The procedure below refers to the regular application process for a doctorate in the arts, regardless of funding. If you wish to apply for one of the three funded PhD positions (deadline 22 May), please consult the “call for three PhD positions”. A regular PhD application (deadline May 8) is not a condition to apply for the paid PhD position.
Application procedure
The deadline for submitting new PhD applications is May 8 2023.
Eligible candidates will be invited to discuss their project at the next meeting of the doctoral committee in the arts on June 7 2023.
The next deadline for applications after May will be September 11 2023. The interview with the members of the doctoral committee will be on October 11 2023.
Interested in doing a doctorate in the arts at LUCA Faculty of the Arts? The first step is that you need to find a supervisor who is willing to support your research project. You must have contacted your future supervisor before you can start applying for admission (see list of possible supervisors below).
Once you have found a supervisor, please follow this procedure to gain admission to enroll as a doctoral student:
STEP 1 - STARTING UP THE ONLINE REQUEST
- The supervisor fills out this online form: www.ghum.kuleuven.be/schoolofarts
- You then receive an invitation to fill out additional information and upload certain documents in the online application tool
- A scan of your master's degree(s)
- A research proposal using the template below
- A letter of advice of the head of your research unit
- Your CV
- Your portfolio (if relevant)
The uploaded documents must be in pdf format (max. 20MB). Please use links in your portfolio to refer to larger files (eg. videos).
- The supervisor then receives an invitation to give their advice and academic approval or disapproval in the online application tool.
- The next step depends on your nationality (EER/non-EER) and master's degree (Flemish/non-Flemish) (see step 2).
STEP 2 - CANDIDATES WITH AN EER-NATIONALITY AND A FLEMISH MASTER DEGREE
- The supervisor's academic advice (approval/disapproval) is sent to the Faculty's doctoral administration.
- The doctoral committee of LUCA School of Arts evaluates the proposal and invites you to the next meeting of the doctoral committee to discuss the research project.
- If the application is approved by the doctoral committee, you will be invited to enroll as a doctoral student at KU Leuven.
STEP 2 - CANDIDATES WITH A NON-EER-NATIONALITY AND/OR WITHOUT A FLEMISH MASTER DEGREE
- All information and uploaded documents from the online application tool are sent to International Admissions.
- International Admissions prepares an advice about the quality of your track record (diplomas, grades).
- This advice and the supervisor's academic advice is sent to the Faculty's doctoral administration.
- The doctoral committee of LUCA School of Arts evaluates the proposal and invites you to the next meeting of the doctoral committee to discuss the research project.
- If the application is approved by the doctoral committee, you will be invited to enroll as a doctoral student at KU Leuven.
If you have any questions regarding the application procedure please contact research@luca-arts.be.
The regulation for the PhD in the Arts can be found here.
Doctoral programme
Accordingly to the doctoral regulations, the compulsory components of the doctoral program are:
1. Writing at least one scientific publication at an international level or a similar achievement at an international level.
- By a publication at international level is meant: a peer-reviewed contribution (journal article, contribution to a book, conference proceedings, patent, design) about his/her own research and written in the language of the discipline. The contribution is aimed at an international audience. In order to be able to successfully complete the doctoral programme, the contribution must be published or be accepted for publication;
- By a similar achievement at an international level is meant: a Creation in the Arts or Design resulting from one’s own research and presented to an international audience by means of the appropriate medium. The Creation in the Arts or Design is archived in Lirias.
2. Giving at least two seminars, either about your own research, or on a more general theme;
3. Giving at least one oral or poster presentation at an international scientific conference;
4. Following at least one seminar series or course component specifically organised for PhD researchers: participation in 4 seminars organized by one’s own supervisor, research unit or research cluster as well as 3 seminars organized outside of one’s own research cluster or research unit. A doctoral student may submit a motivated proposal for an alternative seminar series or course component for the doctoral committee’s approval, provided this proposal is supported by the supervisor;
5. Following the course component ‘Scientific integrity for starting PhDs’ during the first year of the doctoral program;
6. Submitting annual progress reports on your research
Supervisors
Lecturers of LUCA School of Arts with the title “Special Guest Lecturer in the Arts” or with a ZAP mandate at KULeuven can be a supervisor of a PhD in the Arts. All other lecturers of LUCA School of Arts can act as co-supervisor.
- Research topics: Eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth century music, Technologically Inspired Performance (TIP), Historically Informed Performance (HIP) and Beethoven’s rhetoric, pianism, and pianos
- Research unit: Music & Drama
- Research topics: Contemporary art, Light as an artistic medium/Artistic practice, In situ installations and Digital and analogue development in Art
- Research unit: Intermedia
- Research topics: Interactive Storytelling, Human-computer-interaction, Information-visualization, Media Design and Design Research
-
Research unit: Intermedia
- Research topics: clinical improvisation, music therapeutic processes and psychiatry
- Research unit: Music & Drama
- Research topics: professional development of music educators, processes of educational innovation in music education, practitioner research in music education and musical communication
- Research unit: Music & Drama
- Research topics: photography, theory of photography, contemporary art, conceptual art, art in Belgium and humor
- Research unit: Intermedia
- Research topics: art history, aesthetics, political theory, painting, drama, hermeneutics and classical culture
- Research unit: Image
- Research topics: digital media and art, cartography, artistic mapping and information design
- Research unit: Intermedia
- Research topics: Global/ Worldly Art Histories, Exhibition Studies/ Curatorship and Digital Humanities
- Research unit: Intermedia
- Research topics: musical composition, interdisciplinary research and creations, integration of artistic practice, research and education, interaction of musical analysis and performance practice, musicology and pop music
- Research unit: Music & Drama
- Research topics: visual media (stereoscopy, lantern projections, postcards, panorama paintings and film), history of film, media history, cultural heritage, audio-visual heritage, First World War, archive, historical and media archaeological approaches, ephemeral arts, memory and remembrance
- Research unit: Inter-Actions
- Research topics: Social interaction, Music therapy improvisation analysis and Therapeutic processes of change
- Research unit: Music & Drama
- Research topics: medium experiment, spatial models of (re)presentation, drawing as a medium for reflection, contemporary painting and the painterly, the work of art as object for and of interaction and rhetoric of artistic research
- Research unit: Inter-Actions
- Research topics: Participatory design and Codesign, Inclusive design, Design for health, Design for people with neurocognitive disorders, dementia or Alzheimer, Design for disability and Systemic design approaches
- Research unit: Inter-Actions
- Research topics: technology and/as art, technology and ethics, art and science, art and other media, post-artistic theory, philosophy of artistic research, philosophy in relation to the practice of art and design and philosophy of contemporary culture
- Research unit: Image
- Research topics: design of meaningful game and interaction rules, relationship between image and music in audiovisual media and creation of digital and virtual environments
- Research unit: Inter-Actions
- Research topics: Definitions of Art, Cultural exclusion, Experimental music, Metaphilosophy, Canonization in Art History, Philosophical and Artistic Methodologies
- Research unit: Image
- Research topics: animation, constructions of Whiteness, letters in contemporary art writing, walking in artistic practice, marginalized histories, broken world botany and migration histories
- Research unit: Intermedia
- Research topics: regenerative aesthetics, haptic aesthetics, reverse perspective, responsive and transformative phenomenology and phenomenology of pop culture
- Research unit: Image
- Research topics: practice of fine art and experimental film, intermediality, word-image-interaction, poetry film and (auto)fiction
- Research unit: Image
- Research topics: contemporary art, design, textile, clay and ceramics, glass and art of the 19th century
- Research unit: Image
- Research topics: Musical Composition, Interdisciplinary in the arts, Musical construction and perception of time and Synergy of creating and performing in contemporary music
- Research unit: Music & Drama
- Research topics: contemporary art, visual culture and media studies, with a focus on iconoclasm in contemporary culture
- Research unit: Intermedia
- Research topics: composition, orchestration, piano and analysis
- Research unit: Music & Drama
- Research topics: interplay design and science/technology, network visualisation, playful design and interaction design
- Research unit: Inter-Actions
- Research topics: cinema, media history, film & television studies, cultural heritage, arts in wartime
- Research unit: Intermedia
- Emeritus. Doesn't accept new PhD candidates
- Research topics: historically informed performance practice, carillon, mechanical music instruments
versteek-books and intavolation - Research unit: Music & Drama
- Research topics: cinema and the visual arts, painting, experimental film, slow cinema, essay film, artistic authorship, genre, the ordinary, narrative, myth, fiction, writing, script, criticism, ethics / aesthetics, word / image and imagination / reflection
- Research unit: Image
- Research topics: literary studies, art theory, interpretation studies, phenomenology, aesthetics, ethics, writing, reading, the essay, poetics, criticism, word-image-interaction, verbal reflexivity, the artistic process, attention and affect studies, fascination, intuition, illusion, metamorphosis, epiphany, the imaginary, corporeality, romanticism, self-evidence, (auto)fiction and shared reality
- Research unit: Image
- Research Topics: art-education, pedagogy of arts, pedagogy of the camera, pedagogy of the digital screen, pedagogy of the art-school/art-studio), pedagogy of childhood, speculative science, cabinets of curiosity, the art of noticing, equality, affection, exposure and attention
- Research unit: Image
- Research topics: Critical Reflection of and through animation, Decoloniality in Animation and Heterotopias and asymmetries of power inscribed in and by digital objects
- Research unit: Inter-Actions
- Research topics: textile as mediator and (textile) processes of making, embodied knowledge and bio-centric knowledge systems, pluriform ontological/epistemological perspectives beyond binary, anthropocentric and hierarchical frameworks, co-creation as dialogical ethnography and maker practice, non-linear time perspectives and transhistorical narratives/design/creation
- Research unit: Image and Intermedia
- Research topics: Audio topography, Spatial experiences (visual, auditory, sensorimotor, tactile and conceptual) and Spatial narrativity
- Research unit: Image
- Research topics: Interdisciplinary Explorations in Photography, The Intersection of Art, Science, and Technology in a Social Context, and Deep-Ecology: The NonHuman Turn
- Research unit: Inter-Actions