Funding, Scholarships and Awards

Both M.A. and Ph.D. students in Art History receive funding. Additional funds are available to support travel to conferences and to see original works of art. Queen's Art History graduate students also have exceptional success in obtaining major external awards. The programme offers a great deal of support in preparing these applications, including three workshops on grant writing, which have been hugely successful. Over half of the funding-eligible students in the programme currently hold a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada or another major external award!


Queen's Funding - M.A. 

MA students in Art History receive funding for each of the two years of the programme. The amount varies each year depending on the budget, but in recent years each student who does not hold a major external award has received $10,000-$15,000 per year. Depending on the needs of the Department, a portion of a Master's student's funding may be allocated as a Teaching Assistantship. For those wishing to gain teaching experience, there are many opportunities to teach, including the possibility of acting as a teaching assistant for our first-year survey course and leading your own weekly discussion section.

Queen's Funding - Ph.D.

Queen's guarantees its Doctoral students minimum funding of $20,000/year for 4 years. We are usually able to offer doctoral students who do not hold a major external grant more than this ($20,000-$24,000/year in recent years). Some doctoral students in their research year (3rd year) are eligible for a Bader Fellowship worth up to $30,000. Depending on the needs of the Department, a portion of a Ph.D. student's funding may be allocated as a Teaching Assistantship. For those wishing to gain teaching experience, there are many opportunities to teach, including the possibility of acting as a teaching assistant for our first-year survey course and leading your own weekly discussion section. Many upper-year Ph.D. students also have the opportunity to teach their own courses as teaching fellows.

Bader Fellowships - Ph.D.

Alfred Bader, a Queen's alumnus, renowned chemist and art collector, endowed the Department of Art to fund a fellowship in his name, worth up to $30,000, to support doctoral students carrying out research in Europe realistic pre-World War I art. The Department of Art is able to provide generous support for doctoral art history research in Europe in the form of two or more Bader Fellowships annually. Students awarded a Bader Fellowship will also have half of their tuition waived for the year of the award. Here are some recent recipients of the Bader fellowship:

2017-2018: 

  • Kennis Forte (Italy): Experiencing & Performing Counter-Reformation Spirituality at the Italian Sacri Monti
  • Sheilagh Quaile (Scotland): Paisley, Scotland's Nineteenth-Century Shawl Designers: Innovators or Imitators? 

2016-2017:

  • Lauren Bird (France, UK, and Sweden): The Decorative Body: Performance, Fashion, and the Ballets Russes in Paris, 1909–1914

2015-2016:

  • Caylen Heckel (Italy and the Netherlands): Cross-cultural Contact and Masculinity in Sixteenth-Century European Art
  • Chantal Manna (Italy): Performances of Power: Ephemera and the Decorative Arts in Queen Christina's Rome
  • Farrukh Rafiq (UK): Pre-Raphaelite National Identity
  • Marla Dobson (UK): Delimiting Space: The Horse-Drawn Omnibus in Victorian Visual Culture
  • Jillian Lanthier (Ireland and the UK): Rococo Interiors in Ireland and England
  • Nina Schroeder (the Netherlands): Picturing Anabatism: Mennonite Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age

2014-2015:

  • Anna-Maria Moubayed (France): The Body of Eve in Medieval Sculpture
  • Heather Merla (Italy): Manufacturing Nature at the Medici Grand Ducal Court
  • Casey Lee (Netherlands): Taste, Passion, Ambition, and Practice: Dutch Artists and Their Print Collections, 1600-1750
  • Meaghan Whitehead (UK): In a Truly Royal Manner: Painted Cycles in the Residences of Henry III of England
  • Alyssa Abraham (Italy): Correggio’s Altarpieces in Modena and the Gallery of Duke Francesco I d’Este 

2013-2014:

  • Laura Thiel (Netherlands): Gentleman-Scholars at Home: Domesticity, Masculinity, and Civility in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting.
  • Alana West (UK): Frederick H. Evans and his Circle
  • Nenagh Hathaway (Netherlands): The Netherlandish Altarpiece Grisaille from the 15th to the 16th century: A Technical Art History Approach

External Scholarships

Ontario Graduate Scholarship

Art History is proud to have several provincially-funded graduate students. Many Queen's M.A. and Ph.D. students in Art History have won the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS). We provide workshops to help students write winning applications.

Visit the OGS Website for more information and an online application.

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

Art History is proud to have an extraordinary record of success with SSHRC -- of our current 41 eligible students, 20 hold awards from SSHRC. We provide a level of support that has become a model for other departments, including multiple workshops to help students write winning applications.

Visit the SSHRCC Website for more information and an online application.

Other Major Awards

We regularly nominate our students for other major, competitive awards and are very proud that in recent years our students have been exceptionally successful and been awarded the Trillium and Mitchell, both of which give an outstanding PhD student $40,000/year for 4 years.

Queen's Student Awards

Queen's Student Awards can help you obtain need-based financial assistance (bursaries, awards or work programs). Queen's need-based funding is non-repayable and is given on the basis of a student's demonstrated financial need. To qualify for this assistance, you will have exhausted resources available through the School of Graduate Studies and other resources, such as government student financial assistance or a student line of credit.

More information from the Office of the Registrar.