Join a collegial community of scholars

Graduate students in our department are members of a collegial and highly productive community of scholars. Close contact with faculty is the standard, enhanced by a rich array of opportunities for professional and personal engagement across the university.

We offer graduate programs leading to M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Art History.

All students accepted to the Ph.D. program receive up to five years of guaranteed funding, which includes a yearly stipend of $23,000.00, tuition remission for up to 30 credits per academic year, health insurance, and coverage of mandatory fees.

In partnership with the Department of Information and Library Science in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, the department also offers a dual Art History M.A./M.L.S. degree in Library Science.

We offer courses on a wide range of visual traditions—from ancient to contemporary—in Africa, the Americas, East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Our students benefit from graduate-only seminars on specialized topics, lectures on broader research areas, and an annual Robert E. and Avis Tarrant Burke Lecture Series that brings art historians from other institutions to our campus to meet with graduate students and lecture on their area of expertise.

The Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art’s collections and those of The Lilly Library, the IU Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Moving Image Archive, and the Kinsey Institute provide unique classroom and research opportunities. Faculty and students also collaborate with on-campus galleries such as the Grunwald Gallery of Art and the University Collections at the historic McCalla School – which oversees more than 50 collections on the Bloomington campus – to curate exhibitions that draw upon university resources as well as those beyond the campus. Students interested in curatorial careers may also wish to explore the Interdisciplinary Curatorship Ph.D. minor.

Our students work with faculty in various area studies programs, centers, and institutes at IU, including the African Studies Program, Cultural Studies Program, Islamic Studies Program, Renaissance Studies Program, the Center for Caribbean and Latin American Studies, Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society, Center for East Asian Languages and Cultures, Center for Theoretical Inquiry in the Humanities, and the Medieval Studies Institute. IU Bloomington offers courses in more than 80 languages—from Akan to Zulu.

Our graduates are curators, librarians, and administrators at internationally renowned museums, research institutes, and foundations; they teach at outstanding research universities and liberal arts colleges; and work as editors, collections managers, and administrators at various arts and non-profit organizations and commercial enterprises in the United States and abroad.

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