Doctoral Research
For several years now the demand for postgraduate and doctoral Fine Art study in Oxford has been growing. This has coincided with a similar desire on the part of the School to provide such an opportunity within what we feel is an environment particularly well suited to research activity. As a consequence, we have established a DPhil programme.
The admissions process is currently underway and the next submission deadlines for applications are 21 November 2008, 23 January 2009 and 13 March 2009.
This area of the Ruskin's website contains material relating to the research projects being undertaken by its postgraduate community as well as details of staff research interests and general information on the DPhil programme.
admissions process
Download full course details (PDF, 40k)
In addition the Ruskin is able to draw upon a wide network of highly specialised supervisors both within Oxford and outside.
DPhil supervisors
Michael Archer
Within the more general field of contemporary and modern art that occupies Michael Archer, his main interest is in space and materials, and in their interaction and inter-relation. His work results in both writing and the curating of exhibitions. In recent years, this interest has led him to curate an exhibition on bodily experience in the private and public spaces of the urban environment, and to write on net art, on the rhetoric of immateriality that has persisted in art practice and commentary over several decades, on language in art, and on the significance of relational aesthetics for the changing understanding of installation. The major project in respect of language has been a doctoral thesis on the Scottish poet and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay.
Paul Bonaventura
Paul Bonaventura initiates and supports the production of new art that derives from collaborations between artists and experts from the worlds of science, technology and the humanities. The outputs of these collaborations take the form of exhibitions, public art projects, limited editions and multiples, live and time-based art, and publications in electronic and paper-based formats. He is also concerned with the historic and contemporary development of painting, sculpture, installation and photography, and he expresses this involvement in the form of organised exhibitions and articles for specialist and national publications.
Malcolm Bull
Malcolm Bull is a theorist and art historian. He is currently working on several topics in political and cultural theory - reading like a loser; modernism and trust; the concept of the social, and the invention of falsehood. His previous books include The Mirror of the Gods (2005); Seeing Things Hidden (2000), and Apocalypse Theory (editor, 1995). He enjoys working with students who have a critical perspective on contemporary art and society.
Brian Catling
Brian Catling is obsessively engaged in the collision of separate activities that sometimes fuse together in a hybrid event, they being the writing of poetry, the constructing of sculptural installation and the action of performance. Most recently they have fetched up as video works. Teaching is an essential element of his imaginative spectrum. Being a reflector to others' potential and talent is a privilege and a challenge, and it helps to keep him sane.
Maria Chevska
There are two strands to Maria Chevska's current research, both of which relate to recent bodies of work that she has produced and that are in progress. The main focus of her current research is looking at early twentieth-century Modernism; its legacy in contemporary culture and life, and specifically investigating the writers, artists, and political agitators connected with the Russian Constructivists, including Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitsky, Rosa Luxemberg and Vladimir Mayakovsky. She is also interested in migration and displacement of people in a number of cosmopolitan cities.
Chris Evans
Chris Evans deliberately muddles the roles of artist and patron, genius and muse, producing art developed through conversations with people from diverse walks of life, such as art patrons, aristocrats, directors of global corporations, politicians and police officers. Works are manifested in a very wide variety of materials taking the form of, for example, live events, bronze sculpture, editioned etchings, airbrush paintings, ceramics, and short films. Other works by Evans do not exist at all in a conventional sense; they are simply structures, connections between groups of people or ideas, that are left out in the world waiting for somebody to find and use them.
Daria Martin
Daria Martin's research interests include historical aspirations towards the ideal of the gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork). Combining elements of painting, sculpture, performance art, dance, fashion and music, her films created modest moments of simultaneity, fleeting frissons between disciplines. What fascinates her is the essential contradiction of the film medium: its layered ephemerality and sensuality, its articulation of psychological projection together with a necessary physical realisation of fantasy.
Abigail Reynolds
Abigail Reynolds is interested in spatialising information sequences and relationships from non-art sources. In her rule-based works, different modes of understanding are brought into opposition. A proposed ideal order and taxonomy (geometry, alphabetic ordering systems etc) is disrupted by an opposing visual information system. This sets up a problematic relationship with rules and knowledge in the world. She tries to set up a tension between quantifiable information and what cannot be understood, and her work sometimes involves layered collaborations with institutions and disciplines outside the art context as well as within it. She recently undertook a residency at the Oxford English Dictionary, and generated a project in collaboration with the Dyslexia Institute.
Katerina Reed-Tsocha
Katerina Reed-Tsocha is a theorist and art historian with broad research interests in modernist and postmodernist art and theory, the theory of photography, art historiography, and the philosophy of art. Recent and current projects include 'Art History: Theories, Methods, and Practice' (Thames & Hudson, forthcoming), 'A Very Short Introduction to Expressionism' (OUP, forthcoming) and 'The Myth of the Unique Piece', a monograph on artistic strategies of multiplication and the elusive search for uniqueness. She is interested in supervising theoretical, historiographical and philosophical projects relating to modernist and postmodernist artistic practices. In addition, she supervises the 'thesis component' of DPhils in Fine Art by practice. As Director of Graduate Studies she oversees the Ruskin Doctoral Programme and runs the postgraduate research skills seminar.
Richard Wentworth
Richard Wentworth is best known for his sculpture, but his interests have steadily broadened towards something much closer to urbanism. Although his work often contains readymade components, these are usually redeployed to a very different sense of purpose. Photographs of myriad encounters with transient arrangements of objects, taken over many, many years, have chronicled ways in which humans re-order the world to suit their own purposes. He has enjoyed several episodes of working with students, both in Britain and internationally. In the 1970s and 1980s, he taught at Goldsmiths' College, University of London. In the 1990s, he worked with several units at the Architectural Association, also in London. He joined the Ruskin School on 1 April 2002.
The admissions process is currently underway and the next submission deadlines for applications are 21 November 2008, 23 January 2009 and 13 March 2009.
This area of the Ruskin's website contains material relating to the research projects being undertaken by its postgraduate community as well as details of staff research interests and general information on the DPhil programme.
admissions process
Download full course details (PDF, 40k)
In addition the Ruskin is able to draw upon a wide network of highly specialised supervisors both within Oxford and outside.
DPhil supervisors
Michael Archer
Within the more general field of contemporary and modern art that occupies Michael Archer, his main interest is in space and materials, and in their interaction and inter-relation. His work results in both writing and the curating of exhibitions. In recent years, this interest has led him to curate an exhibition on bodily experience in the private and public spaces of the urban environment, and to write on net art, on the rhetoric of immateriality that has persisted in art practice and commentary over several decades, on language in art, and on the significance of relational aesthetics for the changing understanding of installation. The major project in respect of language has been a doctoral thesis on the Scottish poet and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay.
Paul Bonaventura
Paul Bonaventura initiates and supports the production of new art that derives from collaborations between artists and experts from the worlds of science, technology and the humanities. The outputs of these collaborations take the form of exhibitions, public art projects, limited editions and multiples, live and time-based art, and publications in electronic and paper-based formats. He is also concerned with the historic and contemporary development of painting, sculpture, installation and photography, and he expresses this involvement in the form of organised exhibitions and articles for specialist and national publications.
Malcolm Bull
Malcolm Bull is a theorist and art historian. He is currently working on several topics in political and cultural theory - reading like a loser; modernism and trust; the concept of the social, and the invention of falsehood. His previous books include The Mirror of the Gods (2005); Seeing Things Hidden (2000), and Apocalypse Theory (editor, 1995). He enjoys working with students who have a critical perspective on contemporary art and society.
Brian Catling
Brian Catling is obsessively engaged in the collision of separate activities that sometimes fuse together in a hybrid event, they being the writing of poetry, the constructing of sculptural installation and the action of performance. Most recently they have fetched up as video works. Teaching is an essential element of his imaginative spectrum. Being a reflector to others' potential and talent is a privilege and a challenge, and it helps to keep him sane.
Maria Chevska
There are two strands to Maria Chevska's current research, both of which relate to recent bodies of work that she has produced and that are in progress. The main focus of her current research is looking at early twentieth-century Modernism; its legacy in contemporary culture and life, and specifically investigating the writers, artists, and political agitators connected with the Russian Constructivists, including Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitsky, Rosa Luxemberg and Vladimir Mayakovsky. She is also interested in migration and displacement of people in a number of cosmopolitan cities.
Chris Evans
Chris Evans deliberately muddles the roles of artist and patron, genius and muse, producing art developed through conversations with people from diverse walks of life, such as art patrons, aristocrats, directors of global corporations, politicians and police officers. Works are manifested in a very wide variety of materials taking the form of, for example, live events, bronze sculpture, editioned etchings, airbrush paintings, ceramics, and short films. Other works by Evans do not exist at all in a conventional sense; they are simply structures, connections between groups of people or ideas, that are left out in the world waiting for somebody to find and use them.
Daria Martin
Daria Martin's research interests include historical aspirations towards the ideal of the gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork). Combining elements of painting, sculpture, performance art, dance, fashion and music, her films created modest moments of simultaneity, fleeting frissons between disciplines. What fascinates her is the essential contradiction of the film medium: its layered ephemerality and sensuality, its articulation of psychological projection together with a necessary physical realisation of fantasy.
Abigail Reynolds
Abigail Reynolds is interested in spatialising information sequences and relationships from non-art sources. In her rule-based works, different modes of understanding are brought into opposition. A proposed ideal order and taxonomy (geometry, alphabetic ordering systems etc) is disrupted by an opposing visual information system. This sets up a problematic relationship with rules and knowledge in the world. She tries to set up a tension between quantifiable information and what cannot be understood, and her work sometimes involves layered collaborations with institutions and disciplines outside the art context as well as within it. She recently undertook a residency at the Oxford English Dictionary, and generated a project in collaboration with the Dyslexia Institute.
Katerina Reed-Tsocha
Katerina Reed-Tsocha is a theorist and art historian with broad research interests in modernist and postmodernist art and theory, the theory of photography, art historiography, and the philosophy of art. Recent and current projects include 'Art History: Theories, Methods, and Practice' (Thames & Hudson, forthcoming), 'A Very Short Introduction to Expressionism' (OUP, forthcoming) and 'The Myth of the Unique Piece', a monograph on artistic strategies of multiplication and the elusive search for uniqueness. She is interested in supervising theoretical, historiographical and philosophical projects relating to modernist and postmodernist artistic practices. In addition, she supervises the 'thesis component' of DPhils in Fine Art by practice. As Director of Graduate Studies she oversees the Ruskin Doctoral Programme and runs the postgraduate research skills seminar.
Richard Wentworth
Richard Wentworth is best known for his sculpture, but his interests have steadily broadened towards something much closer to urbanism. Although his work often contains readymade components, these are usually redeployed to a very different sense of purpose. Photographs of myriad encounters with transient arrangements of objects, taken over many, many years, have chronicled ways in which humans re-order the world to suit their own purposes. He has enjoyed several episodes of working with students, both in Britain and internationally. In the 1970s and 1980s, he taught at Goldsmiths' College, University of London. In the 1990s, he worked with several units at the Architectural Association, also in London. He joined the Ruskin School on 1 April 2002.