Hey all,

My girlfriend is tempted to do a PhD in Art History self funded and i'm a little concerned how difficult its actually going to be. For science PhDs i understand that the research costs can be pretty crazy, around 10 - 20 thousand a year on reagents and other lab equipment but obviously this doesn't apply for the arts.

However I'm guessing its still going to cost quite a lot. The tuition fees and the maintenance aren't an issue but what I'm wondering is, how much per year are the "research costs" in an art based PhD? Significantly less than science degrees or around the same?

Cheers

I haven't any direct experience of doing an arts-based PhD, but I would imagine that the costs are much, much lower. Other than conference and travel costs, expenses for accessing archives, I can't really think of any additional costs.

Hi Gaiduku, I am doing an arts PhD self funded, so have someinsight into this. If your girlfiend is undertaking an academic, research based PhD and not a practice based one then her expenses outside of living and fees could be zero. Mine are because the only thing to be paid for are fares and hotel bills for conferences, and the department has a fund for that from which I can claim at least £150.00 per year, for full-time students double that sum. Any decent department should have a similar pot of money. Oh and I have also travelled to another city once for research, but I only paid for fares and some sandwiches.


If your girlfriend has her fees and living costs sorted then she is all set and doing well indeed, as self-funders go...


if she is a practice based PhD student then there will be some other expenses, but that depends how expensive her materials are.

From the sound of her research it is basically academic so this does look quite promising. I think i've been a bit of a pessimistic grump basically because I'm from a science background where everything costs a fortune; sounds like it isnt really like that in the arts. I'll get her to look into whether her department has a pool of money for PhD students.

Cheers

I was a part-time humanities PhD student (history), and had quite a lot of expenses in terms of arranging for copies from archives, travelling to distant archives etc. I was funded by AHRC but only received a maintenance grant at the very end of my PhD (when rules for part-timers changed). I received no support for out-of-pocket research costs, nor could my department help.

For an art history PhD the costs are probably less, but will still be there. For example what artworks is she planning to study? Are they local to her or will she have to travel to them? And for her thesis she is likely to have to negotiate photographing/reprographics costs (at high quality) of the art works, and possibly pay a permissions fee for that too.

That was basically my understanding of where the costs will come from. Her PhD is basically going to involve comparing three or four artists from different parts of the UK so that will involve a fair bit of travel. Also the thing about the thesis is very true and i'm worried it will cost more than she expects.