Update on Launch of Ph.D. Program in Creativity - August 2019

Dear Members of the Advisory Council, the Admissions Committee, and friends of the Ph.D. in Creativity,

I wanted to take this opportunity to update everyone about our very successful launch a few weeks ago. We received our accreditation from the Middle States Commission on Higher Education at the end of January. Despite this short lead time, we were up and running with the first cohort of students on June 15th for our two-week Creativity Immersion and are now forming our doctoral dissertation committees.

Apart from interviews in the College Art Association Newsletter and on the art website Hyperallergic, we had no time to publicize the program but the website and word of mouth nevertheless brought us plenty of excellent students. We assembled an outstanding admissions committee that included a physicist and former provost of a major university, a research cardiologist, an anthropologist and museum educator, a professor of art history specializing in African American, modern, and contemporary art, another senior university administrator, and a documentary filmmaker.

Three were from University of the Arts and four from outside. We met at the end of March and accepted 11 students in widely divergent fields who we thought would form a successful and interesting cohort working together and who we also felt would be well served by our program. We expected about six to accept. As it turned out, everyone we accepted wanted to come, although two deferred to next year to better arrange outside fellowships and their work schedules. Our final count was 10 (including one auditor from Independence Blue Cross, which underwrote the Creativity Immersion).

This first class includes a former Army field nurse who worked in Afghanistan and now seeks to use narrative art to promote resiliency among women in North Philadelphia who have experienced trauma. We have a well published wine critic who wants to research the linguistic and cultural origins of Prosecco. We have a therapist from Europe interested in combining experiences in nature with psychoanalytic theory, the director of all the arts programs for the Philadelphia public schools who plans to explore possibilities for the infusion of creativity broadly into the public school system, a college teacher and administrator who wants to invent a program for creative problem solving across disciplines in her college, an African film maker who wants to examine space exploration from an African perspective and whose dissertation will be a deeply researched documentary film rather than a book. We also have a university provost who wants to understand the growing trend of hiring lawyers as college presidents, an art historian interested in how art affects the public perception of ecological issues, and a theater producer, director, and actor who is studying how Shakespeare is used in education. Their profiles, projects and comments about the Immersion experience are posted on our website.

We provided an exciting program of immersive experiences in artistic thinking for them and focused on repeated rewriting of each student’s dissertation proposal through group critique (an idea borrowed from studio classes) and based on each day’s immersion experience.

After two weeks of continual rewriting we could see that our students emerged with more freely conceived dissertation proposals from which to begin their research. Professor Buzz Spector (a book artist, writer, and former dean of the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art at Washington University in Saint Louis) and Zach Savich (a poet and head of Creative Writing at University of the Arts) team-taught this intensive seminar with me (Professor Jonathan Fineberg, art historian and director of the Ph.D. in Creativity).

The program included a visit to the studio of an important contemporary artist, meetings with people doing innovative research in medicine, design and other fields, as well as hands-on experiences of making music, theater and writing.

While this year’s Ph.D. cohort was nine, we also accepted a couple of additional students for the Creativity Immersion-only from Independence Blue Cross which underwrote the program. Next year we will instead encourage applicants from Ph.D. programs elsewhere to come for the Immersion only to see if we can help them frame their dissertations in other programs.

Having done the Creativity Immersion, I have met with the students individually to begin building their dissertation committees from experts all around the world. Once they begin to move ahead writing, we will then reinforce the ways in which the Immersion has informed their approach by bringing them back to campus in January (and again six months later) to partake in a long weekend of more Immersion courses, group critique, and networking among the group. The monthly on-line meeting of the interdisciplinary dissertation committees will also encourage their free thinking in relation to their projects.

I want to thank the members of our Advisory Council for all their helpful advice on the curriculum and on sources in the continuing search for funding and for lending their endorsement to this very out of the ordinary venture. Some have also volunteered to serve as dissertation advisors or helped us find appropriate advisors. We are also grateful to all the UArts faculty and staff who so generously gave their time and energy to helping us form the program as it developed.

All the best,

- Jonathan

Jonathan Fineberg
University Professor
Director of the Ph.D. in Creativity
320 S. Broad St. Philadelphia, PA 19102
t. 217-840-1259
email: jfineberg@uarts.edu
www.jonathanfineberg.com