MA Requirements

The department maintains benchmark worksheets for students to use with their advisors for tracking and planning progress toward their graduate degree(s). Students may obtain these worksheets from their advisors or from the department's Coordinator of Graduate Studies.

Course Requirements

Successful completion of thirty credit hours is required for the Master of Arts degree. Course work must include:

1) Methods of Research (ARTH 692; 3 credit hours)

2) Seven further graduate colloquia or seminars (3 credit hours each/21 credit hours total). Art history is a global and transhistorical field, and graduate education at the University of Maryland is fittingly diverse. Students entering in Fall 2016 or after must therefore also fulfill the following distributional requirements, and students already in the program are very strongly advised to do so. (If the student enters the PhD program after earning an MA from another institution and has not already completed the equivalent of these distributional requirements, he or she must satisfy these requirements at the PhD level.)

Coursework for the MA must include at least one course from each of four topic areas:

          A                           B                                  C                                                  D
Art before 1800    Art after 1800    Art outside Europe and the USA    Art from Europe and/or the USA

Note that a single course may fulfill one of the chronological areas as well as one of the geographic areas. No one course, however, can fulfill both of the chronological topic areas or both of the geographic topic areas. (A course on French Art from 1750 to 1850, for example, would satisfy area D as well as either area A or area B. Similarly, a course on global modernisms would likely satisfy area B, as well as either area C or area D. In any uncertain case, the Director of Graduate Studies shall decide which areas a course has satisfied, and a corresponding note shall be kept in the student’s file.)

3) Thesis Research (ARTH 799; 6 credit hours)

4) Each student must meet with an advisor every semester to determine course selection.

Graduate courses in other departments of the University, or courses equivalent to our 600/700 level art history courses in the Washington Area Consortium, Johns Hopkins University, and the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library, may be taken with the approval of the advisor and the Director of Graduate Studies (see the regulations in the Graduate Catalogue). No more than two courses needed for the M.A. program may be taken outside of the Department of Art History and Archaeology.

Directed Studies courses (ARTH 798) provide students at the M.A. and Ph.D. levels with the opportunity to work closely with individual faculty members within the Department on projects or field topics not normally included in the graduate curriculum. With the support of the supervising faculty member, the student should submit a one-page proposal to the Director of Graduate Studies. The proposal should describe the subject and objective of the project. The Director of Graduate Studies will present the proposal to the Graduate Faculty for its approval at the Graduate Review held at the end of each semester.

Customarily, a student takes in the first year, two to three colloquia or seminars each term. In the second year, a student completes the remaining required coursework and registers each semester for thesis research credit for the research and writing of the M.A. thesis. If the thesis is not defended at the end of the fourth semester, it is expected that a graduate student will defend the thesis by the first week of October of the fifth term in residence.

It is expected that a normal program of study, as suggested above, will not exceed two years. A minimum grade of “B-” is required for all courses approved for graduate credit. Two grades below “B-” result in automatic dismissal from the program.

Satisfactory Progress

A student must make satisfactory progress in meeting programmatic requirements, must demonstrate the ability to succeed in his or her course of studies or research, and must attain performance minima specified by the graduate program in all or in particular courses; otherwise his or her enrollment will be terminated.

Students must submit a two-page abstract summarizing the nature of their proposed M.A. thesis. Students should be aware that the decision to supervise a thesis rests with the individual faculty member. Upon agreement of a professor to direct the thesis, that professor becomes the student's advisor if he/she is not the same as the original advisor.

A M.A. thesis committee comprises three faculty persons (including the advisor), who are members of the Graduate Faculty at the university.  Two of the three members of the committee must be full-time Departmental faculty.  The advisor must submit to the Director of Graduate Studies a list of all committee members at least four weeks before the final copy of the thesis is distributed.

Students must submit three clean copies of the M.A. thesis directly to the committee members for their review.

The M.A. thesis should demonstrate the candidate’s competence in research and in original investigation. The thesis should be equivalent in scope and quality of research to an article in one of the professional art historical periodicals. Captions must accompany the illustrations on the same page; content of the captions may vary slightly according to the subject. The committee will be allowed a minimum of four weeks in which to read the thesis and conduct the oral examination.

The M.A. Thesis Examination

A final oral examination of the M.A. thesis will be held when the student has completed the thesis to the satisfaction of the student’s advisor, all other requirements for the degree have been completed, and a 3.0 grade point average (computed in accordance with the regulations described under “Grades for Graduate Students”) has been earned.

At the time of the thesis defense, the committee will fill out and submit one copy of the Evaluation Criteria for the Master’s Thesis form to the Director of Graduate Studies. Based on the committee’s evaluation of the thesis and its own review of the student’s academic record, it will determine whether or not to award the M.A. degree, and whether or not to recommend the student’s advancement to the Ph.D. program. The student’s advisor will submit a brief narrative evaluation report (1-2 paragraphs) reflecting the views of the entire committee to the department.

All students who wish to undertake a Ph.D. program in the Department are required to submit a Petition to Undertake a Ph.D. Program form. This form must be submitted to the Director of Graduate Studies and within two weeks of the M.A. thesis defense.

Please note: the student is responsible for meeting all deadlines published by the Graduate School (see http://www.gradschool.umd.edu/current_students/deadlines_for_graduate_st...). For further information on the M.A. Thesis Examination go to: http://www.gradschool.umd.edu/catalog/masters_degree_policies.htm