Fine Arts, Ph.D. with a Track in Transdisciplinary Arts

The Department of Interdisciplinary Arts participates with the faculties in art, music, theatre & dance, and philosophy in an interdisciplinary program leading to the Doctor of Philosophy with a major in Fine Arts. Students engage a core curriculum of 15 hours that emphasizes interdisciplinarity among the arts: four required courses include a colloquium that explores disciplinary formation and types of interdisciplinary engagement; arts histories; arts in a contemporary context; and philosophical aesthetics. An additional approved topics or aesthetics course completes a student’s core program. Work within this track involves an individualized curriculum that allows the candidate to pursue a professional goal relating to personal competencies and culminates in a dissertation.

The doctoral degree program with major in Fine Arts requires a minimum of 60 semester hours; the residence requirement is fulfilled by satisfactory completion of 18 semester hours of graduate coursework during one 12-month period. Additional details appear in the introductory catalog section to the Talkington College of Visual & Performing Arts .

Concentrations

The Transdisciplinary track allows students to select two or three disciplinary concentrations in support of a customized course of study. The primary concentration will be situated in one of the TCVPA’s three units and drawn from those unit’s existing FADP concentrations. The second concentration can be an additional arts discipline housed within the TCVPA, or can be a non-arts discipline with which the TCVPA has an agreement relative to this degree track. The Qualifying Exam for this track will involve multiple parts: the IVPA Core Exam as well as exams in each of the major fields. The curricular flexibility of this track is meant to enable students to work in multiple disciplines and create a dissertation project in which the methodology and ultimate product transcends the possibilities of its constituent disciplinary concentrations.