Art History Ph.D. Programs

[tspier2]

Hi, y'all. It's been quite some time since I last posted on here, but I'm writing today on behalf of my significant other. She's interested in nineteenth century Latin American art and is currently pursuing her MA in the same field. We're interested in any feedback that you might have about strong Ph.D. programs where she could continue to conduct similar work. We have already looked at Chicago, UT Austin, Tulane U, etc. and found them to be concurrently very similar and very different from one another in a variety of ways, viz. coursework, funding, faculty members in the same field, library size, image collection size, etc. Any and all information you can provide would be greatly appreciated! Moreover, we're going to be out of the country the year after she finishes her MA, so we're ideally looking for programs that will allow deferment if accepted. Thank you in advance for your responses.

[poliscar]

Before anything else, you'll be very, very hard pressed to find a PhD program in Art History (the humanities in general) that allows you to defer admission. It's just not something that happens; programs will tell you to apply again the next year. 

In terms of appropriate programs, I'd definitely look at Berkeley (Darcy Grimaldo-Grigsby, Lisa Trever), Harvard (Tom Cummins), UCLA (Charlene Villaseñor Black, Stella Nair), Yale (Mary Miller, Carol Armstrong), and potentially Northwestern (Jesús Escobar, Stephen Eisenman, Hollis Clayson). I think there are a lot of cases where she won't necessarily find a perfect advisor, who works in 19th century Latin American art, but instead has to focus on finding places where she could put together a great committee. So in that case I'd be on the lookout for schools with Latin American early modernists, pre-Columbianists, and scholars in 19th century American/European art.