Department of Art and Media Studies

The Department of Art and Media Studies was established as a discipline in 1974 under the name Drama, Film and Theatre, becoming a department in 1978. From 1989, the programme of study in Drama, Film and Theatre was replaced by independent courses in Drama/theatre and Film respectively. Film and Drama/Theatre incorporated practical-theoretical course options, with a point of departure in art pedagogy (Norwegian College of Education) as well as in developments in cultural studies during the 1970s. Since then, the department has expanded to include Visual Culture and Media Studies from the spring of 1994, and Art History, which was established in the autumn of 1997. In the spring of 1997, the department changed its name to the Department of Art and Media Studies.

The department currently employs 24 permanent staff and faculty positions. In addition there are 4 administrative positions, one departmental engineer and one producer in drama/theatre.

In addition to sharing the lecture halls with the other departments that are housed at Dragvoll, the Department has its own facilities which include, among other things: two drama/theatre studios, a theatre workshop, television and sound studios, and several video editing suites.

Today, the department is made up of the following art and cultural studies:

• Drama Studies/ Theatre Studies
• Film Studies
• Media Studies
• Art History

These disciplines are organized into three areas, encompassing several courses of study in the bachelor's, master's and PhD degree programmes. Course offerings have relevance for a wide array of careers in the field of culture. The different studies have their own disciplinary specificity, but a common competence base in modern and late modern art/ media theory and practice. The department today has about 500 students who make up approximately 1/3 of all students graduating from the Faculty of Arts. Art History, Drama/theatre, Media Studies, Film Studies and Media Production are among the most popular subjects at the Faculty of Arts.

We are proud to announce the program of the "International PerFormativity Seminar", a gathering organized by the Performativity research area at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) revolving around the "Performance Turn" and its Implications for Academic Research and Organization. We have invited international scholars from UC Berkeley - Shannon Jackson - and from Oxford University - Annamaria Carusi- to reflect together with local scholars at NTNU about how the performance turn has impacted different disciplines and methodological issues.

We have designed the program to highlight the interdisciplinary nature of our research area and hope to have successfully reflected this in the program by inviting contributors from a varied array of disciplines from within and outside of the humanities. Through this seminar we hope to contribute creating constellations of collaborations between disciplines that take the concept of Performativity as starting point.  

The seminar will take place 12-14 April 2011 at Dragvoll and is open for everyone interested.

We thank all contributors for the engagement and welcome you to participate in this very special event!