MSt in History of Art and Visual Culture
The Department of the History of Art is a vibrant centre for postgraduate students, and offers a one-year taught postgraduate MSt degree in the History of Art and Visual Culture (MSt, ‘Master of Studies’, is the distinctive name for what elsewhere is often called ‘MA’). Students admitted to this programme do not necessarily have to have a first degree in art history, and a broad range of applicants are welcomed. The programme is suitable both as preparation for further research and as a postgraduate qualification in its own right. In addition to a rigorous training in methodology, students take one two-term optional course, and research and write a 15,000 word dissertation on a topic they choose, approved and supervised by a scholar with relevant specialist expertise. All postgraduate students take part in the Department’s Research Seminars, and in the huge range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary seminars which make Oxford an outstandingly exciting setting for the study of History of Art.
Important: please note that the course is full-time and requires attendance in Oxford. Full-time students are subject to the University's Residence requirements. The course cannot be studied part-time or remotely.
Core Course: Issues in Art History
This MSt core course provides a theoretical and methodological interrogation of the practice of art history. It aims to address the major challenges and issues that face all art historians today, no matter what their field. The course is motivated by a single key question: what needs to be done to turn art history into a discourse that can address the most pressing issues of our time? Structured by ten two-hour seminars, the course focuses on a selection of art historical texts that are pushing the field in new directions or have opened up new possibilities for art history. It will be taken for granted in this course that art history is a mode of argument and persuasion, rather than a search for an absolute truth. Seminars will be supplemented by workshops on professional practice and by art handling sessions with a curator at the Ashmolean Museum.
Dissertation Supervision
The Faculty appoints supervisors on the basis of their assessment of their fit with your research interests and their spare teaching capacity. However, before you apply you should ensure that the Faculty has the ability to support your interests by having academic staff with matching expertise. Please check the research interests of Faculty staff by visiting the People page. For details about the application process, please view the History of Art page of the online prospectus. If you've already submitted your application and need advice about the application or to check the status of the application, please contact Graduate Admissions in the Faculty of History. Email: graduate.admissions@history.ox.ac.uk
Optional Courses
Important: please list your Optional Course choice in order of preference at the beginning of your personal statement.
Applicants are asked to list their Optional Course choices in order of preference at the beginning of their personal statement and will be asked to confirm this choice before commencing studies. Due to numbers, please be aware that it is not always possible to guarantee your first optional course choice. Optional courses tend to change on a yearly basis, and are linked to the availability of staff members teaching the options in a particular year. The Optional Courses for 2027-2028 are listed below, but are subject to change.
Optional Courses for 2027-2028
Tutor: Professor JP Park
Pastmodern: The Traditions of the Avant-garde in Early East Asian Art
This graduate seminar reconsiders the place of early East Asian art within histories of modernity. Practices often associated with modern and postmodern art—including action painting, abstraction, conceptualism, ecological engagement, and participatory practice—have significant precedents in East Asian art. Yet despite the experimental and pathbreaking qualities of these traditions, scholarship has been slow to recognize East Asia as a parallel site of artistic modernity. For example, while scholars have celebrated the abstraction, spontaneity, and gestural qualities of early Chinese painting, particularly before 1300, they have often perpetuated an inverse narrative in which later Chinese painting became repetitive, stagnant, or even “post-historical,” awaiting the arrival of European modernism.
Such narratives reflect a broader tendency within dominant histories of modern art to marginalize East Asian artists and overlook practices that predate or parallel Western modernism by centuries. David Porter has described this selective forgetting as “instrumental amnesia,” while Finbarr Flood has examined related forms of exclusion as a legacy of colonial knowledge production. East Asian art, in this context, has often been aestheticized—admired for its formal qualities—without being fully historicized within global discourses of modernity.
The seminar introduces the concept of the pastmodern: both the “modernity of the past” and a “past” or “passed” state of modernity. As a critical framework, the pastmodern unsettles established boundaries between past and modern, East and West, and tradition and innovation. Rather than treating the past as a static precursor to modernity, the course explores how earlier artistic practices complicate linear narratives of artistic progress and remain active within contemporary historical consciousness.
*** Students from all fields are welcome. However, priority will be given to those with research proficiency in at least one non-European language, enabling sustained engagement with primary sources and scholarship relevant to the seminar’s themes.
Tutor: Professor Geraldine Johnson
This course focuses on the roles played by women in the production and reception of visual and material culture in 15th-, 16th- and 17th-century Europe. It also explores how the study of women and art (broadly defined) intersects with questions related to ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’, gender fluidity, racial identity and the de-centring of Europe within the so-called ‘global’ middle ages and early modern period.
Drawing on an expanding field of inquiry, the course examines the careers of professional women artists such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Leyster and Lavinia Fontana working in traditional media such as painting, as well as women in and out of Europe who were involved in the production of objects not always seen as ‘Art’, such as craft works and domestic furnishings. It considers influential women patrons and collectors such as Elizabeth I, Isabella d’Este and Maria de’ Medici, and less well-known lay and religious women patrons in Europe and beyond. Another topic is the representation of gendered subjects and strategies for visually encoding—and, at times, challenging—‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ in a wide range of media and diverse iconographic scenarios. The course looks as well at gender in relation to the beholders and users of art objects, for example when paintings and decorated household furnishings were produced to be viewed and used by young brides and mothers-to-be in the domestic sphere. The course will also consider the role played by gender in cultural exchanges between Europe and the wider world, as well as will touch on the visual afterlife of early modern gendered subjects in everything from 19th-century paintings, prints and photographs to contemporary film, television and online media.
Tutor: Professor Charlene Villaseñor Black
This course centres the decolonial turn in thinking about art in the Americas, from the moment of European contact in 1492 to the current day. How can a commitment to decoloniality help us research and interpret art created in the service of colonisation and empire? How can recent scholarship on art and activism generate new understandings of the power of expressive culture? In line with recognising past history as the impetus of coloniality in the world today, this course ranges temporally from early modern visual and material culture to contemporary art, and encompasses both South and North America geographically.
Drawing attention to Afro-descendent and Indigenous voices and artistic production, the course adopts a global view, also considering influences from Europe, Asia, and the Islamic world. Readings by decolonial theorists, particularly those writing from the Americas, as well as other theoretical texts, will inform our approach to various topics and themes: hybridity and cultural exchange, indigeneity, Afro-descendent expressions, religious art, cartography, art and global trade, the Baroque and Neobaroque, materiality, gender, feminist and queer framings, art and resistance, and art and environmentalism, among other topics.
In addition to critically assessing important theoretical writings and scholars influenced by their ideas, this course encourages close study of visual objects, reliance on primary sources, and the use of community-engaged research methods (as employed in ethnic studies) when appropriate. By challenging traditional geographic and chronological frameworks, we will endeavor to open up new interpretive paths in the study of the art of the Americas, in the process questioning the Eurocentric biases of the discipline of art history.
Tutor: Dr Marko Ilic
This course offers a critical survey of the forces placing unprecedented demands on today’s art world – driving it into more anxious, reactive and contradictory configurations. Moving beyond familiar debates surrounding the so-called ‘global contemporary,’ our inquiry will be anchored in an examination of the art world’s political economy. We will explore art’s shifting dynamics in relation to identity politics and the rise of populism, to migration and conflict, as well as its entanglement with rapacious hyper-capitalism and the accelerating crisis of climate collapse. We will also consider its relationship to the all-consuming digital attention economy and the still-uncertain consequences of AI.
Focusing each week on a specific theme, with case studies drawn from different parts of the world, the course offers a perspective on where the art world stands on these issues and what kinds of solutions it proposes – or fails to propose. Together, we will discuss where the art world is now, where it might be heading, and how artists, institutions, and writers can best intervene at a time that calls for nothing less.