PhD Program in Rhetorics of Art, Space, and Culture at SMU

PhD Program in Rhetorics of Art, Space, and Culture

RASC/a (inspired by the Spanish word for "scratch”), the name of the Ph.D. program at SMU, stands for "Rhetorics of Art, Space, and Culture.” It builds upon the strengths of the present faculty but with renewed emphasis on historical and new media, visual technologies, architecture and the city, race and gender, and performance and ritual. Emphasizing spatial and well as visual culture, it extends the department’s commitment to the study of technologies of visual communication, while also advancing transnational scholarship in Arts of Latin America, Iberia, and the Americas.

Students will enjoy close mentorship within a small-program setting and generous funding: a fellowship package of five years of tuition and health benefits plus a stipend of $25,000 per year. Students also receive support for off-campus and international research and conference travel. In addition, the department conducts annual site-specific graduate seminars that take students off-campus for eight to ten days each year (Venice, Italy in 2009/10, Los Angeles, CA in 2010/11). Our campus facilities include a number of significant resources for graduate training. In addition to a dedicated art and art-history library (Hamon Library), the SMU campus is home to the Meadows Museum of Art, one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Iberian art outside Spain; the Bridwell Library, an internationally-recognized collection of manuscripts, incunabula, and early print media; and the DeGolyer Library, whose collections include a wealth of materials on early voyages and travels, Western Americana, and the history of science and technology.