M.A. Arts & Culture Concentration

What You'll Study

Through a combination of various J-School M.A. courses and electives in their field both inside and outside the J-School, M.A. students in the Arts & Culture concentration develop historical knowledge, contextual understanding, and nimble thinking across a range of disciplines. Their array of courses includes classes with the M.A. cohort that address  foundational issues for sophisticated journalists, investigative reporting, and narrative technique, as well as specialized classes in covering culture. They build their expertise in particular areas through graduate-level classes they select in other Columbia departments (such as African American Studies, Anthropology, Art History, Film, Literature, Music, etc.). 

Through writing assignments, extensive reading, field trips, and some informal brown-bag lunches with just the Arts & Culture concentrators and professors, students examine the emotional force of the arts as well as how they function in social and political contexts and as commodities in a global marketplace. Through the year, students work closely on their writing with Arts & Culture professors Alisa Solomon and David Hajdu. 

The general description of the M.A. experience describes the curriculum for all M.A. students. Each student has abundant opportunities and considerable freedom in charting a path for deepening their expertise in their chosen field. Here’s how, for Arts & Culture:

Focus on Arts & Culture

In each of their M.A. courses, students have the opportunity to drill down into the areas that most interest them through the topics they select for their assignments in the M.A. Seminar, Evidence and Inference and Narrative Techniques: These will be journalistic stories and essays on cultural themes each student chooses and then reports and researches with guidance from their professors.

For the Oral History unit of Evidence & Inference, for example, A&C students might choose as their subject an artist or the bearer of a cultural tradition in a specific community or a public school’s beloved theater teacher; for the Country Report assignment in the M.A. Seminar, they will hone in on the cultural policy of a particular nation. For the Investigative class, they might look into an issue like shenanigans in music streaming services or inequities within an arts institution or visa issues for an international performance festival. 

Thesis Feature

For her thesis, Hannah Moore, '19 M.A. Arts & Culture, explored a movement by the Kingston, Jamaica dancehall community to protect their work from appropriation by foreign pop artists. Read Dancehall Is Fighting to Protect – and Copyright – Its Dance Moves.

Meanwhile, they will begin work on their thesis: a timely work of longform journalism that marries engaging narrative with sophisticated analysis, on a subject of their choice. They will work closely with their Arts & Culture advisor/editor throughout the year.

As for courses in Arts & Culture, students have a range of opportunities. In the second half of the fall semester, they will break from the all-M.A. seminar into a specific Arts & Culture J-School class. In the meantime, they will take an elective outside the J-School in their focus area. A brief and list of examples of courses taken by previous A&C students includes:

• Art & Artists in Society
• Contemporary Architecture
• Conspiracy Theory in US Films
• New Media Art
• Art & Architecture of Islam
• Surrealism
• Cultural Memory
• Medieval Literature
• Fashion Policy
• American Film: The Western
• Analytical Perspectives in New Music
• Post-Colonial/Post-Soviet Cinema
• Global Food Worlds
• Psychology of Curiosity
• Women and the Literary Culture of Japan
• The Black Prophetic Tradition
• Sound and Listening Cultures of the Indian Subcontinent
• The City in History
• The History of Sexuality
• The Love Song in Popular Black Music
• Theatricality and the Political
• Virginia Woolf
• Queer Theory
• Exhibition Practices
• The Novel in Africa
• Aesthetics & Politics
• Oscar Wilde
• Narrative and Human Rights
• Latin American Artists
• Ralph Ellison
• The Sixties in the Archive
• and many more.

Working in one of the most vibrant cultural centers in the world, students will have a rich and unique educational experience.