Performing and Media Arts (Graduate Field)

Program Website

Field Description

The graduate program (PhD) in Performing and Media Arts offers students an interdisciplinary environment in which to pursue critical studies of various theatrical and performance traditions, cinema and media cultures, and expressive behavior in multilingual, intermedial, and transnational contexts. Students may work with a strong emphasis in either theatre and performance studies or cinema and media studies, and they are also encouraged to find novel, fresh, and rigorous ways to produce work at interdisciplinary sites of contact between theatre and performance studies on the one hand and cinema and media studies on the other hand.

A student’s Special Committee is made up of three faculty members, two PMA field faculty members representing the student's major area (theater and performance studies, cinema and media studies, or theatre theory and aesthetics) and a third, from outside the PMA field faculty, representing the student's minor area (e.g., Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Asian Studies). Please note that while the graduate field is not coterminous with the department and the graduate field includes many faculty members with interests in performing and media arts from other Cornell departments, every special committee must include at least one current faculty member in the Dept. of Performing and Media Arts. Chairs of special committees must hold a PhD in their major field and be a member of the PMA Graduate Field.

Students whose interdisciplinary interests encompass more areas of study may add a fourth committee member. Possible areas include (but are not limited to): Directing or Acting Pedagogy; Film and Video Studies; Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies; LGBT Studies, Africana Studies; Anthropology; Asian Studies; English; German; Latina/o/x Studies; Music; Near Eastern Studies; and American Studies.

Research Facilities

Cornell University maintains an extensive library system for scholarly research, with excellent holdings in areas relevant to the field. Olin and Kroch Libraries are the main research centers for the humanities; they house several special collections of particular interest to our program, including the world’s largest Hip Hop Collection, extensive materials on and by George Bernard Shaw and George Jean Nathan, and the Rose Golden Archive of New Media. Students work closely with Cornell's Society for the Humanities and The School for Criticism and Theory, interdisciplinary centers of intellectual exchange that draw scholars and artists from across the globe.

Data and Statistics

Field Manual