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Our study was prompted by a widely shared perception that opportunities for publishing monographs have shrunkin recent years while the numbers of Ph.D. recipients have increased. Quantitative analysis of art history Ph.D. conferralsand of university press publishing in the field confirms both developments, and it shows that there has already been a modestdecline in monograph publication relative to the number of Ph.D. dissertations produced. This decrease is likely to become morenoticeable in the years immediately ahead, as Cambridge University Press, the second most productive publisher of art historymonographs in the past decade, contracted its art history line by more than 50 percent in 2006.

The summary findings on Art History Ph.D. Conferrals and Art History Publication by University Pressespresented below are explained in detail in Lawrence T. McGill's report The State of Scholarly Publishing in the History of Art and Architecture . The downward trend in publishing opportunities for art history monographs is also related in complexways to the rise of interdisciplinary investigation and new fields of inquiry such as visual studies. These developments are outlinedat the end of this section.

Art history ph.d. conferrals

From 1992-93 to 2002-03, the number of Ph.D.'s awarded annually in art history (and related fields, such as artcriticism and art studies, but not including architecture or archaeology) increased dramatically.

This subsection of the report was written by Lawrence T. McGill; it is excerpted from his report The State of Scholarly Publishing in the History of Art and Architecture .
Archaeologists and architectural historians are often trained outside art history departments, in Classicsdepartments and Schools of Architecture, respectively, but the data aggregate all graduates from these programs without differentiatingthose specializing in art history. The data reported here thus undercount the actual number of doctoral degrees conferred to arthistorians.
During the fourteen years prior to the 1993-94 academic year (1979-93), the field had awarded an average of about156 Ph.D.'s per year. Between 1993-94 and 1996-97 (a span of four years), the field awarded an average of 198 Ph.D.'s per year, a 27percent increase over the previous 14-year average. Since 1998-99, the field has awarded an average of 236 Ph.D.'s per year, anincrease of another 19 percent from the mid-1990s, and a total increase of 51 percent since the 1980s and early 1990s. In the mostrecent two years for which data are available (2002-03 and 2003-04), there were 260 and 259 Ph.D.'s awarded in the field ofart history, or over 100 more Ph.D.'s per year than was typical during the 1980s and early 1990s.

While the total number of doctoral degrees awarded (in all fields) has also increased since 1992-93, the fieldof art history has been producing Ph.D.'s at a far more rapid rate than the typical discipline. The average annual rate of increase ofPh.D.'s in all fields since 1992-93 has been just below 1 percent per year, while art history Ph.D.'s have increased at the rate ofmore than 8 percent per year.

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Source:  OpenStax, Art history and its publications in the electronic age. OpenStax CNX. Sep 20, 2006 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10376/1.1
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