Ph.D. in Fine Arts

We train public-facing, interdisciplinary scholars and artists

The arts are not silos or ivory towers. They are dynamic practices of give and take. Texas Tech University’s unique Fine Arts Doctoral Program (FADP), which leads to a PhD in Fine Arts, encourages students to pursue creative-critical study of the arts as an energetic exchange between multiple disciplines. Our students work both deeply and broadly. They balance focused disciplinary investigation with more integrative research bringing together approaches from the arts, social and natural sciences, and/or humanities. The FADP serves two types of students: 1) those with interdisciplinary scholarly or practice-based research interests, and 2) those with disciplinary research agendas who also want to increase their breadth as educators or administrators in a variety of institutional contexts. Student dissertation projects vary widely—from the creation of a festival of theatre and performance art in shipping containers to evolutionary explanations for music and dance, from an analysis of medieval altarpieces as technologies of virtual reality to a feminist approach to voice-image relations in Iranian film.

Some of our students use different disciplinary practices to answer cross-disciplinary questions; others conduct research within a single discipline, but also want the broader knowledge necessary to be a leader in an institution serving diverse needs. Ultimately, interdisciplinarity does not disparage or deny the disciplines, but depends on them for their methods and insights, even as it reorganizes their commitments. The FADP sees interdisciplinarity as a performance of world-making aimed at both current and future cultural institutions.