PhD in Arts

The title of ‘Doctor of Arts’ is conferred by the university. Students who are preparing a PhD in the arts are considered students of the university, more specifically of the Antwerp Doctoral School, where they are enrolled in the doctoral study programme. They have two supervisors: a member of the university’s senior academic staff (lecturer, senior lecturer or professor) and a supervisor from one of the Antwerp Schools of Arts. An individual PhD commission, consisting of three or four members, also monitors the progress of their doctoral research. You can find out more about all of these aspects in the brochure ‘Doing a PhD at the University of Antwerp’.

We work closely with docARTES, a doctoral study programme offered by the Orpheus Institute, for PhDs in music. PhD students focusing on the performing arts have the option of working with a.pass. For audiovisual and visual arts, we work with the other Schools of Arts in the context of SeminArt.

ARIA’s steering committee oversees admissions to the doctoral study programme. Students are accepted following a binding recommendation issued by OR-ARIA, ARIA’s research board, which is a consultative body comprising researchers of the three Antwerp Schools of Arts and a number of research groups at the university. The student must then use a special form to apply for the programme, which can be downloaded from the website of the Antwerp Doctoral School.

Doctoral students are students (third cycle) who are enrolled at the University of Antwerp. This means it’s possible to do a PhD even without funding. In practice, however, most doctoral research is funded, meaning the PhD student has resources and an income at his or her disposal. Funding can be obtained in various ways. An important source of funding is the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO). You can find further information about application procedures, deadlines, criteria and so on on their website. The University of Antwerp’s University Research Fund (BOF) also funds PhD research. The Schools of Arts fund the majority of all artistic research, however. You can find out more about the organisation of the application rounds on their websites. You can also contact the coordinators at the respective Schools of Arts:

• Sint-Lucas Antwerp: Ruth Loos
• Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp: Els De bruyn
• Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp: Kevin Voets