the department
The Department of the History of Art and Architecture at UC Santa Barbara offers a diverse and innovative curriculum that seeks to foster a critical understanding of the production of art and the built environment. With a faculty of eighteen full-time professors and nine adjunct and affiliated faculty, the department offers both broad coverage and individualized programs tailored to student interests at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Although committed to sound historical research, we work beyond the traditional boundaries of art history to open those new perspectives that arise from interdisciplinary approaches and theoretical methodologies. We are one of the only art history departments whose faculty evenly divide as specialists of art and architecture.
In the undergraduate curriculum a new emphasis on global perspectives and intercultural exchanges joins the department’s long-established strengths in European and Non-Western traditions. The department now
also offers a new emphasis on Architecture and the Environment, a program that promotes an interdisciplinary understanding of architecture within a complex matrix of social, geographical, and political factors.
The department’s graduate program for the Ph.D. degree balances maximum flexibility with rigorous training in order to foster the creativity that is essential to the development of a vital discipline. Students are encouraged to utilize individual and collective faculty expertise to create specific fields of art historical inquiry. Feminist art history and gender studies, text-image relationships, art theory, technology and art, and the epistemology of collecting and displaying objects are some noteworthy faculty interests. For those interested in museum careers, there are ample opportunities to work through our internship program with area institutions, including the University Art Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Fowler Museum at UCLA and the Huntington Library and Art Collections; the department also enjoys a close working relationship with J. Paul Getty Museum. We are happy to announce a new initiative that allows faculty and student exchanges with the University of Leiden in Holland that maintains an English-based curriculum.
