Graduate Summer School

Graduate Summer School will commence in 2024. Further information will be available from November 2023.

The Summer School is a lively twelve-day programme of workshops, discussions and encounters with historical archives and contemporary practice. It offers the opportunity for art historians and art school students (across all specialisms) to learn from each other, and for UK-based students to connect with their Yale-based peers and with other members of the UK’s arts community. The Summer School provides a forum for stimulating discussion and debate on a theme that is of interest to both art students and art history students and is relevant to both historical and contemporary art.

The programme is organised by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Yale School of Art and the Yale Department of the History of Art.

Structure

The Graduate Summer School is based in London and incorporates visits to other locations in the UK. Each year, we will work through questions around the theme in its historical and contemporary manifestations in British art and culture, thinking closely about these questions in relation to global and transnational conditions.

The programme is structured around:

• a number of day-long workshops, in which the participants will work with artists, researchers and scholars
• talks by, and discussions with, art historians, curators, critics and artists
• visits to historical sites, archives and arts organisations
• opportunities for collective reflection and the development of ideas

The emphasis of the Summer School is on creative and collaborative forms of analysis and exchange between participants, who will form a research group around the pressing intellectual, practical and political concerns of this year's theme. Accordingly, participants will be encouraged to share their own areas of interest in the topic, and to collectively develop interdisciplinary research methodologies. There will be sessions during and at the end of the twelve days, allotted to this participant-led process. These sessions may provide the basis for future outputs – publications, for example – which would offer a permanent expression of the work done in the Summer School.

Eligibility

You can apply if you are currently enrolled as:

• a PhD student in the Yale Department of the History of Art
• an MFA student in the Yale School of Art
• a doctoral researcher at a history of art programme in the UK
• a doctoral-level art student enrolled at an art school in the UK

The Summer School will host twenty students in total: five doctoral students enrolled in history of art programmes across the UK; five art students enrolled at UK art schools at graduate level; five PhD students from the Yale Department of the History of Art; and five MFA students from the Yale School of Art.