Applications to the Art History PhD program must be submitted through the Arts & Humanities Division Admissions website, which provides detailed instructions including the specific, annual December deadline for admission the following fall quarter. We cannot consider late applications. Questions about admissions should be directed to the Office of Admissions of the Division of the Arts & Humanities.
The department does not offer a terminal MA degree, but the University of Chicago does offer a Masters Program in the Humanities (MAPH), in which students can choose to concentrate in art history and/or pursue a Curatorial Option.
Select students may pursue joint PhD degrees with art history and another department or program. Please refer to the graduate program page for additional details.
The written parts of the application generally have much greater weight when it comes to making admissions decisions. We do not currently require GRE scores.
All applicants for whom English is not a primary language may be required to submit current scores from the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) or the International English Language Testing System (IELTS). Current scores are no more than two years old at the time of application submission. A complete description of the English proficiency policy may be found at this website, and questions about the English proficiency requirement should be directed to ahd-admissions@uchicago.edu.
Once an application is submitted, it will be forwarded to the Department of Art History. Each year the department has a limited number of slots for which we are able to offer admission; there are always far fewer slots than qualified applicants. In order to determine which applicants will be offered those slots, the art history faculty review applications in a series of committees. Building on these reviews, the full faculty decides upon a list of applicants to recommend to the Arts & Humanities Division for admission. Interest on the part of faculty most likely to advise the student certainly matters, but final admissions decisions are made by the department as a whole rather than by individual faculty. Formal notification of decisions comes from the Arts & Humanities Division.