The PhD in Creativitiy at Rowan University is housed in the Ric Edelman College of Communication & Creative Arts. 

Faculty & staff
Email: phdincreativity@rowan.edu
Phone: 856-256-4340
Address: 6 East High Street, Glassboro, NJ

The PhD in Creativity at Rowan University is accepting letters of intent. Once New Jersey state authorization is finalized in early 2025, you may be invited to complete the official application process based on your letter of intent. 

If you are interested in pursuing the PhD in Creativity, submit the following materials as one document (pdf preferred) to phdincreativity@rowan.edu by January 26 at 5 pm:

• A proposal of about 1,000 words, outlining the dissertation you wish to pursue. Think of this as a proposal for a book you'd like to write. 
  
  This document should state the central question your research proposes to address. It should also discuss the need for your project, both personal and more broadly in your field or fields; your project's relationship to previous scholarship in the field; the methods you propose to use; and a selection of works by others you consider central to your project. 
  
  We are happy to review or discuss your research proposal prior to the due date using the email above.
  
  
• A personal statement of about 1,000 words explaining your interest in the PhD in Creativity. Topics you may wish to consider:
  • What led to your interest in pursuing this PhD?
  • How has your prior training or work experience prepared you to undertake the writing of your dissertation?
  • What other works or paths – books, articles, bodies of work, or other influences – do you want to explore during your time in the program?
  • What do you envision yourself doing with this degree?

Please note that these are only suggestions, and the personal statement is not intended to be a comprehensive document. Overall, it should give us a sense of your interests and who you are.

• Potential advisors: Provide any suggestions of experts whom you would ideally like to have as an advisor. You need not have had any previous contact with them, but in a paragraph, explain why you would like them on your committee of advisors.
  
  
• Resume or CV
  

Questions? Contact phdincreativity@rowan.edu

Once determined, the annual tuition for the PhD in Creativity will be listed on Rowan’s Graduate Tuition & Fees page.

If eligible, students who complete the FAFSA may also receive Federal Direct Unsubsidized loans. You can apply to borrow additional funds to cover your costs in the form of a Federal Direct Graduate PLUS loan or private educational loans. 

All students are strongly encouraged to seek fellowships from external sources in the forms of scholarships, grants, and fellowships from employers, foundations and corporations.

Two-week Creativity Immersion Residency (first summer)

Each new Phd in Creativity student must attend a mandatory two-week Creativity Immersion residency, which is held during the first summer of the program. This intensive Creativity Immersion includes ongoing seminars on methods and revision of the dissertation proposals.

The June 2025 Creativity Immersion takes place from June 1 - June 15, 2025. The class meets 9am-6pm for 14 consecutive days and occasional evenings. You will need a smartphone and a laptop.

Most of our seminar meetings will be in the Barnes Foundation, but some meetings will be elsewhere. We intentionally do not announce the location of many meetings to leave students as unprepared and hence open-minded as possible for some of the experiences we organize. 

Housing Options for First Summer Residency

Students should find accommodations within reasonable walking distance to the Barnes Foundation at 2025 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy, Philadelphia, PA 19130.

Plan to arrive May 31, 2025 and depart on June 15, 2025.

Four-day Creativity Immersion Residency (first January)

An additional four-day Creativity Immersion residency is required from January 3 to January 6, 2026 following the first fall semester. This intensive Creativity Immersion includes ongoing seminars on methods and the revision of the dissertation proposals. This location is TBA.

January 26 at 5pm - Letters of intent due to phdincreativity@rowan.edu (see above for requirements)

February 6 - Students will be notified by the Admissions Committee if selected to be interviewed for the 2025 cohort.

Febryary 7-10 - Zoom interviews with faculty

February 20 - Letters of admission extended

June 1-15, 2025: Mandatory Immersion program. See above for more information.

January 2-5, 2026 - There will be a second immersion January 2-5 focused on creative research projects.

Current Dissertation Advisors

George Aye
Co-Founder and Director of Innovation, Greater Good Studio; faculty member in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's (SAIC) Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects.

Quinn Bauriedel
Associate Professor and Program Director of the MFA in Devised Performance at Rowan University's College of Performing Arts; Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director of Pig Iron Theatre Company; Obie Award winner

Anthony Davis
Composer, Professor of Music at UC San Diego; Pulitzer Prize recipient

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., PhD
Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University; MacArthur Award recipient

Deniz Ortactepe Hart, PhD
Lecturer in TESOL, School of Education at the University of Glasgow

Richard Herman, PhD
Professor Emeritus and former Chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Hannah Higgins, PhD
Professor of Intermedia and Avant-Garde Art and Culture, Founding Director of IDEAS, University of Illinois Chicago

Scott Kiesling, PhD
Chair of the Department of Linguistics, University of Pittsburgh

Sara Konrath, PhD
Associate Professor of Philanthropic Studies, IUPUI Lilly Family School of Philanthropy

Jim McNeely
Pianist, Composer, and Professor Emeritus in Jazz Composition at Manhattan School of Music

Keith Mines
Director, Latin America Program at United States Institute of Peace; author of Why Nation-Building Matters: Political Consolidation, Building Security Forces, and Economic Development in Failed and Fragile States (University of Nebraska Press)

Zach Savich
Associate Professor, Cleveland Institute of Art; Visiting Program Faculty, the PhD in Creativity, Rowan University; award winning poet

Fadi Skeiker, PhD
Professor of Theatre, Fordham University

Amrita Subramanian, PhD
Faculty, Organizational Dynamics, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania,

Henry Threadgill
Pulitzer Prize-winning Jazz Composer

Pratyusha Tummala-Narra, PhD
Research Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Director of Community-Based Education at the Albert and Jessie Danielsen Institute at Boston University

Robin Wagner-Pacifici, PhD
Professor, Department of Sociology at The New School for Social Research

Past Dissertation Advisors

Ronald A. Beghetto, PhD
Pinnacle West Presidential Chair and Professor, Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University, and Author of Uncertainty x Design: Educating for Possible Futures (Cambridge University Press)

Arnold Berleant, PhD, DFA (hon.)
Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Long Island University; Past President of the International Association of Aesthetics

Lorene Cary
Senior Lecturer, Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania; author of Black Ice, Lady Sitting, My General Tubman and other books and plays

Jason Demeter, PhD
Assistant Professor of English at Norfolk State University

Finis Dunaway, PhD
Professor of History, Trent University

Suzanne Hudson, PhD
Associate Professor of Art History and Fine Arts, University of Southern California

Christine Hume, PhD
Professor of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University

Paul Finkleman, PhD
President, Gratz College

Yael Katz, PhD
Vice President, Academic at Georgian College, Ontario, Canada

Simon Kim
Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design

William Kinderman, PhD
Professor and Elaine Krown Klein Chair in Performance Studies / Music Performance at UCLA

Marilyn Krieger, PhD
Director of Public Relations, Trade Media & Events, E. & J. Gallo Winery

Karl Kusserow, PhD
John Wilmerding Curator of American Art, Princeton University Art Museum

Robert Lumley, PhD
Professor Emeritus at University College London

William W. McIlhenny
Senior Fellow, German Marshall Fund of the United States

Lisa Messeri, PhD
Assistant Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology, Yale University

Mark Moore, PhD
Clinical Psychologist/Psychoanalyst

Linda F. Nathan, EdD
Adjunct lecturer, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Co-Director, Perrone Sizer Institute for Creative Leadership

Julie Reiss, PhD

John Sexton
Benjamin F. Butler Professor of Law, New York University; President Emeritus, New York University

Paul Stoller, PhD
Professor of Anthropology, West Chester University

Buzz Spector
Visiting Faculty, PhD in Creativity at Rowan University; American artist and critic, Emeritus Professor and Dean of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University, St. Louis

James Thomas, PhD
Deputy Director, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
President and University Professor Emeritus, George Washington University

The Advisory Council is comprised of distinguished professionals across diverse disciplines whose knowledge and expertise have contributed to the formation of this program. They will assist in the recommendation and selection of outside advisors to serve each dissertation.

David Campbell, PhD
Professor of Physics, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Materials Science and Engineering and former Provost, Boston University

Roy Campbell, PhD
Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Professor of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

John Carlin, PhD
Author, television producer, and record producer. Founder of Funny Garbage, one of the first digital design companies in New York, and The Red Hot Organization, one of the first major AIDS charities. He teaches entertainment law at Columbia Law School.

Anjan Chatterjee, MD
Professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Architecture, University of Pennsylvania. Director of Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics and author of The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art

Fang Lijun
Artist and entrepreneur, Beijing. Associated with Cynical Realism in the 1990s, Fang is a leading vanguard artist. He is also a founder of the National Archives of Contemporary Art.

Jack Flam, PhD
President of the Dedalus Foundation and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art and Art History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Kathleen A. Foster, PhD
The Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Senior Curator of American Art, and Director, Center for American Art. Curator and art historian, she has published on nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists such as Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, and Andrew Wyeth; most recently, she organized the exhibition and catalogue American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sargent at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., PhD
Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University; recipient of the MacArthur “genius” award as well as an Emmy and a Peabody Award for his television series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

Kevin Hamilton
Dean of the College of Fine + Applied Arts and Professor of New Media, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; co-author of Lookout America!: The Secret Hollywood Studio at the Heart of the Cold War

Hannah B Higgins, PhD
A Professor and founding Director of the interdisciplinary BA in IDEAS at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her books include Fluxus Experience (University of California Press, 2002), The Grid Book (MIT Press, 2009) and the co-edited anthology Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Art (University of California Press, 2012).

Emilia Kabakov
Artist, NY. A pioneer, with Ilya Kabakov, of installation art, with recent retrospectives at the Guggenhiem Museum in NY, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, and the Tate Modern in London

William Kinderman, PhD
Leon M. Klein and Elaine Krown Klein Chair of Performance Studies in the Herb Alpert School of Music, University of California, Los Angeles. A leading authority on Beethoven and internationally known pianist, scholar and recording artist, he has received a lifetime achievement award from the Humboldt Foundation. He has published a dozen books, including Beethoven, The Creative Process in Music from Mozart to Kurtag, and studies of Mozart and Wagner.

Bon Ku, MD
Bon Ku, MD, MPP is the Assistant Dean for Health & Design at Thomas Jefferson University. An emergency medicine physician, he also directs the Health Design Lab which has featured in The New York Times, CNBC, and Architectural Digest. His book, Health Design Thinking, co-written by Ellen Lupton, was published in 2019.

Cynthia Oliver, PhD
Professor of Dance, Associate Vice Chancellor for Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; choreographer of Virago-Man, in the 2017 BAM Next Wave Series and currently touring.

Larry Silver, PhD
Larry Silver is Farquhar Professor of Art History, emeritus, at the University of Pennsylvania and past President of the College Art Association.  He specializes in Northern Old Master painting and graphics and his books include Peasant Scenes and Landscapes (Penn 2006), Marketing Maximilian (Princeton, 2008), and Jewish Art: A Modern History (2011, with Samantha Baskind).

Fred Tomaselli
Artist, NY; best known for detailed paintings of birds, plants, and transparent human forms in a combination of unorthodox materials, and for his fantastical reimaginings of the pictures on the front page of the New York Times; represented by James Cohan Gallery and White Cube in London, with solo exhibitions in New York at the Whitney Museum and the Brooklyn Museum

Deborah Willis, PhD
UArts BFA '75 (Photography); Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University; she is an artist, photographer, curator, photo historian, and author. Willis is also a recipient of the MacArthur “genius” award, among many other accolades.

Jerry (Yoram) Wind, PhD
Lauder Professor of Marketing Emeritus at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Internationally known for pioneering research on organizational buying behavior, market segmentation, conjoint analysis and marketing strategy.

Zhang Xiaogang
Artist, Beijing; one of the leading painters of the first generation of artists to emerge in China after the Cultural Revolution and an artist of global influence

Semir Zeki, PhD
Professor of Neurobiology and Neuroesthetics at University College London and FMedSci Fellow of the Royal Society

Books from dissertations

2025 cohort

Kehinde Bademosi, Design in Public Health Crises: the power of empathy in visual storytelling, published by Bloomsbury in June 2025.

2022 Cohort

• Susan H. Gordon, The Story of Prosecco Superiore (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2024), 314 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1538191262
• Eugene Hughes, Alone with Nature: The Psychology of Environmental Attunement (Bloomsbury Academic, in production, to be released in 2025)
• Patricia E. Salkin, May It Please the Campus: Lawyers Leading Higher Education (Touro University Press, 2022), 352 pages, ISBN-13: 979-8887190082
• Cindy Veloric, Risky Beauty: Aesthetics and Climate Change, exhibition catalogue, Nurture Nature Center, Easton, PA.

Articles, book chapters & awards from dissertations

• Suzannah Eig
  • “Emma Smith, This is Shakespeare,” book review, The Cleveland Review (April 2021).
  • "Crossing Lines, Playing Roles," a poem, Beyond Words Magazine (October 2020).
  • "'But in this changing, what is your intent?' A Conversation with Sarah Enloe," Shakespeare Association of America (June 2020)
    
    
• Susan H. Gordon
  • The Story of Prosecco Superiore (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2024) is a finalist for Drink Books of the 30th Gourmand Drink Awards.
  • "Silvano Follador's Road of Understanding Prosecco" Forbes (March 2023).
  • Book review of Rob Arnold, The Terroir of Whiskey: A Distiller's Journey into the Flavor of Place, Cleveland Review of Books (July 2021).
  • "What a Little Hilltop in Abruzzo Can Tell Us About Words for Place," Gastronomica 20.2 (May 2020).

• Eugene Hughes
  • Co-author, "Aesthetic Engagement as a Pathway to Mental Health and Well-being," in the Oxford Handbook of Mental Health and Contemporary Western Aesthetics, edited by Martin Poltrum, Michael Musalek, Kate Galvin, and Yuriko Saito (Oxford University Press, 2023).
    
    
• Jessica Hunter
  • Promoted to Director of Creativity & Innovation at Colorado College in 2023
  • "When Uncertainty Becomes Possibility: VTS and Creative Problem-Solving," Visual Thinking Strategies (2023)
    
    
• James Brandon Lewis
  • Winner of the inaugural Balvenie Fellowship, selected by Questlove,
  • On the cover of the June 2023 issue of DownBeat Magazine
  • Performed as a headliner at the Newport Jazz Festival in summers 2023 and 2024.
  • Released the five albums in 2022-2024: The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis (2024), Transfiguration (2024), GIFTS (2024), For Mahalia, With Love (2023), Eye Of I (2023).
    
    
• Frank Machos
  • Profiled in"Philly schools ‘Mic’d Up’ program reaches new heights," Metro Philadelphia (July 23, 2023).
    
    
• Patricia E. Salkin
  • "Minority Lawyers Contribute to the Swelling Number of College and University Presidents with JDs, "American Bar Association (2023).
  • "Lawyers are Leading Higher Education as Advocates Call for More Formal Leadership Training," Legal Education (February 2021).
  • "Why Lawyers Make Excellent Academic Leaders," University Business (January 2021).
  • “Pandemic Bar Exams Left Many Aspiring Lawyers Behind" Bloomberg Law (January 2021).
  • "Should I Stay or Should I Go: Student Housing, Remote Instruction, Campus Policies and COVID-19," The Urban Lawyer (February 2021).
  • "ABA Does the Right Thing and Stands with Law School Graduates in the Midst of the Pandemic," JURIST (August 2020).
  • "INSIGHT: Your Next College President May Be the GC Next Door," Bloomberg Law, (July 2020).
  • "The Bar Exam and the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Need for Immediate Action," Harvard Law Review Blog (April 2020).
  • “Licensing Lawyers in a Pandemic: Proving Competence," Harvard Law Review Blog (April 2020).
  • "From the Classroom to the Presidency: Legal Educators Tapped to Run the Campus," American Bar Association, Syllabus, newsletter (February 2020).
  • "Lawyers are leading U.S. colleges and universities more than ever before. Is that good or bad for higher education?" The Washington Post (January 15, 2020).
    
    
• Abel Tilahun
  • Awarded a 2023-4 Guggenheim Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
  • Exhibition "Inner and Outer Space: Lalibela on the Moon," Lalibela, Ethiopia (June 2020).
    
    
• Cindy Veloric
  • "Embodied Space: The Pollution Pods Experience," chapter 7, in Perspective: Selected Essays on Space in Art and Design (Vernon Press, 2023). 
  • "Joan Jonas, Moving Off the Land II, a Consideration of Strange Strangers," Issue 61, Antennae (August 2023).
  • "Aesthetic and Industrial Rupture in the Work of Edward Burtynsky and Justin Brice Guariglia" Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism (University of California Press, August 2023).
  • “Science, Sensibility and Metaphor in the Coral Reef Artwork of Diane Burko," Ocean Archive (May 2020).
  • "Joan Jonas, Moving Off the Land II: A consideration of 'strange strangers,'" Ocean Archive (April 2020). 

The support of generous alumni and friends helps impact students in the PhD in Creativity by providing vital resources for scholarships, academic enhancements and leadership and engagement opportunities.

To support the PhD in Creativity, click the button below and type in "Phd in Creativity" under "Designation Instructions." Your generosity today will make an immediate and lasting impact on the storytellers, artists, critical thinkers and communicators of tomorrow. 

Give now

For more information, contact:
Kaylee Collins
Director of Annual Giving
collinske@rowan.edu | 856-256-5415