The Faculty of Visual Culture engages a broad range of historical, theoretical and critical domains. PhD researchers in the Faculty normally attend for regular individual research supervision, participate in regular research seminars and participate in a lecture programme in critical and visual research methodologies. A programme of visiting lecturers further contributes to the dynamic culture of debate among researchers. The Faculty creates a community within which lively exchange, scholarly discussion and critical debate continuously happen.
The PhD Thesis is typically 80,000 to 100,000 words in length. Applicants interested in discussing the possibility of pursuing PhD studies in history, theory or criticism should contact the Head of Research and Postgraduate Development at or the Head of Faculty Prof. Niamh O’Sullivan at .
NCAD PhD researchers currently work in:
Public Art as Cipher of Forgetting: Memory and Meaning in Public Art.
Mapping the City – Artworks in Public Space from an anthropological perspective.
Playing and Becoming Who We Are: A Genealogy of the Contemporary Playing Subject, orientated by an ethics of Care and Inoperability.
Art, Church and National Identity.
Constructions of the Visual in Cultural Representations of contemporary Belfast.
Design in East Germany (1949-73).
Irish Exhibition of Living Art.
Canons of Collecting: a critique of practices governing the collection of contemporary art in Ireland in the 20th Century.