Search for 1000+ PhD/MA theses written about feminist art and contemporary women artists
The aim of these pages is to provide a single point of access to research completed at MA and PhD level on the work on contemporary women artists and feminist art deposited in a national archive or University repository. This information is currently very hard to find beyond national borders. This was the rational for making an international resource available in this area and on this subject.
This section of the site is the result of a research project at Middlesex University conducted by Frances Hatherley and Katy Deepwell from Jan-May 2015. We hope this resource will help all researchers build on the work of these scholars and help students identify new projects and ideas.
Although we have located 1171 dissertations and theses at MA/PhD level, we do not regard this resource as complete. We encourage anyone to add the work of students and colleagues to this list. Theses in this database are listed in several languages. This is not an Anglophone list but this website can only use Latin font and accents were omitted.
We provided links to where the electronic e-theses or an information page about each one can be found online. We have not stored the PDFs of these e-theses. We did not collect the abstracts, nor did we make a subject-based search directory. Theses in paper formats where no link is available can be found in University libraries.
The widespread development of electronic University repositories and e-thesis collections since 2000 has made it possible to link directly to the PDF of these theses, where known. We have added information about where the thesis has been published as a book, even after several years of further research. You can also search author's names in n.paradoxa's booklist.
We did not list the names of the lecturers and Professors who supervised this work, but they are given in the actual theses. Their encouragement and sponsorship of this work is important. There are significant clusters of research projects which are the result of individual Professor's activities at different institutions, just as there are significant thematic shifts over time regarding how feminist art and women artists individually and collectively have been studied.
This resource does include some MA and MFA projects deposited in national archives and University repositories, largely from USA and Canada. BA projects at NCAD in Ireland were also included. Many art schools have not yet put all their dissertations and theses online in repositories or national collections, so we know that there are gaps in what is available.
Most of the theses listed are written after 1974, many are much more recent (from the last decade). It was not possible in many countries to write a PhD in art history on any subject post-1945 or even post-1960 until the 1990s. Since Phds in Fine Art started (mid-1990s), many artists have written PhDs about their own practice. We included PhDs in art education (post-16) where they explored feminist pedagogy.