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The Department of Art History has a tradition of teaching and research that explores how art, people and ideas become distinctive through their movement across the globe. This crossing of boundaries raises issues of artistic encounter and exchange across cultures. It also challenges our thinking about reuse, appropriation and expropriation, or the one-sided removal of property, particularly as acts of colonisation. The cross-global connections of art and the rise of world economies also affects our understanding of collecting museums and display.

Art, architecture, and design historians  at the OU seek to re-evaluate art established art-historical methods and approaches by considering emerging concerns across the wider humanities with processes of cultural encounter, movement and conflict. A major publication in this area is the anthology, Art in Theory: The West in the World, co-edited by Professor Leon Wainwright.

We welcome applications in areas that correspond with current staff research interests. 

Entry requirements

A UK Masters’ degree or equivalent level in a relevant subject (art, architecture or design history), or exceptionally a First Class undergraduate degree with a substantial dissertation. If you are not a UK citizen, you may need to prove your .

Potential research projects

We welcome applications to study topics that complement our current research.

Current/recent research projects

• The world by the Thames: Global Materiality and Elite Self-Fashioning in the Seventeenth-Century Collections of Ham House, Surrey
• Figuration in the Work of Post-Conceptual British Women Painters

Potential supervisors

• Dr Amy Jane Barnes – museum studies, collecting, curating and the representation of art and material culture of China
• Dr Emma Barker – French and British 18th-century art
• Dr Carla Benzan – art and visual culture in early modern Catholic Europe 
• Dr Kim Charnley – politics of contemporary art including art activism and socially engaged art and its relationship to displacement and migration 
• Dr Angeliki Lymberopoulou – Byzantine art and culture
• Dr Sam Shaw – art in Britain and its Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Europe c.1850-1950 including cosmopolitanism and transnational networks
• Dr Margit Thøfner – Visual, spatial and material culture c,1500-1700
• Professor Leon Wainwright – Modern and contemporary art in the Dutch-, English- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean; art of the African, Asian and Caribbean diasporas in Britain, the Netherlands and North America, and the Caribbean. 
• Dr Robert Wallis – visual and material cultures of contemporary Paganism

Fees and funding

PhD fees

Some of our research students are funded via the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership; others are self-funded.

For detailed information about fees and funding, visit Fees and studentships.

To see current funded studentship vacancies across all research areas, see .

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