IX. Graduate Programs

Art History and Visual Culture

The MA program is intended to provide students with core knowledge about Art History and Visual Culture within an interdisciplinary research context beneficial for transition to higher levels of Art History-related education and research and/or for careers in a variety of Art History-related fields, for instance in art publishing, museums and galleries, or government agencies.

The MA in Art History and Visual Culture is the first MA in this country which will provide a much-needed critical perspective fundamentally engaged with the history, politics, ideology, theory, and discourse not only of art, but, more significantly, the critical practices which inform how art's history is taught, marketed, and disseminated. What makes the program unique, dynamic, and exciting is its self-reflexivity, that is, its investigation of the discipline itself. By critically exploring a wider purview of objects, the program will be structured so as to provide maximum flexibility, introducing students to interdisciplinary inquiry and holistically engaging with objects in their multidimensionality. In other words, students will learn to discuss and critically write about objects in their material, critical, theoretical, and contextual totalities. Students will also explore the concept of identity, the power of visual rhetoric, and the shifting power dynamics inherent in art and its disciplines both in historical and contemporary contexts.