The Art History Department the University of California, Riverside offers both MA and PhD degrees to prepare students for further academic study at the doctoral level; and for careers in art critical writing and in museums, galleries, and other arts institutions. The graduate program at UC Riverside offers a full range of art history courses, with faculty specializing in the major Western fields as well as Asian art. Students are encouraged to take the interdisciplinary graduate courses offered by the Literature, English, Dance, History, Anthropology, and Gender and Sexuality Studies programs on campus.

In addition to academic study, students are encouraged to obtain practical experience through participation in the organization and mounting of exhibitions at the Sweeney Art Gallery and California Museum of Photography on campus, as well as at other arts institutions in the area. In recent years, our students have won year-long internships at the Getty Museum, the Getty Research Institute, the Huntington Library, the Norton Simon Museum, and other museums.

Graduate-level research is supported by campus resources such as the Department’s Visual Resources Collection, the Rivera library, which contains approximately 8 million titles, and the California Museum of Photography, which possesses one of the leading collections of popular and fine art photographs in the country. UC Riverside is situated an hour from downtown Los Angeles, and numerous other resources in the immediate area are available to graduate students, including the major research libraries of the of the Getty Research Institute and the Huntington Library.

The Department of the History of Art is a member of the Getty Consortium, a group of Southern California graduate programs. This sponsors an annual graduate seminar held at the Getty Research Institute, which makes heavy use of the resources of the Getty Center. Students apply to take the seminar on a competitive basis.

Admissions take place on a rolling basis but applicants are urged to apply by January 5 in order to be considered for fellowship support.

Graduate Support in the form of Teaching and Research Assistantships and Graduate Fellowships, is available through the department. Other forms of financial aid are also available.