Courses and programmes
The Department of Culture and Aesthetics offers courses and programmes in Art History, History of Ideas, Literature, Musicology, Theatre and Performance Studies, and Curating.
Art History
The need to create pictures, shape ideas and form surroundings has existed in all times and cultures. In art history, you track how this will to create has changed in form and content from antiquity to our age. You will learn about art and architecture as well as other forms of visual culture, design and the shaped environment.
Cultural Heritage Studies
Cultural Heritage Studies is a broad field which examines our common material and immaterial cultural heritage. Using critical theories and practical exercises, you study a changing and international field of cultural heritage through political, legal and social perspectives. Cultural heritage is one of the profile areas at Stockholm University.
Curating
The role of the curator has become increasingly expansive since the turn of the 21st century. Curating, synonymous throughout the late 1900s with freelance exhibition production, today encompasses a greater number of functions connecting a wide range of creative practitioners (including artists, architects, filmmakers and writers) with an audience.
Master's Programme
The International MA in Curating Art was founded in 2003, as one of the first curatorial studies programmes in Scandinavia, and has been developed as an ongoing collaboration between Art History (together with the schools of Business and Law) at the university together with prominent art institutions in Stockholm.
The programme starts every autumn semester and has only one admission round, in early December to mid January.
History of Ideas
The subject is about how people perceive themselves and the world, our conceptions of history, present and future. History of ideas wants to analyze and understand the emergence of intellectual and scientific culture and its relation to society, in the light of general notions and thought traditions and by means of a historical method.
Literature
Do you like to read and are interested in how literature has changed throughout history, from the oral dictation of the past to today's digital text worlds? Do you think about what literature really is? Do you want to become an expert in analyzing and interpreting texts? Then literature science is a subject that suits you.
Musicology
The ability to make and listen to music is as fundamental for humans as the ability for speech. By studying Musicology you will become acquainted with musical sound worlds and structures, and the ways these are used and interpreted in different social contexts. You will come to know diverse musical genres and traditions.
Theatre and Performance Studies
Focusing on the performing arts, public performances, and performances of everyday life, Theatre and Performance Studies ‘recognize and insist on the interdependency of a related series of disciplines and also on the role of performance in the production of culture in its widest sense’.
Courses and Programme
Master's Programme
Our International Master’s Programme in Performance Studies is an innovative study programme aiming to provide students with excellent competences and skills for a profession in the performing arts and cultural field. Next programme start is autumn 2026.
Courses
We offer several courses at Master's level and one Bachelor's level course.
Please see current courses at the end of this page.
PhD Programme
We also offer a four year PhD programme. For more information about PhD studies in Theatre and Perfomance studies, please contact:
Director of Postgraduate studies
Christina Svens
Email: christina.svens@teater.su.se
Postgraduate studies
Siora Photography, Unsplash.
At the Department of Culture and Aesthetics there are five research subjects with postgraduate studies, Art History, History of Ideas, Literature, Musicology or Theatre and Performance studies. The department offers a dynamic interdisciplinary research environment for post graduate research, in which the PhD students are active both within their subjects and in interdisciplinary activities.
There are around 50 active PhD students at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics. The postgraduate studies at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics consists of four years of fulltime studies with employment: The writing of a doctoral thesis (180 ECTS credits) and PhD courses (60 ECTS credits). The PhD position can be combined with other work at the department and will then be prolonged with a fifth year.
Read more about the PhD Studies at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics
Last updated: 2026-01-29
Source: Department of Culture and Aesthetics