The School of Visual Culture is an interdisciplinary centre for teaching and research in humanities and social science disciplines with particular focus and expertise across the history, theory and criticism of art, design and visual culture.
The School creates a community that fosters lively exchange, scholarly discussion and critical debate. The mix of disciplines in the School enables ambitious enquiries into all aspects of art and design, representation, cultural production, cultural consumption, material culture, visual and spatial culture and cultural politics. Themes are explored through a variety of methodologies and with reference to a wide variety of art and design practices and forms of Visual Culture.
We welcome proposals for doctoral research 'by thesis' and 'by practice' - see the FAQs tab for further details.
Research students in the School also benefit from opportunities to take classes in our MA programmes.
Current and completed doctoral research projects at the School include:
•Fred Boissonas's Phtography and the Representation of the Greek Landscape
•Miroslaw Balka and the Politics of Memory in Polish Art
•From Hide to Hand: The Leather Glove as Material and Metaphor in Polite English Culture, ca. 1730 to 1820 (IRC funded studentship)
•Objects, Spaces and Rituals. A Social and Material History of Matrnity in Ireland, c. 1730-1830 (IRC funded studentship)
•Irish Identity through the Home: The Suburban Mid-Century Transformation
•On Ballet and Design
•Ontology of the Digitally-generated Image
•Systems Theory / cybernetics and the contemporary art institution
•On the Stained Glass of William Early (1872-1956)
•Bochner's Intermittent Objects: Aesthetics, Embodiment and Affect in Conceptual Art
•Interstitial Distance: The Future Of The Critical Arts Insitutions' Relationahip To The Neoliberal State
•Narratives of Global Modernity: International Contemporary Art Exhibitions as Places for Mapping Relational Geographies
•Reclaiming Remix: The critical role of Sampling in Transformative Works - a multimodal semiotic analysis of rhetoric and ideology in Critical Remix video
•Bracha L Ettinger's Matrixial Theory & Aesthetics: Matrixial Flesh and the Jouissance of Non-Life.
•Ghost-haunted land: Art After the 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland - published by MUP
•Advocating for the user: Functionalist industrial design practice in the German Democratic Republic - published as a book
•Form, complexity and governance: Problems of play in contemporary arts practice - published as a book
•Catholic Ireland: the Catholic church and the construction of Irish identity 1879-1923
For further details about length, duration of study, etc., please click on the course weblink below.