MA.GAC.1.5YR - MA in Global Arts and Cultures (1.5-year program)

2025 - 2026 | Curriculum | 1.5-year program

The GAC MA program provides a strong foundation in social and cultural theory for artists, designers and architects, as well as students pursuing work in museums and galleries, creative industries, activism, policy making, entrepreneurship and academic research and teaching. In acquiring new cultural and political literacies, students gain the capacity to speak to multiple audiences, intervene in current debates and navigate global systems.

The curriculum is designed to establish frameworks for critical inquiry and develop individually tailored research projects. Core courses survey current theoretical discourses, explore research methods across and beyond traditional disciplines, and provide guided thesis preparation. Electives expose students to topics in the history of global art and design, literature, performance, and visual and material cultures. In close consultation with faculty mentors, students devise research projects that culminate in the completion of a master’s thesis based on original investigation, critical and historical analysis, and innovative forms of written and visual communication.

Learning outcomes

Graduates of the program are prepared to:

• Demonstrate a critical  understanding of the history of global modernity, and to demonstrate an understanding of the contemporary stakes of globalization as an economic, political and cultural process. 

• Demonstrate a critical understanding of the key theories, and ideological implications of global modernity as they have been articulated particularly since 1989 across the social sciences and humanities.

• Demonstrate a nuanced understanding of the relationship between the arts and global economic processes: how cultural practices are embedded in, complicit with, or potentially resist the processes of globalization.

•  Demonstrate an understanding of interdisciplinary forms of representation, and a political sensitivity and an analytical sophistication towards global contemporary art forms. 

• Conduct self-directed research that leads to an original written work of scholarship. 

• Demonstrate an understanding of how to  develop theoretical frameworks, how to synthesize interdisciplinary methodologies, and how to apply them to their own research and writing.

• Understand the ethical dimensions of conducting research on contemporary and historical subjects and topics, and develop a reflexive positionality as researchers.

• Develop a convincing argument through clear, nuanced writing that shows a process of successive iterations, editing and incorporation of feedback; in concert with specific disciplines.