliography and footnotes).

Students are examined on a major field consisting of two contiguous areas and a third component that can be in a related field providing skills for their dissertation.

Students are encouraged to teach after passing the second year review. Opportunities for teaching at NYU and at other New York area colleges and universities will be coordinated by the Director of Graduate Studies.

PhD students are funded for up to six years, depending on the transfer of previous graduate work. The program is normally divided into three years of course work, exams, and submission of a dissertation proposal and three years for dissertation research and writing. Variations to this pattern might occur according to opportunities for students to develop skills or experience in their specialist fields, as approved by the student’s advisor and the Director of Graduate Studies. Students are encouraged to compete for outside fellowships. The award of such fellowships might extend the number of years taken to complete the program. Institute funding will be suspended during the period of outside fellowship support.

Students Entering with a Master’s Degree

To receive the PhD degree, all Institute requirements must have been fulfilled, including a Master’s thesis (of copy of which is submitted with the application), and a distribution of courses within areas of study that correspond to those outlined in Distribution Requirements. No credits will be automatically transferred; credit will be awarded based upon evaluation by the Institute Faculty at the First Year Course Review. In addition, at least one written comprehension exam in a foreign language must have been passed. The student entering with a MA degree must pass an exam in a second language, if not yet attained, by the end of his/her first year of study. Entering students who have been awarded an MA at the Institute will begin as third year PhD students. They are expected to have a distribution of courses that meet the Course Distribution for the PhD and are required to pass a written comprehension exam in a second language.

Degree Requirements

PhD | Masters Degree | Conservation

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The doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania provides students with broad training in the history of art and its critical approaches, yet also focused training in their selected fields.  Students completing the Ph.D. are well prepared for teaching positions at the university and college level and for curatorial positions in museums and galleries.  Faculty work closely with Ph.D. students to outline an appropriate course of study and mentor students while preparing them for assistantships, curatorial internships, and other career orientations.

Admission to the program is by application to the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, which administers full fellowship packages to all admitted students.  (See the "Admissions" page on this site.)  Both B.A. and M.A. students are eligible to apply.  Students normally pursue coursework over their first three years and, once admitted to Ph.D. candidacy (following their area exams), devote their time thereafter to dissertation research and writing.  Students entering the program with an M.A. may chose to accelerate their coursework at Penn to gain candidacy to the Ph.D. more quickly.

Students generally take three seminars in each semester; some of that coursework includes also pedagogical instruction when the student serves as a Teaching Assistant. To ensure a broad understanding of art's history, the Department asks students to take three seminars focusing on periods prior to 1750 and three after.

Further details regarding the graduate program may be found in the  Graduate Bulletin .

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• Ph.D. in Art History & Visual Culture

The Ph.D. Program in Art History & Visual Culture is committed to preparing you for advanced research in the global visual cultures of the past and present. The Department recognizes that visual literacy plays an increasingly important role in contemporary society. Art, architecture, mass media (television, video, film, internet), and urbanism all work through reference to visual and spatial conventions. We strive to provide you with the necessary tools to understand objects and archives and with the skills to interpret visual and material culture for the benefit of the broader community. We invite applications from highly qualified students interested in careers in research, teaching, and criticism.

Requirements for a Ph.D.

• 12 to 15 courses (excluding language courses), of which at least 10 are taken from the Art, Art History & Visual Studies department
• 2 to 4 courses taken from other departments at Duke
• Language proficiency in at least two foreign languages
• Preliminary exam
• Note the former Ph.D. track in Visual & Media Studies has now been replaced by a new Ph.D. program in Computational Media, Arts & Cultures (CMAC)
• Also review Ph.D. Program Guidelines attached below
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Art History, Ph.D.

Ph.D. in Art History (+Dual Ph.D.)

TODO FIXME : DRAFT : WORK IN PROGRESS

Become a professional in the field advance your career with an advanced degree..

Advanced study of visual arts spanning periods, cultures, and geographies. The Art History Ph.D. program can deepen your expertise and advance your Art History career.

Program Application Deadline

The deadline for applications for AY 2024–25 is January 15, 2024.

To be assured full consideration, please review all details on program and admission requirements, and ensure that you apply by this deadline.

Earn a Ph.D. in Art History at Penn State

Our Ph.D. students and alumni have earned Fulbright and Getty Fellowships, the Rome prize, tenure-track positions, and curatorial fellowships and jobs. For more than fifty years, our graduates have been writing books, organizing exhibitions, teaching college and pre-collegiate students, and ensuring the preservation and understanding of our cultural heritage. Join us!

The Ph.D. in Art History program will prepare you to broadly influence art and culture through careers as scholars and educators, as museum curators, as public advocates of cultural heritage, and as arts administrators, to name just a few of the professions that recent program alumni have entered. Breadth of knowledge is as essential for museum professionals as it is for academic researchers. For this reason, advanced study of the visual arts and material culture from diverse periods and geographies is required of all graduate students, with Ph.D. candidates attaining deep expertise in at least one field of art historical research. The department’s faculty includes specialists in African, Asian, and European art and the arts of the Americas.

Graduate faculty members and advisors are leading scholars in their fields. Our interdisciplinary program challenges you to think critically and creatively in order to make a meaningful contribution to the field. The Ph.D. in Art History program also offers dual-title Ph.D. options in Asian Studies or Visual Studies.

Nancy Locke

• Associate Professor of Art History
• Director of Graduate Studies in Art History

[email protected]

814-865-4877

Is the Ph.D. in Art History right for you?

A Ph.D. makes possible the highest level of career success in art history. Our program has a track record of excellent outcomes in diverse career paths, with particular success in placing students in academic and museum careers.

We help you ask and answer the big questions in your area of study. Our graduate students have opportunities to teach, research, and work on digital humanities projects with our Visual Resource Centre. The Palmer Museum of Art also provides internships to prepare you for curatorial work.

Engage with a dynamic cohort of fellow students and a supportive community of scholars.

Degree Options

Dual-title degree options add a significant interdisciplinary breadth to your Ph.D. scholarship. These two dual-title programs develop context through which you can learn to synthesize knowledge within and across disciplinary boundaries in both scholarship and teaching.

Dual Ph.D. and Asian Studies

The primary objective of the dual-title degree program in Asian Studies is to engage critically and substantively with the teaching, research, and scholarship of Asia, a diverse area with a population of some 4.5 billion. The program integrates knowledge and methodology across disciplines of Asian Studies and Art History.

Graduate students are trained in such a way that you will be equipped to represent, understand, analyze, and appraise the crucial and current scholarly issues in Asian Studies in the context of your art discipline focus.

The program aims to produce doctoral graduates with a competitive advantage for employment that relates to Asia in academia, museum, curatorial, and other professional fields.

Graduate Bulletin Links

• Asian Studies Bulletin page
• Graduate Studies information related to the dual-title Ph.D in Art History + Asian Studies .

Dual Ph.D. and Visual Studies

Humanistic study. Technological dynamics. Analyze images, physical and virtual environments, and visual sign systems; histories of visual modes of communication, apprehension, and aesthetic pleasure; and conceptions of the nature of visuality itself. Challenge boundaries. Challenge yourself.

The dual-title Ph.D. in Visual Studies fosters an interdisciplinary approach to humanistic study, which, spurred by technological dynamics that increasingly integrate text and image, engages analysis of specific images, physical and virtual environments, and visual sign systems; histories of visual modes of communication, apprehension, and aesthetic pleasure; and conceptions of the nature of visuality itself. Students in this program analyze and assess visual media that, integrated with texts, are integral to humanistic scholarship and pedagogy today.

Dual-title degree programs increase the intellectual rigor and breadth of graduate work and provide a context in which students learn to synthesize knowledge within and across disciplinary boundaries in both scholarship and teaching. Drawing from knowledge and practices produced across the humanistic disciplines while responding to ongoing challenges to conventional disciplinary boundaries, this degree highlights existing strengths of graduate training in the humanities at Penn State, structures the continuing development of these programs, and credentials our graduates’ training and work with visual forms, environments, and media.

• Visual Studies Bulletin page
• Graduate Studies information related to the dual-title Ph.D in Art History + Asian Studies

Professional Development

Our department is regularly invited to select graduate students to participate in major graduate student symposia, including the Middle Atlantic Symposium in the History of Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Graduate Symposium on the History of Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Penn State art history graduate students often present papers at scholarly conferences/symposia across the United States and abroad (for which the department provides partial financial support).

Financial Support

• George Dewey and Mary J. Krumrine Endowment This endowment helps support publication projects of art history faculty and graduate students.
• Graduate Assistantships There are about nineteen graduate assistantships filled by graduate students in the Department of Art History each year.
• University Fellowships and Awards Qualified incoming graduate students may also be nominated by the department for University Fellowships, Bunton-Waller Graduate Awards, Graham Fellowships, and other awards. The department also has funds to help support graduate students in their research and travel related to their theses. The department awards dissertation fellowships and travel/research grants totaling over $60,000 to graduate students each academic year.

Summer Opportunities

• Summer Abroad program in Todi, Italy The Department of Art History is a co-sponsor of Penn State’s Summer Abroad program in Todi, Italy, in which graduate students may choose to participate.
• Annie Gooding Sykes Internship This internship is a twelve-week internship offered during the summer. Interns work with museum staff on a variety of curatorial projects, with a particular focus on American works on paper. Students who have completed the ARTH 409 “Museum Studies” course are preferred. One internship with a stipend is offered each summer.
• Silver Trout Curatorial Graduate Internship Program This internship program is a twelve-week internship offered during the summer. Interns work with the museum staff on curatorial projects and initiatives. Graduate students in art history or art education are eligible for the Silver Trout Curatorial Graduate Internship Program. Students who have completed the ARTH 409 “Museum Studies” course are preferred. Two internships with a stipend are offered each summer.

Ph.D. Students

Students currently enrolled in the Ph.D. in Art History programs.

Arunima Addy Degree: PhD in Architecture Research Focus: South Asian architectural and urban history Dissertation title: Diaspora of Indian Temple Architecture Academic Adviser: Madhuri Desai [email protected]

Arunima Addy is currently a PhD candidate in Art History with dual title in Asian Studies. She has been a practicing architect in India, before joining the graduate program at Penn State. Arunima has her research interests in the relationship between the politics of religion and the construction of national identity, specifically with the rising sentiments of Hindu nationalism in India. She looks at visual representations in the built environment to understand how through architectural establishments religion is being used as a political tool to frame an image of the nation. For her dissertation, she is investigating the relationship between the politics of religion and nation-building particularly with respect to changing dynamics of Indian temple architecture in the neoliberal perspective where religion is becoming a global commodity.

Han Chen Degree: PhD in Art History and Asian Studies Research Focus: Modern and Contemporary Chinese and East Asian Art, history of collecting and exhibiting Dissertation title: TBD Academic Adviser: Chang Tan [email protected] | CV

Han Chen is a PhD student specializing in the history of collecting and exhibiting Chinese and East Asian art in the Euro-American context from the late nineteenth-century to the present day. She received her B.A. in 2016 and M.A. in 2019 from China Academy of Art. In 2021, she received her second M.A. from Penn State where she wrote her thesis entitled, “Selling China: A neglected encounter between Huo Mingzhi and France in the early twentieth century.” She has worked for the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State and the Freer and Sackler Gallery of Art as a curatorial intern. Her current interest lies in employing machine learning to realize the image inpainting of photographs of Chinese antiques.

Melanie Clark

Olivia Crawford Degree: PhD in Art History Research Focus: Nineteenth-century European Art and Architecture, Post-colonial Studies, Jewish Studies, Middle Eastern and North African Studies. Dissertation title: TBD Academic Adviser: Nancy Locke [email protected]

Olivia Crawford received her B.A. in Art History and French and Francophone Studies from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2016 and her M.A. in Art History from Penn State University in 2018. She is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History at Penn State.

Her current research examines representations of colonial and metropolitan Jewish communities in French Orientalist art and architecture. Her dissertation prospectus is forthcoming.

Crawford lives and works in Knoxville, TN.

Noah Dasinger Degree: PhD in Art History Research Focus: Fifteenth-century Italian sculpture Dissertation title: TBD Academic Adviser: Daniel M. Zolli [email protected] | LinkedIn

Noah Dasinger is a first-year Ph.D. student studying Italian Renaissance art and architectural history with a focus on fifteenth-century sculpture. Noah is an Alabama native, and in 2020, he graduated summa cum laude from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, with a Bachelor of Arts. He then obtained a Master of Arts degree from the University of Georgia, Athens. Upon graduation, he received high honors for his thesis, “Symbolic Epigraphy and the New Rome: Humanist Capital Letters on the Tomb of Leonardo Bruni.”

Noah also has extensive training in archival research and early modern Italian paleography both in the United States and abroad. He was a curatorial intern at the Georgia Museum of Art and a research intern at the Medici Archive Project. His current research examines the development, display, and materials used for fifteenth-century Italian tomb sculpture. Noah’s research also investigates early modern workshop practices, materials, processes, and their relationship to commemorative sculpture.

Arielle Fields

Katherine Flanagan

Laura Freitas Almeida

Emily Hagen Degree: PhD in Art History Research Focus: Seventeenth-century Italian architecture Dissertation title: Pietro da Cortona’s Santi Luca e Martina: Rediscovered Relics and the Spectacle of Reform in Seventeenth-Century Rome Academic Adviser: Robin Thomas [email protected] | CV

Emily Hagen is a Ph.D. candidate in art history studying early-modern Italian architecture with an interest in digital humanities. Her research focuses on churches devoted to martyrs’ relics in seventeenth-century Italy and investigates how architecture amplified the fiction of rediscovery in the context of early-modern Catholic reform.

Katherine Koltiska Banerjee

Kyle Marini Degree: PhD in Art History Research Focus: Pre-Contact and Early Modern Latin America, Andean Textiles Dissertation title: TBD Academic Adviser: Amara Solari [email protected] | Instagram | LinkedIn

Kyle is a PhD student in pre-contact and early modern Latin American art history. He specializes in the techniques of production, ritual use, and iconography of Inca textiles. He primarily researches ceremonial objects that have been destroyed to recover a more representative view of Inca visual culture before Spanish occupation of the Andes. This approach is in effort to decolonize modern understandings of the Inca developed from the study of objects that survived arduous extirpation campaigns throughout the Viceroyalty of Peru. By emphasizing objects erased from the archive, he reconstructs a history through the most integral Inca artifacts that ceased to exist precisely because of their visual power. Kyle is also a practicing artist, and he uses remaking as a methodology to envision these lost works and the technical processes used by their creators.

Keri Mongelluzzo Degree: PhD in Art History Research Focus: History of Photography; Modern Art Dissertation title: Bauhaus/Dream House: The Uncharted Surrealism of New Vision Photography Academic Adviser: Nancy Locke [email protected] | CV | LinkedIn | Academia.edu

Keri Mongelluzzo is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in the history of photography and modern art in Europe. Her dissertation, “Bauhaus/Dream House: The Uncharted Surrealism of New Vision Photography,” examines how French Surrealist sensibilities gained traction with transient artists associated with the Bauhaus, an innovative school of design in interwar Germany. Tracking key Bauhaus figures as they moved throughout Europe and across the Atlantic, “Bauhaus/Dream House” exposes their messy motivations for evoking surrealist themes amidst surges of nationalism and the rise of fascism. To date, Keri’s dissertation research has been supported by the Department of Art History and the Max Kade German-American Research Institute.

Keri’s broader research and curatorial interests in the histories and theories of photography span the medium’s history. She has written steadily on prominent photographers of the twentieth century, like Man Ray and Eugène Atget, presenting papers at the inaugural conference of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism at the Bucknell Humanities Center and the 24th Annual Graduate Student Symposium on the History of Art at the Barnes Foundation. In addition to curating a number of exhibitions of photography at the Palmer Museum of Art, including Myth Meets Modernism: The Manuel Álvarez Bravo Portfolio (2019) and Framing the City (2018), Keri piloted the museum’s first-ever virtual exhibition, Photography = Abstraction , using Google Slides at the onset of the pandemic and presented her work on this and her collaboration on subsequent virtual exhibitions and tours at the College Art Association Annual Conference in February 2021.

Amy Orner Degree: PhD in Art History Research Focus: Eighteenth-Century British Architecture and Urbanism Dissertation title: TBD Academic Adviser: Robin Thomas [email protected]

Amy is a PhD student specializing in eighteenth-century British architecture and urbanism, with a focus on Empire and its effects on architecture. Her research questions consider the social and political influences on architecture, as well as the influence of Empire on Scottish town planning. She received her B.A. in Museum Studies/Art History from Juniata College in 2017, before working as a School Programs Educator for The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. Amy received her M.A. in Art History from Penn State University in 2022 with her thesis titled, “The Palette, the Patron, and the Hand of the Artist: Artemisia Gentileschi in London.” During her time at Penn State, Amy has worked with the Palmer Museum of Art, the Matson Museum of Anthropology, and as a research fellow in the Center for Virtual/Material Studies.

Alicia Skeath Degree: PhD in Art History Research Focus: Dissertation title: TBD Academic Adviser: Adam Thomas

Kenta Tokushige Degree: PhD in Art History Research Focus: Sixteenth-century Italian Military Architecture Dissertation title: Being a Military Architect: Building Fortifications in Cosimo I de’ Medici’s Realm Academic Adviser: Robin Thomas [email protected]

Kenta Tokushige is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at The Pennsylvania State University. His dissertation entitled, Being a ‘Military Architect’: Building Fortifications in Cosimo I de’ Medici’s Realm, studies the geopolitical role of fortification building under Cosimo I de’ Medici in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in the latter half of the Cinquecento by looking at the design process of a fortification as a collaborative project by people of various social status and the way it was represented in multiple forms of art upon its completion. His research traces the correspondence between the patrons, local governors, and architects regarding the decision-making process and examines the intentions of each individual. Additionally, he is exploring the representation and the circulation of information after the completion of the fortification in relation to the espionage of military information.

His research has been supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the Susan W. and Thomas A. Schwartz Endowed Fellowship for Dissertation Research.

He completed his B.Arch. and M.A. in Architecture at Waseda University and Master of Architectural History at University of Virginia.

Holli Turner Degree: PhD in Art History Research Focus: Art of Early Modern Southern Europe and Colonial Latin America, the materials and materiality of art, technical art history, theories and practices of conservation, race, and representation in art, decolonial practices in art history Dissertation title: TBD Academic Adviser: Daniel Zolli [email protected]

Holli M. Turner is a doctoral student specializing in early modern art, with a focus on the art of Italy, Spain, and the Americas. Her dissertation will examine the colonial implications of color – broadly understood – in the Venetian artist Titian’s paintings for the Spanish monarchy. This project knits together several core concerns of her work: the materials and materiality of art; the representation of race and ethnicity in art; and the interpretive importance of invisible labor, and laborers, to art’s history. In Summer 2021, Holli is serving as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellow in Penn State’s Art History department, where she is developing a digital humanities project that tracks Titian’s pigments and their origins.

Holli is a Virginia native that was trained in art history and graphic design before embarking on doctoral study. Her research interests also stem from her own artistry. In her spare time, she paints, illustrates, and creates works through traditional and digital media.

Guides and Resources

• Art History Graduate Handbook

Alumni Success

95 percent of those who earned their Ph.D. since the year 2000 are employed in art history or a related field.

• Of these, 71 percent are teaching at the college level.
• The other 29 percent hold such positions as museum curator or lead historian at a historic center.
• Of those teaching at the college level, 67 percent hold tenure-track or tenured positions.

Legal Statements

• Non-Discrimination
• Equal Opportunity
• Accessibility
• The Pennsylvania State University © 2024

MA or PhD in Art History

The graduate Art History programs at UT, comprising the MA in Art History and the PhD in Art History, are among the nation’s largest and most distinguished, with nearly twenty full-time faculty members who are leading scholars in their fields and represent a diversity of critical and methodological outlooks. Students in Art History are regularly honored with prestigious awards and fellowships, and alumni from this program lead successful careers at colleges, universities, and museums worldwide.

The programs’ expansive scope comprises courses covering a wide range of periods and cultures of art, while areas of special concentration are represented by several active research centers. Interdisciplinary study and collaboration play a vital role in the program. Additionally, research is enhanced by access to the many resources available across campus including the Blanton Museum of Art, one of the country’s leading university art museums; the university’s notable library system; and cultural archives such as the Harry Ransom Center.

Eligibility

Applicants to the Master of Arts Program are expected to have completed a broad range of undergraduate coursework in art history (18 hours in art history are recommended) and related fields. MA students will be required to demonstrate proficiency in reading/translating one contemporary language other than English prior to beginning the fourth semester in residence.

Program Tracks

Four MA tracks are offered:

• General (allows students to cover diverse historical areas of art history)
• Ancient (Western and Non-Western)
• Medieval to Early Modern

Program of Work — General Track

Program of work — specialized track, specialized tracks, example program plan, language requirement.

MA students must have reading/translation competence in at least one modern language in addition to English. The additional language will be relevant to the student’s areas of study and will allow the student to understand the scholarship of their field. The language will be determined in consultation with the Graduate Adviser and the choice is subject to ratification by the Graduate Studies Committee.

The choice of language is flexible but must be decided in consultation with one’s advisor/committee chair or the Graduate Adviser if an advisor has not yet been selected. Language courses cannot count toward fulfillment of the requirement for six hours of coursework taken outside the department (supporting work or Minor).

The language exam requirement must be fulfilled in one of the following ways:

• 4 semesters of college-level language courses passed at grade B or above. Advanced placement credit can count towards the required number of courses.
• Departmental exam to test translation proficiency in French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Portuguese (and other languages as petitioned by students) administered 3 times each year (beginning and end of fall semester, and once during spring semester). Exams are graded by at least 2 faculty members. Language exams will be administered to students who wish take it in a given semester. The exam proceeds simultaneously, in a single location and time that works for all. This requirement can be fulfilled in one of the following ways, and must be satisfied by the end of the third long semester in residence.
• To compensate for the exceptional difficulty involved, students who plan on qualifying in a language other than the traditional European languages may be allowed to do so. Permission may be granted after consultation with the Graduate Adviser and after petitioning the faculty to substitute an instructional course in that language in place of a supporting (i.e. out-of-department) course.

Thesis Colloquium

During the semester of enrollment in Thesis research (ARH 698A, 3 hours), usually in the third semester of residence and after the completion of 18 hours of coursework, the student presents a topic for faculty approval in a Thesis Colloquium. Enrollment in ARH 698B Thesis (3 hours) may take place only after an approved presentation.

• In the first year, no later than the end of the Spring semester, the student will contact an Art History faculty member about supervising the thesis and initiate a discussion about possible topics.
• Students are encouraged to interview faculty in their area of specialization in order to find a faculty supervisor/committee chair. Students and supervisors must be in alignment to accommodate their professional goals. Failing to find a supervisor will result in termination from the program.
• The wise Art History Master’s student will take advantage of the summer following the first year to develop and research a topic or possible topics with the goal of being ready to schedule the colloquium in the early part of the Fall semester.
• If the colloquium is not held, a grade of Incomplete is assigned; a final grade will be assigned when the colloquium is held during the next long semester.

Refer to the handbook for details regarding the processes involved with submitting the final thesis and applying for graduation.

Program Handbook

Applicants to the Doctoral Program must have an MA in art history or an MA in a related field with substantial coursework in art history at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Applicants completing the second year of a Master’s program are also eligible to apply.

Program of Work

The Doctor of Philosophy degree requires at least thirty hours of coursework beyond the MA degree. Course requirements include:

• A minimum of five graduate seminars in at least two of the department’s chronological groupings of western and non-western art: Ancient; Medieval to Early Modern; and Modern

Nine hours of supporting work, normally consisting of two graduate seminars outside the Department of Art and Art History in areas related to the major field, and one graduate reading course outside the Department of Art and Art History often taken in the context of preparation for the qualifying examination. All of these courses must be taken for a letter grade.

A minimum of six hours of dissertation research and writing

Further requirements include reading/translation competence in at least two contemporary languages in addition to English, a dissertation colloquium, written and oral qualifying examinations that admit the student to doctoral candidacy, the dissertation, and the oral defense of the dissertation. PhD students who are employed as Teaching Assistants must enroll for one term in ARH 398T Supervised Teaching in Art History , a pedagogy seminar that meets one hour per week. This course does not count toward completion of the degree.

Doctoral students must have reading/translation competence in at least 2 modern languages in addition to English. These languages will be relevant to students’ areas of study and will allow individuals to undertake primary research and understand the scholarship of their chosen field.

Language courses cannot count toward fulfillment of the requirement for 9 hours of coursework taken outside the department (supporting work or minor). Each language requirement can be fulfilled in one of the following ways, and must be satisfied before advancing to doctoral candidacy:

• Four semesters of college-level language courses passed at grade B or above. Advanced Placement credit can count towards the required number of courses.

Departmental exam to test translation proficiency in French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Portuguese (and other languages as petitioned by students) administered twice per semester. Exams are graded by at least two faculty members. Language exams will be administered to students who wish take it in a given semester. The exam proceeds simultaneously, in a single location and time that works for all. The choice of language is flexible but must be decided in consultation with one’s adviser.

Confirmation of completion of a modern language requirement from the student’s Master’s program.

To compensate for the exceptional difficulty involved, students who plan on qualifying in a language other than the traditional European languages may be allowed, after consultation with the graduate advisor and after petitioning the faculty, to substitute an instructional course in that language in place of a supporting (i.e. out-of-department) course.

Dissertation Colloquium

The Colloquium is intended to be an informal conversation with the faculty concerning the topic, its feasibility, and potential pitfalls that might affect the student’s ability to complete it successfully.

The Dissertation Colloquium is held during the third or fourth term of the student’s residence and after the completion of at least 18 hours of coursework. A week before the scheduled Dissertation Colloquium, the student presents to the Graduate Adviser for Art History and the faculty a written prospectus, prepared with the help of the dissertation adviser.

The topics for the qualifying examination are also set at the Colloquium, and the examining committee is determined. At this time, the composition of the dissertation committee is also discussed. The student must complete the Qualifying Examination by the end of the next long semester following the Colloquium.

Qualifying Examination

The student will be examined in four areas: at least two broad areas of expertise and one or two focused areas with the possibility of one area being directed by a faculty member outside the Department. All of these exams will be written and must be completed within a one-week period. In consultation with each faculty member on their examination committee, students will schedule three-hour time periods during which they will take the written exams.

At least two weeks before the examination, the student will confirm with the Graduate Coordinator the date and time of each examination and the name and email address of any examiner not on the Art History faculty. The student will determine the order of the questions. The Graduate Coordinator will solicit questions from each examiner.

Within several days of the completion of the last written examination, a two-hour oral examination on the same topics will follow with the entire examining committee. During this exam the examining committee will question the student about the exam questions. To schedule the oral examination, please use the same process used for scheduling the Colloquium. The student's performance on these exams will be ranked "Pass" or "Failure." For additional details and procedures, please refer to the Graduate Handbook.

Once the student has completed all program requirements and passed the qualifying exams, the committee supervising the dissertation is formalized in the doctoral candidacy application process.

Learn more about completing the Application for Doctoral Candidacy →

• After admission to Candidacy for the doctoral degree, the student must stay in continuous enrollment in dissertation hours each spring and fall until the degree is completed.

Students doing research abroad while in doctoral candidacy may be eligible for Independent Study and Research status.

Example Topics

Below are examples of past qualifying examinations topics. Please note that these can include both general subjects and topics related to a particular student’s dissertation research:

Medieval Art

• Northern Renaissance Art
• French Court Culture and Patronage (possibly an outside the Department question)
• Fourteenth-Century Manuscript Illumination

Modern/Contemporary European Art

• European Art, 1890–1945
• Art of the United States, 1945–1985
• Art and Philosophy of Language (Examiner: Art History Dept.)
• Little Magazines and Literary Modernism (Examiner: English Dept.)

Dissertation

The dissertation must make an original contribution to scholarship. It normally requires fieldwork of at least a year’s duration. The Dissertation Committee directs the student during the completion of the dissertation. Defense of the dissertation (Final Oral Examination) before at least four members of the Dissertation Committee is a University requirement; the dissertation supervisor must be physically present for the defense to take place.

Learn more about submitting the request for the Final Oral Examination →

Refer to the handbook for details regarding the processes involved with submitting the final draft, defending, and applying for graduation.

• Current Graduate Students

Funding resources at the MA level, such as scholarships and in-state tuition waivers, are limited and awarded on a case-by-case basis. Each semester, MA students may apply for positions as a Grader for a large introductory/survey or upper-division class. Once assigned to grade for a course, the Grader must attend all lectures and grade all exams and assignments for the course. The number of Grader positions varies each year, and the salary is based on the number of students in the class. A few MA students also may be awarded Teaching Assistant positions, when these are available, again on a case-by-case basis.

The faculty’s goal is to support all admitted PhD students with a combination of Teaching Assistantships, Assistant Instructor positions, Graduate Research Assistant positions and scholarship funds so they can earn their degree with as little outside cost as possible.

A limited number of Graduate Research Assistant positions may be available each semester to both MA and PhD students.

All applicants are considered for financial support; it is not necessary to apply or request separately.

FAQ Visit Apply

Program Contacts

Robin Dangel   Graduate Program Coordinator

Dr. Nassos Papalexandrou   Graduate Advisor

PhD Art History Admission

The Department welcomes graduate applications from individuals with a broad range of life experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds who would contribute to our community of scholars. Review of applications is holistic and individualized, considering each applicant’s academic record and accomplishments, letters of recommendation, and admissions essays in order to understand how an applicant’s life experiences have shaped their past and potential contributions to their field.

University Application Materials

The application for admission as well as general information about applying is available from the Graduate Admissions website; please visit  Graduate Admissions  to apply. Prior to applying you must first determine if you are eligible -  application eligibility (undergraduate degree requirements) . International applicants, please also see  Bechtel International Center  and Graduate Admissions  International Applicants  for more information and any additional application requirements. Prospective students may apply beginning in late September (please verify the precise date on the  Graduate Admissions  website). The following documents are required by the university and can not be waived; please click on the links for more detailed information about each:

Letters of Recommendation : Three letters of recommendation are required. The department does not accept applicant recommendation via a letter service (i.e. Interfolio or other service). It is the applicant's responsibility to ensure that letters are submitted to the electronic application by the published deadline. Please only submit three letters.

Transcripts : Upload a scanned copy of your official transcript(s) with the online application. Applicants must upload transcripts from every post-secondary institution attended as a full-time student and for at least one academic year. Transcripts from current degree programs also need to be submitted.

Statement of Purpose : You must indicate in the first sentence of your SOP the name of the program to which you are applying and the area you wish to study (e.g. PhD in Art History – Modern). The Statement of Purpose should describe succinctly your reasons for applying to the proposed program at Stanford, your preparation for this field of study, research interests, future career plans, and other aspects of your background and interests which may aid the admissions committee in evaluating your aptitude and motivation for graduate study. Applicants can include and mention faculty members, with overlapping research interests whom they would like to work with and why, in their statement of purpose. The Statement of Purpose must be: 1,000 words or less; single-spaced; formatted with 1-inch margins and 12-point, Times New Roman font.

Application Fee : The application fee $125, is non-refundable, and must be received by the application deadline (fee waivers are available to eligible students. Please see  Graduate Fee Waivers  for more information). The Department does not offer fee waivers outside of the process at the Graduate Fee Waivers page. Please do not contact the department requesting to waive the application fee.

GRE Scores: Graduate Record Exam (GRE) General Test is no longer required for admission to the Department of Art & Art History.

TOEFL Scores : Required when first language is not English; IELTS is not accepted. Please note that the department can NOT waive the TOEFL requirement. If you wish to submit a request for TOEFL waiver, please see  GRE and TOEFL Requirements . It is the applicant's responsibility to ensure that the scores are submitted to the electronic application by the published deadline.  (Note: To bypass the entry of TOEFL scores in the application, enter a future test date. You can add in the additional information section of the application that you have received a waiver from Graduate Admissions.)

Online Application

* Please note all application materials, once submitted as part of your application, become the property of Stanford University. Materials will not be returned and copies will not be provided for applicants nor released to other institutions. Please keep a copy for your records. Re-applicants must submit new supporting documents and complete the online graduate application.

Writing Sample Requirement

In addition to the University application materials listed above, applicants in Art History are required to submit a writing sample.  You should upload your writing sample along with your online application (only one writing sample will be accepted). It should be 20 pages maximum, including illustrations and bibliography – neither papers over this limit nor entire Master’s theses will be accepted.

Start Your Application

For admission in Autumn Quarter of the next academic year, all required application materials, including your test scores and recommendation letters, must be received on-line by no later than  December 1 at 9:00 pm (PT).

Note: The Graduate Admissions period opens in late September each year for applications to be submitted by the published deadline in December (for matriculation beginning in the following academic year). After April 15th each year, the Graduate Admissions period is closed, and the online application will reopen during the following September.

Selection Process

Application review takes place between mid-February and mid-March; applicants are notified by e-mail of their status around March 15th. Accepted students are admitted for the following Autumn Quarter; no applicants for mid-year entrance will be considered.  You will be contacted via e-mail regarding your application status after the deadline; please do not contact the Department in this regard. Applicants who are chosen as finalists for admissions are asked to make themselves available for an individual interview by faculty via Skype.  Admitted prospective students are invited for a campus visit intended to introduce them to faculty, current graduate students, and to members of the larger Stanford community involved in the arts.  Library, museum and other facilities are part of this introduction to the PhD program in Art History at Stanford.

The Art and Art History Department recognizes that the Supreme Court issued a ruling in June 2023 about the consideration of certain types of demographic information as part of an admission review. All applications submitted during upcoming application cycles will be reviewed in conformance with that decision.

Knight-Hennessy Scholars

Join dozens of  Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences  students who gain valuable leadership skills in a multidisciplinary, multicultural community as  Knight-Hennessy Scholars (KHS). KHS admits up to 100 select applicants each year from across Stanford’s seven graduate schools, and delivers engaging experiences that prepare them to be visionary, courageous, and collaborative leaders ready to address complex global challenges. As a scholar, you join a distinguished cohort, participate in up to three years of leadership programming, and receive full funding for up to three years of your PhD studies at Stanford. Candidates of any country may apply. KHS applicants must have earned their first undergraduate degree within the last seven years, and must apply to both a Stanford graduate program and to KHS. Stanford PhD students may also apply to KHS during their first year of PhD enrollment. If you aspire to be a leader in your field, we invite you to apply. The KHS application deadline is October 11, 2023. Learn more about  KHS admission .

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The PhD program in the Division of Art History prepares graduates for university-level teaching, curator positions at major museums, and independent research in the field. Before beginning work for the PhD, students should have completed a master's degree in art history. Requirements for the degree include 60 credits of coursework beyond the master's degree and research capability in at least two foreign languages.

Preparation

Applicants to the PhD program must have a master's degree in art history or a related field combined with course work in art history. Applicants need not have an undergraduate major in art history but should have a solid record of art history course work. In our program we define a “solid record” for our undergraduate majors as 55 quarter credits of art history classes distributed among major fields of study offered in our department. This figure should serve only as a general reference point, however; we do not expect all applicants to have exactly the same background and course distribution as our undergraduate majors. Studio art classes and work experience in art-related fields can enhance your application but, in most cases, will not substitute for a good background in art history course work.

Financial Support

Each year the Division of Art History offers two fully funded five-year PhD packages, which are typically comprised of a combination of fellowship support and teaching assistantships.

Information about other financial support opportunities can be found under Graduate Support .

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DXARTS Ph.D.

The primary focus of doctoral education in Digital Arts and Experimental Media is to create opportunities for artists to discover and document new knowledge and expertise at the most advanced levels higher education can offer. Creating new art is at the center of all activities in the program. The DXARTS Ph.D. is an intersection of creativity and research-oriented program of study requiring a substantial commitment to graduate-level study and reflection. The Ph.D. degree prepares artists to pursue original creative and technical research in Digital Arts and Experimental Media and pioneer lasting innovations on which future artists and scholars can build.

Application and Admission

Please see the Graduate Admissions  section of this site.

Degree Timeline & Requirements

Learn more about the Degree Timeline & Requirements here .

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Artists interested in pursuing a master's degree in fine arts can explore a wide range of schools offering programs in areas such as graphic design, photography and sculpture.

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Association for the PhD in the Visual Arts  

The question is not whether artists should get PhD's or not - the question we should be asking is -   what will happen when they do?

Prof. Dr. Malcom Quinn, Chelsea College of Art, London

Associate Dean of Research and Director of Graduate School for Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Graduate School,

UAL and Honorary Senior Research Associate,   UCL Faculty of Laws, Bentham Project

Association for the PhD in the Visual Arts

About phdva, the association for the phd in the visual arts (phdva) aims to foster the discussion and exchange of ideas on the phd in studio art in the usa and internationally. the role and education of artists, theorists, and designer-makers at the phd level is at a time of pivotal change in education and communication worldwide.  phdva ( https://phdart.net ) is committed to fostering such an exchange in an interdisciplinary manner, attentive to new collaborative frameworks in the arts, humanities, philosophy, and sciences.                                                                                                            .

Learn more about updates regarding the 2024–2025 FAFSA process.

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Pratt Institute Ranked Sixth in World’s Top Art & Design Universities

The QS World University Rankings by Subject 2024 also place Pratt in the top five universities for art and design in the United States.

Pratt Institute is ranked #6 out of 241 US and international art and design universities in the QS World University by Subject 2024. The listing also ranks Pratt #4 in the United States. Additionally, Pratt was ranked #17 in the History of Art category.    

Published annually, the rankings assess the world’s top universities in 55 individual subjects based on academic reputation, employer reputation, and research impact. They are published by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), one of the world’s leading sources of comparative data about university performance.

Pratt has been rated one of the world’s top 10 art and design universities by QS World University Rankings by Subject every year since QS added the category to its rankings in 2015.

Explore the QS World R ankings by Subject 2024: Art & Design and learn more about their criteria and methodology . 

Chuan He Elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Chuan He Elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences

The University of Chicago Department of Chemistry is pleased to announce John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor Chuan He has been elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

The members elected in 2024 are being recognized for their excellence and have been invited to uphold the Academy’s mission of engaging across disciplines and divides.

“I am very honored. I hope our lab will continue our trajectory of innovation,” said Professor He.

In a press release announcing the selection, President of the Academy, David Oxtoby , said, “We honor these artists, scholars, scientists, and leaders in the public, non-profit, and private sectors for their accomplishments and for the curiosity, creativity, and courage required to reach new heights. We invite these exceptional individuals to join in the Academy’s work to address serious challenges and advance the common good.”

Out of 250 members elected in 2024, six newly elected members are affiliates of the University of Chicago.

In addition to Professor He , they include American Linguist and Mary K. Werkman Professor, Diane Brentari; experimental particle physicist and current deputy director of Science and Technology at the Fermi Lab , Bonnie T. Fleming ; Frank P. and Marianne R. Diassi Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, Erik Hurst; Professor and current dean of the University of Chicago Division of the Humanities Deborah Nelson , and Bruce Lindsay Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and Public Policy Amir Sufi.

The new class joins Academy members elected before them, including Benjamin Franklin (elected 1781) and Alexander Hamilton (1791) in the eighteenth century; Ralph Waldo Emerson (1864), Maria Mitchell (1848), and Charles Darwin (1874) in the nineteenth; Albert Einstein (1924), Robert Frost (1931), Margaret Mead (1948), Milton Friedman (1959), Martin Luther King, Jr. (1966), and Jacques Derrida (1985) in the twentieth; and, in this century, Madeleine K. Albright (2001), Antonin Scalia (2003), Jennifer Doudna (2003), John Legend (2017), David W. Miliband (2018), Anna Deavere Smith (2019), Salman Rushdie (2022), and Xuedong Huang (2023).

“With the broad diversity of members elected this year, we are continuing to expand on the commitment to excellence and wide-ranging expertise established by our founders,” said Chair of the Board Goodwin Liu, who also serves as an Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court. “The honor of election comes with an invitation for new members to rededicate themselves to the common good by advancing the Academy’s nonpartisan, cross-disciplinary work in the arts, democracy, education, global affairs, and science.”

Induction ceremonies for new members will take place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in September 2024.

Chuan He  is the John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. He is an expert in the field of RNA modification biology and cancer epigenetics. He was the first to champion the idea that modifications to RNA are reversible and can control gene expression. 

His work is foundational to developing potential therapies that target RNA methylation effectors against human diseases such as cancer. Prof. He’s team was the first to identify eraser proteins, which can undo changes made to RNA molecules, which sparked the emergence of epitranscriptome research. Prof. He's team explained how RNA methylation functions through characterizing reader proteins—processes that known to play critical roles in many types of cancer. 

A Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, He’s many honors include a Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and a W. M. Keck Foundation Distinguished Young Scholar in Medical Research Award. 

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences was founded to help a young nation face its challenges through shared purpose, knowledge, and ideas. Chartered in 1780 in the midst of revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, and others, the Academy’s membership and work have changed greatly over the centuries while remaining faithful to ideals that celebrate the life of the mind, the importance of knowledge, and the belief that the arts and sciences are “necessary to the interest, honor, dignity and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people.”

To learn more about the Academy and its history.  https://www.amacad.org/about-academy https://www.amacad.org/history

To learn more about members elected from 1781–2023 in an online directory. https://www.amacad.org/directory

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Take This Dance Class and Call Me in the Morning

Prescriptions for social activities, exercise and the arts — first popularized in Britain — are coming to America. But some experts say the U.S. health care system may get in the way.

By Christina Caron

Last spring, Tia Washington, 52, a mother of three in Dublin, Calif., received a stern warning from her doctor: If she didn’t quickly gain control of her high blood pressure, she was likely to end up in the emergency room.

Listen to this article with reporter commentary

He wrote a prescription for blood pressure medication and urged her to see a health coach, too. Ms. Washington reluctantly agreed.

“I didn’t want to die,” she said.

To her surprise, the health coach wanted to talk about more than vital signs. Ms. Washington found herself opening up about how she disliked doctors (and medications). How she tended to address the needs of work or family before her own. How her job had created “tremendous stress.”

Together, they decided that Ms. Washington would attend two weekly movement classes, check in regularly with a nurse practitioner and receive free fruits and vegetables from a “food as medicine” government program.

By the end of the conversation with the health coach, Ms. Washington said, the message was clear: “Tia, pay attention to yourself. You exist.”

Ms. Washington’s experience is just one example of how a practice called social prescribing is being explored in the United States, after being adopted in more than 20 other countries . The term “social prescription” was first popularized in Britain after it had been practiced there in various forms for decades. While there isn’t one universally accepted definition, social prescriptions generally aim to improve health and well-being by connecting people with nonclinical activities that address underlying problems , such as isolation, social stress and lack of nutritious food, which have been shown to play a crucial role in influencing who stays well and for how long.

For Ms. Washington, who is among thousands of patients who have received social prescriptions from the nonprofit Open Source Wellness , the experience was transformative. She found a less stressful job, began eating more healthfully and learned simple ways to move more during the day. About a year later, she was able to stop taking blood pressure medication entirely.

Elsewhere in the United States, similar programs are underway: At the Cleveland Clinic, doctors are prescribing nature walks, volunteering and ballroom dancing to geriatric patients. In Newark, an insurance provider has teamed up with the New Jersey Performing Arts Center to offer patients glassblowing workshops, concerts and museum exhibitions. A nonprofit in Utah is connecting mental health patients with community gardens and helping them participate in other activities that bring them a sense of meaning. And universities have started referring students to arts and cultural activities like comedy shows and concerts as part of their mental health initiatives.

The approach has also drawn the attention of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York ’s community development team, which will bring together experts over the course of the next year to discuss how social prescriptions can help improve well-being in low-income neighborhoods.

The process of making referrals is not new among community health professionals and social workers. Social prescribing differs by providing a kind of accountability coach, referred to as a link worker in Britain , who assesses the needs and interests of clients and then connects them to local organizations including volunteer groups and cultural institutions.

In recent years, the English national health care system has employed 1,000 new link workers, with the goal of making social prescribing available to 900,000 people by 2024. But putting such a plan in place in the United States, which does not have a socialized health care system, would be far more complicated, experts say.

“There’s reason to be skeptical about how far this will go,” said Daniel Eisenberg, a professor of health policy and management at the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Our health care system tends to make only very incremental changes, and I think all the biases built into the system favor medical care and more acute intensive care.”

If social prescriptions can help keep people out of the emergency room for routine complaints, which could save billions of dollars , this may provide additional incentive for health insurance providers to help cover the costs, experts say.

Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield, New Jersey’s largest health insurer, is participating in a study examining whether an arts prescription program will improve patients’ quality of life and reduce health disparities. Further down the road, the company will find out whether the prescriptions can also save money by lessening patients’ reliance on the E.R. for ordinary health care needs. While earlier research on social prescribing suggests that it can improve mental health and quality of life and that it might reduce doctor visits and hospital admissions , many of the studies have been small, reliant on patients’ self-reporting and done without a control group.

The potential benefits have made social prescription “a really hot topic,” said Jill Sonke, the research director at the University of Florida’s Center for Arts in Medicine. She is working with British researchers to identify all of the social prescription programs in the United States — the number now tops 30 — and learn what worked and what didn’t.

The programs are not a panacea, Dr. Sonke said, and there are many possible pitfalls to enacting them on a wider scale in America. If social prescriptions are not accessible to people who are uninsured or underinsured, for example, or if people don’t feel welcome at the places they’re being referred to, then “the system isn’t doing what it’s intended to do,” she said. “It really is about everyone having access to wellness and prevention,” she added.

In January, Stanford University and Rutgers University-Newark began prescribing arts and cultural activities to students as an expansion of the schools’ mental health services. At Rutgers, students can attend cultural events in Newark at no cost, via a partnership with the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. At Stanford , the students are referred to campus events like concerts, art exhibitions or specialized classes, and prescriptions are managed by Art Pharmacy, a start-up in Atlanta that also provides arts prescriptions in Georgia and Massachusetts.

At both schools, any student, including those without mental health issues, can seek a referral from a trained staff member . Student leaders at Rutgers can also make referrals.

Kristi Maisha, a Stanford graduate student who studies civil engineering, said she decided to participate because she wanted to take a moment away from the intensity of her academic schedule.

“It is not very beneficial to stay in that head space all the time,” she said. “So I was definitely looking for something that would kind of break me out of that.”

Ms. Maisha chose to attend an improvisational dance class led by a choreographer — though she showed up with some trepidation. “What am I doing?” she thought as the class began.

But she followed the instructor’s lead, contorting her torso and limbs, and even her face, into new shapes — leading with her body instead of her brain. The class became symbolic of simply living in the moment, she said, and she felt freed from the “planned out, predetermined thoughts” that often confined her. “Now that I know that it’s actually quite a good time, I’m more likely to do it, regardless of them prescribing it or not,” she said.

Read by Christina Caron

Audio produced by Kate Winslett .

Christina Caron is a Times reporter covering mental health. More about Christina Caron

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Three CUNY Educators Win 2024 Guggenheim Fellowships

April 17, 2024

Art Historian, Interdisciplinary Artist and Philosophy Scholar Win Prominent Prize

Three women from CUNY’s faculty have won prestigious Guggenheim Fellowships in recognition of their groundbreaking contributions to the arts and humanities. This year’s CUNY Guggenheim fellows are interdisciplinary artist  Bang-Guel Han  and philosophy scholar  Barbara Montero , both of the College of Staten Island, and art historian  Claire Bishop , of the CUNY Graduate Center.

“We congratulate Professors Han, Bishop and Montero for their selection as recipients of the highly coveted Guggenheim Fellowship,”  said CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez. “Not only are they dynamic changemakers producing innovative, influential work in their respective fields, they are also devoted faculty members who educate and inspire the next generation of scholars.”

Now in its 99th year, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation this year selected 188 fellows in 52 disciplines from nearly 3,000 applicants. Scholars are honored for work in the social and natural sciences, the humanities and the creative arts, and each recipient receives a stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.” Prior recipients include James Baldwin, Rachel Carson and Martha Graham. See the  full list of 2024 Fellows .

Examining Politics, Social Constructs

Han, an associate professor at the College of Staten Island, is an interdisciplinary artist working across video, performance and code. Through her work, she examines the sociopolitical and cultural dimensions of body and language in relation to social structures, representational systems and understandings of self.

“The list of recipients contains so many amazing people – I feel humbled to be in the same company,” Han said, adding that she feels “elated and honored.”

As a Guggenheim Fellow, Han will be working on a new interdisciplinary art project consisting of an experimental tapestry, electronic sculpture and live events in the form of public panel discussions.

Han was born and raised in Seoul and has been based in the United States since 2003. Her work has been shown in The Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Queens Museum, DOOSAN Gallery New York, SangSangMadang in Seoul and Centro Internazionale per l’Arte Contemporanea in Rome.

In her artist statement, Han said that her art practice “critically engages with manifestations of activities often associated with the feminine: talking about emotions, confessions, eavesdropping and gossiping. I’m interested in text as sites of disclosure and declaration that blur and complicate the distinction between public and private.”

Exploring the Mind-Body Problem

Montero is a philosophy professor at the College of Staten Island and the University of Notre Dame. Her experience as a former professional ballet dancer helps inform her research, which is focused on two very different notions of the body: as the physical or material basis of everything, and as the moving, breathing, flesh and blood instrument that we use when we run, walk or dance.

“I feel ecstatic that my work was recognized as worthy of support,” Montero said.

Her Guggenheim project will involve writing a draft of a book to be titled “Things That Matter: Actual-World Metaphysics and the Mind-Body Problem,” which is currently under contract with Oxford University Press. The book will explore what philosophy can teach readers about both themselves and the world they inhabit. “My goal is to methodically complete a full draft. After that’s done, it’s pure pleasure for me,” Montero said.

Montero has won fellowships and awards including the National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship and the American Council of Learned Societies Charles Ryskamp Research Fellowship. She was nominated by Oxford University Press for the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, an award for which publishers are permitted to submit only one book per round.

Critic and Contrarian 

Bishop, a prolific scholar and contemporary art critic, is known for her original and sometimes contrarian views and interpretations. Her book “Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship,” for which she won the 2013 Frank Jewett Mather award, calls for art that engages and challenges its audience in a more intentionally assertive manner.

“So many great scholars have been Guggenheim Fellows, and there are so many I admire on the list of fellows this year. It’s terrific to be in that company,” Bishop said. “It’s also public recognition of a more contemporary and interdisciplinary way of writing.”

Her forthcoming book, “Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today,” due in June from Verso Books, includes four essays about changing patterns of attention in contemporary art and performance since the early 1990s. Her essays and books have been translated into 20 languages. A professor at the CUNY Graduate Center since 2008, she has taught courses on a variety of topics, such as exhibition history, museums of contemporary art, dance and performance, histories of art education and attention and technology.

“Art history can be a very niche bubble, while the media oversimplifies,” she said, speaking of her plans for the Guggenheim. “I’d like to help bring some accessibility to the former and some complexity to the latter.”

Read the full announcement from the  CUNY Graduate Center .

The City University of New York  is the nation’s largest urban public university, a transformative engine of social mobility that is a critical component of the lifeblood of New York City. Founded in 1847 as the nation’s first free public institution of higher education, CUNY today has seven community colleges, 11 senior colleges and seven graduate or professional institutions spread across New York City’s five boroughs, serving more than 225,000 undergraduate and graduate students and awarding 50,000 degrees each year. CUNY’s mix of quality and affordability propels almost six times as many low-income students into the middle class and beyond as all the Ivy League colleges combined. More than 80 percent of the University’s graduates stay in New York, contributing to all aspects of the city’s economic, civic and cultural life and diversifying the city’s workforce in every sector. CUNY’s graduates and faculty have received many prestigious honors, including 13 Nobel Prizes and 26 MacArthur “Genius” Grants. The University’s historic mission continues to this day: provide a first-rate public education to all students, regardless of means or background. To learn more about CUNY, visit  https://www.cuny.edu .

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Greyson Norcross ’20MED, ’24PHD: ‘My Biggest Hope is to Revolutionize How We Think About Leadership’

Greyson Norcross’ is fascinated by how leadership intersects with the arts, and his dissertation  explored the experiences of senior leaders in higher education who have backgrounds in music. After he graduates with his Ph.D. in Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development with a concentration in adult and lifelong eEducation , he is looking forward to engaging in new avenues for research in leadership and creativity, while also serving as a senior donor engagement officer for the Triangle Community Foundation.

Meet Greyson

Hometown: Willow Street, Pennsylvania

Degree: Ph.D. in Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development with a concentration in adult and lifelong education

Activities (Research or Extracurricular) :

At NC State, I have worked at the Belk Center for Community College Leadership and Research since the fall of 2018. It has been a distinct honor to work there under [W. Dallas Herring Professor in the NC State College of Education and Executive Director of the Belk Center for Community College Leadership and Research] Audrey Jaeger throughout my graduate studies. Much of my graduate studies fell during the COVID-19 pandemic, so I was not heavily involved in on-campus extracurriculars, but I am an active member of the Triangle Curling Club and greatly enjoy running and roller-skiing in my free time.

Why did you choose the NC State College of Education? 

I was drawn to the College of Education because of the caliber of faculty I would be able to work with. I am fortunate to have been able to work with Dr. Audrey Jaeger from when I first started my master’s degree in higher education administration up through the completion of my doctoral dissertation. The college also had a great reputation, and I knew several individuals who were attending or had graduated from the college while I was completing my grad school applications. I also really liked the location of NC State in Raleigh and its proximity to the beach and the mountains.

Why did you choose your concentration?

I often describe myself as a professional seeker of wonder in the world. Many of my own passions for learning did not develop until well into adulthood. For me, adult and lifelong education represents the epitome of being a lifelong learner. I wanted to be in a space that helps make learning accessible to everyone and helps to foster an excitement and passion in learning new things, especially among those who struggled to enjoy learning in their prior schooling.

What do you eventually hope to accomplish in your field? 

My biggest hope is to revolutionize how we think about leadership. My research explores how leadership intersects with the arts and creativity and how leaders who have experience or backgrounds in music and other creative arts can embed creativity and innovation in their leadership. I want to shed light on the unique skills of these people and open up pathways for people from these backgrounds to enter into leadership positions.

Do you have a favorite memory from your time in the College of Education?

Many of my favorite memories come from interactions with my fellow classmates. Because my classmates came from a variety of professional and functional areas, I was able to learn so much from them and understand what adult learning looks like in numerous different settings.

Tell us about an experience you had with the College of Education that had the biggest impact on you or your career.

I think that an experience that had the biggest impact on me came when I was first introduced to the Cyma Rubin Visualization Gallery at D. H. Hill Library as part of my visual qualitative research course with [Associate Professor of Literacy Education] Angela Wiseman . I had never encountered visual research methods prior to this course, and I had certainly never come across presenting research using a 360-degree perspective. This experience was profoundly influential in how I thought about and communicated research. Because of this, I did my dissertation defense in the Cyma Rubin Visualization Gallery and was able to incorporate stunning visuals and music in ways that allowed attendees to be immersed and connected to the research.

Why did you choose education?

In many ways, I feel that education chose me. My career in education began with the College Advising Corps (CAC) in Pennsylvania. I served as a college adviser for two years before transitioning to a leadership role within CAC. My experience in CAC was profoundly influential in shaping my interests in education. After my time in getting students into college, I wanted to shift into helping to ensure that students had the supports and structure needed to help them complete their education.

What are your research interests? What inspired those interests?

My dissertation is titled “Creating an Ensemble: The Influence of a Musical Background on Leadership Among Senior Leaders in Higher Education,” and it explored the experiences of senior leaders in higher education who have backgrounds in music. This research highlighted that these musical leaders developed a unique set of skills through their musical performance that then helped them be more effective as leaders in higher education through greater inclusion of creativity and innovation. This research stems from my own background as a musician, music educator and my work in higher education. I have been playing the trombone since I was in fourth grade and for many years taught various musical ensembles (e.g., concert band, jazz band, marching band). This research was the perfect connection between my passions and interests in music, education and leadership development.

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From literature to AI: UC grad shares career path to success

Humanities and storytelling lead to lucrative tech entrepreneurship.

Before Katie Trauth Taylor worked with international organizations like NASA, Boeing and Hershey, and before receiving accolades for her work in the generative AI space, she was in a much different industry: English and literature. 

Taylor earned her master's in English and Comparative Literature in UC’s College of Arts and Sciences. She completed her educational journey at Purdue University with a doctorate degree in rhetoric and composition. After working as a graduate assistant at Purdue and UC, she became a research professor at Miami University. 

It might seem from there that her career was set — perhaps a tenured professorship or a university administrative position. That might have been her path, but Taylor had her eyes set on different goals.

So how did Taylor transition from literature and composition to tech entrepreneurship? She enjoys sharing that part of her story.

A&S masters grad Katie Trauth Taylor, who has launched two businesses. Photo/Provided

“I love that question, and I think it's so important for everyone in the humanities to see that they have just as much entrepreneurial potential as any other person.”

Taylor founded Untold Content in 2015, jumping from academia to entrepreneurship. Untold Content is a business-to-business content strategy company that recognizes storytelling patterns and frameworks that will help innovative companies make their ideas clear, compelling and impactful to an audience.  

She then took innovation to the next level in 2022 with the launch of Narratize, a generative-AI storytelling platform that transforms the ideas of scientific, technical and medical innovators into impactful and detailed content and stories quickly.

It's so important for everyone in the humanities to see that they have just as much entrepreneurial potential as any other person.

Katie Trauth Taylor Entrepreneur and A&S master's grad in English

English to entrepreneurship

With 10 years of successful partnerships with lucrative companies like AAA and Boeing, Taylor is just getting started. And yet, it took a while for her to get here.

“I think sometimes we feel stuck — like, ‘I have to follow a path because I made us a choice about what to major in or what to study.’

  “But really, once you get out into the workforce, you see that everything is almost interdisciplinary and you can see and cut across those boundaries more seamlessly as long as you're a strong critical thinker, a great communicator and hungry to constantly learn.” 

Taylor was just that person during college. As she matriculated through her institutions, she formed bonds and met many mentors along the way who pushed her towards starting her own business.

“I think wherever you want to grow in your professional life, you just have to ask those questions. Ask, ‘what do I need to learn to get there and find my mentors?’ And sometimes, mentors are thrust upon you in the most wonderful ways. And it surprises you,” said Taylor. 

Along the way she continued her love for storytelling and sharing that passion. And yet, she felt that she could help scientists, tech moguls and medical professionals share their stories in more effective and impactful manners. 

“I had a mentor somewhere along the way, who said ‘look me in the eyes. You know, you could just start a business, right?’” 

And Taylor did just that with Untold Content while she was a research professor at Miami University. Untold Content kept growing and growing, so she made her decision and pursued her new passion fulltime, as the leader of the then up-and-coming narrative storytelling strategy company.

Making her mark in tech

“I never got a business degree, but here I am running my second company,” Taylor said.

The generative AI leader took herself into a new avenue of business and networking. However, she identified the potential of using generative AI to push the ideas of innovators in science, technology and medicine into impactful storytelling and long-form content.  As such, she found what would be her company’s foothold in the tech industry. 

“We came to generative AI as a way to solve a problem that we had already discovered, so we already knew the problem. The problem was, it is so challenging to communicate effectively within science, tech and medical industries, and there are so many roadblocks related to that,” said Taylor.

“I've always been in love with that problem. So, we were in this really intensive moment in my first company where we were trying to ask ‘how do we solve that problem at scale?’And so, we were designing tech platform for communicating internally and help people craft more clear and impactful messages.”

She received the perfect gem of knowledge pertaining to this issue during her time at UC from associate professor of English Laura Micciche — a lesson at the basis of her women-led companies.

UC for me was completely life-changing. The people I met were the most generous and thoughtful subject-matter experts that I have ever met, and they remain strong forces in my success today.

Katie Trauth Taylor A&S alum, tech entrepreneur

“Laura Micciche taught me about rhetoric and composition and the way that words hold power and how they structure society and public rhetoric the way they shape opinion,” Taylor said.

Taylor and her company never left their storytelling roots. Her team consists of data scientists, engineers and ‘narrative scientists,’ people who are science, tech and medical communicators with journalistic and marketing backgrounds. 

“Narrative scientists see the way words make meaning. And that is essentially the design of the predictive models,” said Taylor. “That is the most exciting, possible moment to be able to bring those diverse skill sets together. That's where the magic happens with Gen AI. And that's where we see solutions that will actually be transformative.”

The teams at Narratize and Untold Content continue with these tenets in mind under Taylor’s leadership.

To the future

Narratize and Untold Content work to help a variety of stakeholders understand the ideas and insights of innovators around the world, from consumers to potential investors. However, given the recent surge in open AI, creatives like journalists and marketers are concerned.

AI software continues to evolve, and as technology advances, it is inevitable that jobs may be lost. And yet, Taylor has her own response to this question: ‘What happens to creatives as AI continues to get better?'

“It's the question everybody is asking. How do we keep pace with this rapid rise of technology? We set out really early on to ask how do we empower people? How do we do AI with good intent?”

One of the major pillars of both companies is to keep AI in the hands of creatives and to ensure AI is nothing but human-led. 

“And that means that we design the user experience to pull insights from the person and to support the person in their workflow and embed the AI into those workflows so they can be more effective in their work and do that more efficiently.”

The focus is on teaching and empowering creatives with generative AI, and according to Taylor, the best path forward is through embracing AI and maintaining focus on amplifying storytelling. An emphasis on focus that she strengthened during her time at UC. 

"UC for me was completely life-changing. The people I met were the most generous and thoughtful subject-matter experts that I have ever met," Taylor said, "and they remain strong forces for my success today."

Featured image at top: Graphic representation of artificial intelligence. Credit/Steve Johnson on Unsplash.

By Serigne Thiam

Student Journalist , A&S Department of Marketing and Communication

[email protected]

• Department of English
• College of Arts and Sciences
• Alumni Association
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Remembering Daniel C. Dennett, University and Fletcher Professor of Philosophy Emeritus

This message is being sent on behalf of the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences.

Dear colleagues,

It is with great sadness that I write to inform you that Daniel C. Dennett, University and Fletcher Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, passed away early this morning. He was 82.  

Dan Dennett was truly a once-in-a-generation scholar, teacher, and colleague. His career at Tufts spanned more than 50 years and we are incredibly fortunate to have had him as a part of our community for so long.

After receiving his AB in philosophy at Harvard University and his PhD in philosophy at the University of Oxford, Dan taught at the University of California, Irvine, from 1965 to 1971, before arriving at Tufts as an associate professor. He was promoted to professor in 1975 and chaired the Department of Philosophy from 1976 to 1982. Dan was named University Professor in 2000, Tufts’ highest honor for faculty members. That year, he also became the Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and he received the distinction of University Professor Emeritus when he retired at the end of 2022.

Dan was a major intellectual figure internationally, with research centering on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He published 21 books, such as Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1995) and Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006), and more than 560 articles. Interestingly, an off-Broadway play, “The Unbelieving,” which was staged in New York City in 2022, was directly inspired by interviews with clergy conducted for his book (with researcher Linda LaScola) Caught in The Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind (2013).

At least 18 books have been written about Dan and his work, and he appeared in numerous documentaries, including A Glorious Accident (1993). In 2011 he collaborated with Tufts undergraduate Matthew Hurley and Assistant Professor of Psychology Reginald Adams to coauthor Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (2011). He also chaired the Loebner Prize Committee that held the first three restricted Turing test competitions. Students and colleagues from around the world traveled to Tufts to study, work, and think alongside him.

Dan’s pioneering approach to his field has garnered international attention for more than half a century. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987, and has received two Guggenheim awards, a Fulbright fellowship, and a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. From the last decade alone, his awards included the Mind & Brain Prize (2011), the Erasmus Prize (2012), the SINe medal (2016), and the Carl Sagan Award (2018). Dan gave talks across the globe, even after retirement, and was awarded numerous honorary degrees, granted by universities spanning from Connecticut to Bucharest.

Dan assisted and advised former Tufts President Jean Mayer in his efforts to turn Tufts into a major research university. During Larry Bacow’s presidency, he created and hosted the Tufts High Table dinners, which gave faculty members the opportunity to get to know each other in non-committee contexts, and which led to many longstanding friendships and collaborations. He also served as director of the Tufts Center for Cognitive Studies since its inception in 1985 and co-founded the Curricula Software Studio in 1985.   Dan is survived by his wife of over 60 years, Susan, their son, Peter, their daughter, Andrea, and six cherished grandchildren, as well as his two sisters, Charlotte and Cynthia.   Those seeking support during this time may wish to make use of the services of the Tufts Employee Assistance Program and/or the University Chaplaincy .    Thank you for joining us as we send our heartfelt condolences to the Dennett family and to all those whose lives Dan touched.

Sincerely yours,

James M. Glaser Dean, School of Arts and Sciences

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9 to 5 The Musical: Cast Interviews with Hannah Countermine and Sophia Vessecchia

Published April 24, 2024

Hannah Countermine

Freshman Music Theatre major Hannah Countermine and junior Music Theatre major Sophia Vessecchia star as Judy Bernly and Violet Newstead in UB Theatre and Dance’s new production of 9 to 5 The Musical , running April 26 – May 5, 2024 at the Center for the Arts. Hannah and Sophia tell us a little bit about what audiences can expect during the two-weekend run.

Hannah Countermine Interview:

What’s Judy’s primary challenge in the story? How do you shift gears emotionally to portray how she changes throughout?

Judy's primary challenge in the show is finding her own independence. At the top of the show, she is dumped by her husband and is forced to get a job at Consolidated. Through this job, she learns how to make a living on her own. Violet and Doralee take Judy their wing and help her become a strong, fierce, and independent woman.

On the day of a show what do you like to do, or not do, in the hours before curtain? What’s your way of preparing?

On a show day, I prepare in many different ways. My first priority is warming up my voice and body by drinking lots of water, stretching, using a vocal steamer, and doing some vocal warmups. I also have to prepare mentally by clearing my mind with some meditation. While I do my hair and makeup, I love to listen to empowering female music such as Britney Spears, Beyoncé, and of course Dolly Parton!

Have you ever had a role like Judy before? What’s been the most challenging aspect? What have you tried to do to make it ‘yours?’

I have never played a role like Judy before, but she has been a dream role of mine for quite a long time. I relate to Judy in many ways, from her vibrant personality to her sense of independence. This role gave me a chance to work on my comedic timing and versatility throughout the show. I absolutely loved working on this show and wouldn't have been able to make the progress I have made with Judy without all of the support from the cast and crew.

Sophia Vessecchia

Sophia Vessecchia Interview:

What’s been your favorite part of the rehearsal process and preparing to play the role of Violet?

When preparing for the role of Violet, I actually interviewed my Aunt! (Hi Aunt Sue!). To me, she is very similar to Violet: a hard-working, strong woman. She was able to tell me stories from her experience in the workplace, which was very helpful in preparing for the role. This role is dedicated to her and it really is such a honor to portray the role of Violet. My favorite part of the rehearsal process is being able to work with my friends everyday. Being able to work close with Kyra and Hannah is such a joy and I learn so much from them each day!

Have you ever had a role like Violet before? What’s been the most challenging aspect for you personally?

I have never had a role like Violet before, and it has been such an amazing experience! The most challenging aspect for me is all the singing! I just counted and Violet alone has 10 songs! It can be vocally exhausting, but it really is a great challenge for me to work more on my technique and maintain good vocal health.

Do you have questions or comments for the Office of the Provost? Let us know your thoughts and we’ll be happy to get back to you.

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