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The one-year course, entitled MA in the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, provides candidates with detailed knowledge of the visual arts of these areas, contemporary and historical, while also focusing on the methodological and theoretical issues involved in their analysis and display, both in their original contexts and in the contexts of museums and exhibitions. This programme is suitable both as a stand-alone MA and as a foundation for doctoral research.
Consideration of this material occurs at the interface of several disciplines: anthropology, art history, archaeology and museology. The MA course is therefore essentially cross-disciplinary, with an emphasis on anthropological approaches, including related subfields such as anthropology of art, museum anthropology, and cultural heritage. Students are introduced to a variety of perspectives and theoretical approaches, while maintaining a focus on the complexity of the body of material at hand.
The wide range of options for essays and the dissertation allows the course to be tailored to a student's interests. Thus, someone wishing to focus, for example, on a particular region, disciplinary perspective or museum studies, can weight the course in that direction by selecting essay subjects and a dissertation topic in that area. Places on the course are restricted to a maximum of ten, allowing an unusually high degree of regular individual supervision and small-group tuition. Strong emphasis is placed on the development of research skills.