In 2011, the Art History Department began enrolling students in an innovative Ph.D. program rooted in the fields of art history and visual culture studies. The program builds upon the strengths of a distinguished faculty who bring a renewed emphasis on historical and new media, visual technologies, architecture and the city, race and gender, and performance and ritual. Emphasizing spatial and well as visual culture, the program extends the department’s commitment to the study of technologies of visual communication, while also advancing transnational scholarship in the arts of the Americas, Africa and the African Diaspora, and Europe.
Admission
All students admitted to the program will receive full fellowship support and close mentorship within a small-program setting. Candidates are ensured professional success through a program featuring
- Small seminars and ample options for tutorial studies.
- Fellowships for all doctoral candidates for five full years.
- Medical benefits, tuition waivers and professional travel support for doctoral students.
- Close mentoring from matriculation to graduation and beyond.
To be admitted to the Ph.D. program, an applicant must have obtained a B.A. or M.A. from a four-year accredited college or university.
Degree Requirements
The Ph.D. in art history requires up to 36 credit hours of coursework, as well as 6 hours of directed readings and at least 4 credit hours of dissertation work. Students must pass a departmentally administered exam to demonstrate proficiency in at least one language relevant to their course of study. Further requirements include oral and written exams in the third year and a colloquium at the beginning of the fourth year; the fourth and fifth years are devoted to dissertation research and writing.
Any student who has demonstrated language proficiency and achieves a GPA of 3.00 in 30 hours of coursework during the first and second years of study but who does not receive the positive recommendation of the advisory committee to continue on to Ph.D. candidacy will be allowed to fulfill the requirements for the M.A. by completing a thesis within the following 12 months.
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