Page 2 of 2, 25 Master Programs in Art Studies in Netherlands for 2024

In the two-year Research Master's degree in Arts and Culture, you can choose between two tracks.

Culture and heritage are the sinews of a society. In an era marked by rapid change, ambitious and critical cultural leaders are required to foster the cultural core of a sustainable society.

The MA Art History Curatorial Studies is a vibrant master Program that attracts students from all over the globe. It teaches students to become intellectually thorough, socially engaged, and professionally successful art historians.

Culture can be understood as a complex cognitive process through which humans articulate and negotiate their individual and collective consciousness, identities, values and understanding of the world. The arts have always played an important part in this process.

What do art forms like painting, film, music or theatre contribute to societies? Why have humans in every culture and throughout history engaged in activities we categorize as art?

The two-year Master's track in Arts, Media and Literary Studies is a specialization within the Research Master's degree in Arts and Culture. Arts, Media and Literary Studies equips students with knowledge and skills to become researchers and experts on the role that the arts, literature and media play in society, now and in the past. The programme offers a rich multi- and interdisciplinary framework within which students can specialize in one of the following disciplines or combinations of disciplines, under close supervision of a highly qualified research faculty:

Are you fascinated by the emotional and cognitive effects of films? Do you love studying documentaries and the contributions cinema can make to discussions of climate change? Then the Master’s track ‘Film and Contemporary Audiovisual Media’ is the right one for you. Within a year you can acquire a Master’s degree from one of the Top 100 universities in the world—and you will do so in the city with the youngest population in the Netherlands. An internship in film, television or other media is part of the program as well. In ‘Film and Contemporary Audiovisual Media’ you will work closely with our international faculty, who will initiate you into the latest theoretical debates in film and media studies. You will learn to work with state-of-the-art approaches such as phenomenology, film-cognitivism, ecocriticism, film philosophy, digital film forensics, and experimental media archaeology.

The Arts, Policy and Cultural Entrepreneurship track focuses on the organizing of art and the public role of art in today's societies. Using methods from critical sociology, public policy studies, management studies, and cognitive perspectives on the arts you will learn to critically reflect upon the values that influence local and global art practices. On the basis of theory and empirical work, you will learn to analyse, criticise, and reflect upon the existing practices for art's sustenance, organisation, and dissemination. You will learn to devise strategies on how the arts should be managed, marketed, and addressed by public policy agents in order to strengthen their role in society.

The interdisciplinary Arts, Cognition and Criticism track focuses on how culture is transmitted, innovated and critiqued through the arts, with course topics such as the arts and reflective imagination; value-negotiation through storytelling; or social and political functions of the arts. Students are trained in methods from the cognitive sciences, hermeneutics, narrative and critical theory, discourse analysis and art sociology. They develop a keen theory-based insight into the role of the arts in cultural dynamics, and hands-on capacities for critical analysis and interpretation of art-works, debates and developments in the arts, in connection to their social background.

Are you keen to gain more insight into the innovative potential of painting? Do you want to know how to grow as an artist who relates to a medium that has been reinvented many times and in different places in the world? Then come study in our Master's in Painting.