MPhil/PhD in Arts & Humanities

at Royal College of Art

The School provides expert supervision across the spectrum of art and writing practice, art and design history and theory, curating and criticism. We welcome proposals for theoretical and practice-led projects, industrial collaborations and technologically focused research.
 

Our research interests are wide-ranging and reflect the expertise of our staff, focusing on arts, humanities and material practices, their scholarship and dissemination. The School’s distinctive research culture encompasses a broad range of activities from highly individuated scholarly and creative enquiries to projects that concern public policy and evaluation, collections and archival research, material and technical explorations as well as more speculative arts practice-focused projects. It includes the V&A/RCA PhD in History of Design, a degree offered jointly between the RCA and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
 

Beyond your individual supervision, you’ll be able to participate in research groups, where staff and students cluster around an idea or issue. These change annually and for 2017/18 were Absurdity, Disorder, Documents, Entanglement, Fiction and Politics, whilst for 2018/19 they were Collaboration, Documents, Entanglement, Environment, Me and (Re)Enactment. In 2019/20, they are Archive, Correspondence, Entanglement and Public(s).
 

Research takes place within an environment that is ambitious to generate new methods and insights. We thrive on interaction across the broad areas of fine and applied arts and the humanities, through School-wide lectures, workshops and tutorials delivered by key contemporary artists, writers, curators and thinkers, many of whom form part of our permanent staff base. The broad base of expertise offered by the School means we can support research interests across a large range of disciplines; moving image and sound, painting, performance, photography, printmaking and sculpture as well as jewellery, metal, ceramics, glass, curating, critical and theoretical writing and design history. The School embraces its cross-disciplinary perspective and celebrates the deployment of diverse and original methods of research and production.