Ph.D. in Media, Art and Text

By Tom Gresham

When Norah Lind visited Marcel Cornis-Pope, director of the interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Media, Art, and Text at Virginia Commonwealth University, to talk about the school’s new interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Media, Art and Text, Cornis-Pope proved blunt. Instead of attempting to entice a potential student with sugarcoated encouragement, Cornis-Pope candidly revealed the new program would be “a very uncomfortable degree.”

That’s just what Lind hoped to hear.

“I wanted something that was going to push me forward into the way the world is and the way the world is going to be,” Lind said. “The interdisciplinary aspect of this program pushes you to explore; it forces you to get outside of your comfort zone. That was important for me.”

The Media, Art and Text program at VCU was officially launched on Aug. 21, becoming the first Ph.D. of its kind in Virginia. Twelve students, including Lind, make up the program’s inaugural class. The students represent a wide range of educational and professional backgrounds that is fitting for such an ambitious program.

Media, Art and Text will incorporate studies that overlap three major “silos” at VCU – the School of the Arts, the School of Mass Communications and the Department of English – to examine the field of communications in a thorough way.

The breadth of the program will give students considerable leeway to focus their pursuits. Students will study the history of communications from oral to print to digital to multimedia, they will explore how text has evolved, they will examine the ways text and image meet and the results of those meetings and they will trace the evolution of multimedia. Students will look at traditional literary texts and works of art, as well as film, new media, television and advertising. Everything will be viewed in a cultural context.

Although theory occupies a key aspect of the Media, Art and Text curriculum, Cornis-Pope said interpretation will only be part of the program.

“We also want them to learn to be productive and creative in these different forms of communications,” Cornis-Pope said. “We want them to learn how to engage an audience in an entertaining way."

The emphasis on real-world applications should mean students who seek the Ph.D. will harbor professional aspirations in a number of different fields, including academics, journalism, politics, publishing, the arts, the Internet and an array of other industries.

Robert D. Holsworth, Ph.D., dean of the College of Humanities and Sciences, said the jobs will likely fit within a particular rubric – “media and communications in the modern world.”

“I think this Ph.D. will really appeal to a wide range of potential employers, but they’ll have the common interest of hiring graduates with exceptional skills when dealing and thinking with new media,” Holsworth said.

Catherine Ingrassia, Ph.D., associate dean for academic affairs, said VCU wanted to move quickly to develop an approach to studying the “cultural phenomenon” of new media – keeping ahead of the trends, rather than lagging behind them.

“There are so many new technologies in our world now,” Ingrassia said. “It was important to start looking at the cultural significance of them. It was important to start thinking more broadly about the world of communications.”

In order to sufficiently address the topic, it was clear a media program could not fit within the borders of a single department or even school at VCU.

“We knew we had to break open the model to look at this,” Ingrassia said. “We had to think about how we could do this without just using the traditional models of study, because we knew that those weren’t going to be enough.”

Belinda Haikes, one of the students in the program, said the interdisciplinary nature of the Ph.D. helped lure her to it.

“That’s what the world is moving toward,” Haikes said. “Our culture is becoming much more integrated in terms of text and images. In order to understand our culture, I think you have to be more sophisticated in how you look at it.”

Holsworth agreed, noting the interdisciplinary nature of the Media, Art and Text program should be particularly productive because of the expertise on new media and communications issues in English, Mass Communications and the Arts at VCU.

“Knowledge today is usually coming from the exchange of ideas and perspectives across disciplines – not just within a single discipline,” Holsworth said. “That’s really happening all across the intellectual world.”

The Ph.D. is not designed exclusively for those already entrenched in new media matters. Neither Lind nor Haikes describe themselves as particularly technologically savvy, and, in fact, both say their lack of knowledge inspired them to apply to the Media, Art and Text program. Other students, meanwhile, have extensive backgrounds in technological applications. Cornis-Pope said the resulting dynamic is complementary rather than conflicting and illustrates the strength of interdisciplinary studies.

“Absolutely everyone has some unique dimension they bring to this,” Cornis-Pope said. “That keeps us all entertained.”

Cornis-Pope said when reviewing applications for the Ph.D., VCU officials looked for evidence that candidates had demonstrated varied interests and appeared open to experimentation and searching out new challenges.

“We want them to find a direction that takes them outside of their comfort zone,” Cornis-Pope said. “We want them to build experience in completely new areas of communication and to learn new ways of mixing their creative experiences.”

Lind describes her academic and professional background as somewhat conservative, focusing largely on English education. She has taught at the high school level and owns a master’s degree in English education. She was working part-time toward a master’s in literature at VCU when she heard about the Ph.D. in Media, Art and Text that was in development. She said she decided she “needed to pull myself out of my little shell of literary study.”

“I’ve always avoided technology if I could,” Lind said. “But I don’t think you can do that anymore.”

In part because of her background in education, Lind said she hopes to investigate ways of making text more accessible to readers, specifically today’s young readers, who are accustomed to computer screens, digital text and interactive formats. Lind argues that those who claim today’s youth are not reading as well as their predecessors are missing the point.

“They are smart – just in a different way,” Lind said. “They are reading now in a different way than we did. Instead of complaining about it, we should work with it and do something to make things more accessible to them.”

Haikes also has a background in education, having taught art in inner city schools. She has a master’s in printmaking, though, and hopes to be a full-time working artist.

Haikes had been wrestling with a nagging feeling that there was an absence of technology in her art when she spoke to Joe Seipel, senior associate dean in the School of the Arts at VCU, at an event in Philadelphia. As Seipel described the Media, Art and Text program, Haikes saw an opportunity to learn not only how to utilize technology to create art but also how technology’s place in modern culture could inform her work.

“My creative base needs to be what is happening in our culture,” Haikes said. “And I was very aware that I had a limited understanding of what was going on.”

Now, approximately a month into the Media, Art and Text program, she’s excited by the untapped possibilities – both for her work and for the world.

“The changes that are occurring in this area are happening so rapidly that it’s just amazing to watch,” Haikes said. “It’s almost like we’re in another Renaissance.”

Cornis-Pope said he’s already heard from potential applicants for next year and been pleased with the unexpected directions they might take within the Media, Art and Text avenue of study.

“I think we’ll be surprised by what they come up with next,” Cornis-Pope said.