Ph.D.: Rhetorics of Art, Space and Culture In 2011, the Art History Department will launch an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program rooted in the fields of both art history and visual culture studies. The Ph.D. program's title, RASC/a (Spanish for "scratch"), stands for "Rhetorics of Art, Space and Culture." The program builds upon the strengths of the present faculty but with 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, it extends the department's commitment to the study of technologies of visual communication, while also advancing transnational scholarship in Arts of Latin America, Iberia and the Americas.
Students will enjoy close mentorship within a small-program setting and generous funding that includes a fellowship package of five years of tuition and health benefits, plus a stipend of $25,000 per year. Students also receive support for off-campus and international research and conference travel. In addition, the department conducts annual site-specific graduate seminars that take students off-campus for eight to 10 days each year (Venice in 2009/10, Mexico City in 2010/11).
Campus facilities include a number of significant resources for graduate training. In addition to a dedicated art and art history library (Hamon Library), the SMU campus is home to the Meadows Museum of Art, one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Iberian art outside Spain; the Bridwell Library, an internationally recognized collection of manuscripts, incunabula and early print media; and the DeGolyer Library, whose collections include a wealth of materials on early voyages and travels, Western Americana and the history of science and technology.
Dallas/Fort Worth is home to numerous museums and collections of international stature, and students enjoy access to these resources as well. The Dallas Museum of Art holds an encyclopedic collection of more than 30,000 objects, with particular strengths in Modern and Contemporary, Classical, American decorative arts, African and Pre-Columbian. The Kimbell Museum, housed in Louis Kahn's landmark building, boasts a smaller but superlative collection of art from around the world.
The Amon Carter museum includes one of the world's best and most comprehensive collections of American photography, with strong holdings in American art and sculpture. The Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas) and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth possess fine collections of 20th and 21st century American and European art. These collections are joined by a number of smaller museums in the area (including the Dallas Latino Cultural Center, the McKinney Avenue Contemporary), as well as several first-rate private collections. Students receive internships at these institutions, as well as regular instruction in their galleries and storage rooms.
Contact us for more information about graduate study in the RASC/a program at SMU.
M.A. in Art History
The M.A. Program in Art History trains leaders in the field who are capable of thinking critically, viewing objects with fresh perspective and conducting research at the highest level, and who are conversant with the discipline's history and invested in shaping its future. Recent graduates have gone on to Ph.D. programs, most fully funded, at Harvard, Yale, Northwestern, Brown, Cornell, UCLA and USC.
The M.A. program requires 30 hours of coursework and culminates in the completion of a Master's thesis. Each year, four to six applicants are awarded M.A. stipends (on top of tuition waivers) up to $10,500. Funding for thesis travel and research is available on a competitive basis. Additionally, the dDepartment offers one fully funded site-specific graduate seminar a year (this past fall in Venice) and academic credit and financial support is available for those who participate in the Poggio Colla Field School in Tuscany, Italy.
For information about applications for graduate studies in art history at SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts, contact Joe Hoselton (
hoselton@smu.edu)