Winterthur Fellows treat fine art as material culture. As such, one of the connoisseurship topics students study is prints and paintings. During this class, students are taught to analyze the materials that went into creating a piece of fine art, as well as the objects depicted in a given piece. Other connoisseurship topics examine different [...]

Fellows receive guidance on selecting their thesis advisors during the first year of study. Students select their thesis advisor from Winterthur Museum or University of Delaware faculty who meet the University’s qualifications for guiding an MA thesis. With experts in all different sub-fields of material culture and the decorative arts, we are confident that every [...]

Students are not required to use objects, documents or art from the Winterthur collection for their thesis. Although we know that there are an endless number of possibilities for thesis topics in the Winterthur collections, we encourage students to examine as many objects as possible, both inside and outside of the Winterthur collection. As long [...]

“American” refers to the continents of the Americas, rather than simply the United States. Winterthur’s library and object collections contain items from North, Central, and South America. People, ideas, and objects move, entangling them in habitats and global communities. As such, in classes where students are utilizing Winterthur’s collection, professors require that students examine the [...]

No. The goal of the program is to teach analytical skills, provide content knowledge, and develop conceptual thinking. After training in object analysis, Winterthur students can apply these skills to any objects, no matter the time period and Fellows’ thesis topics can relate to any time period of the student’s choosing. While the connoisseurship classes primarily utilize Winterthur’s object collections [...]