Education Standard

All applicants are expected to present an approved Bachelor degree at minimum level of 2nd class honours (2.2)

Applicants who do not meet the minimum academic entry requirements may be considered on the basis of prior work or learning experience (RPEL). Candidates may be required to pass a qualifying examination set by the relevant department before being accepted to a Masters degree programme. Attendance at selected undergraduate lecture courses at NCAD, together with related written work may be prescribed. 

You may apply for the programme if you are currently completing your Undergraduate Degree. NCAD will review the rest of your application If necessary, we can make you a Conditional Offer. When your degree is completed and you send us final transcripts we will upgrade this to a Full Offer. 

Essential Supporting Documents

• A Statement of Interest - 300-500 words framing your reasons for applying to the programme

• A recent CV

• Certified transcripts of previous programmes followed

• Certified copies of degree/ certificates and/or other appropriate third level qualifications bearing the official stamp of the institution.

• Academic Reference (Head of School/Department preferred), or if you graduated more than 4 years' ago please submit an employer reference

  • Some referees prefer to submit the reference directly to the college. If this is the case, please instruct your referee to email a standard reference to postgraduate@ncad.ie. Please make sure all references contain the letterhead and the institution contact email address for the referee

Document Description

When uploading documents please make sure you clearly label them using the Description Box like in the example below 

English Language Requirements

All programmes in NCAD are taught through English. International Applicants are asked to provide proof of their English Language Proficiency.

Full details of acceptable tests and the standard required can be found at the following link English Language Requirement.

After Your Degree

The programme consistently receives excellent feedback from both external examiners and students. Students on the programme have received internationally recognised awards for their work and many have gone on to pursue doctoral research at NCAD and elsewhere. Graduates have published their work in peer reviewed journals and many are working within education (second and third level), art / design practice, galleries, museums, historic houses, film, theatre, publishing and government bodies responsible for arts/craft promotion.

To find out more about the careers of graduates, please click on the names below:

Murieann Charleton (graduated 2007)

Susan Curley Meyer (graduated 2018)

Elaine Manley (graduated 2020)

Séamus Nolan (graduated 2019)

Glen O Sullivan (graduated 2014)

Donna Rose (graduated 2019)

Applications for 2025 will open in Autumn 2024

Fees

For information on tuition fees please follow this Link 

There is an application fee of €55.00*

Apply

Step 1: Click on Apply Now button below | Step 2: Fill in your details

Step 3: Upload your Supporting Documents

• You can also submit your application even before you upload the necessary documents. 

• You can not add new documents after you have submitted. 

• Additional documents can be sent to postgraduate@ncad.ie and we will upload them on your behalf. 

Step 4: Pay the application fee & submit your application to NCAD*

• If you are applying for multiple Postgraduate Programmes then you are only obliged to pay the application fee once.

  • Complete your application as far as the fee payment page

  • Click save + exit

  • Email postgraduate@ncad.ie and let us know you are ready to submit and we will submit the application on your behalf. 

• NCAD Graduates are not required to pay the application fee. 

  • Complete your application as far as the fee payment page

  • Click save + exit 

  • Email postgraduate@ncad.ie and let us know you are ready to submit and we will submit the application on your behalf. 

Programme Team

The MA Design History Material Culture is taught by internationally recognised leaders in their fields and draws on wide-ranging academic expertise in architectural history, dress and textiles history, contemporary craft practice and craft history, contemporary design theory and material culture studies.

Professor David Crowley

crowleyd@staff.ncad.ie

Professor David Crowley is the Head of the School of Visual Culture. Before joining NCAD, he was a professor in the School of Humanities at the Royal College of Art in London. He has a specialist interest in modernism in art and design, often with a focus on the histories of Eastern Europe under communist rule. His books include Warsaw (2003) and Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc (2010). He writes regularly for Eye magazine, Creative Review, Frieze and other art and design press titles. Crowley also curates exhibitions, including ‘Cold War Modern’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2008–9; and ‘Notes from the Under-ground: Art and Alternative Music in Eastern Europe 1968-1994’ for the Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, 2017 and Akademie der Kunst, Berlin, 2018. His writing can be found at: faktografia.com.

Dr Lisa Godson, MA, PhD

godsonl@staff.ncad.ie

Lisa is a lecturer in History of Design, and was previously NCAD Fellow at GradCAM and tutor at the Royal College of Art. Her research interests include contemporary design and twentieth-century Irish material culture. Her co-edited volume Making 1916: the visual and material culture of the Easter Rising was published by Liverpool University Press in 2015.

Hilary O’Kelly, MA

okellyh@staff.ncad.ie

Hilary O’Kelly is a dress historian focusing on the material culture of fashion. Her main interest is in exploring the power of dress as cultural communication. From perspectives of creativity and manufacture to issues of consumption, economies and politics her research embraces issues of identity and culture, inclusivity and marginalization. In NCAD she teaches this subject on many courses from BA to PhD, and with her colleagues Dr. Nikki Gordon-Bowe and Dr Paul Caffrey, established the MA in Design History and Material Culture in the year 2000.

Her research interests developed through undergraduate study of Art-History (UCD) and a Master’s degree specialism in History of Dress at UCL (Courtauld Institute). The aspects of dress explored in her research, lectures and publication have sprung variously from the visual (portraits/photographs/illustrations), the actual and material (dress practices, jewellery, knitwear) to the embodied immaterial (identity; national, gender and social). The material Culture of Fashion, prioritises neither the dress itself, nor the theoretical form, but brings together objects, ideas and social practices,
to analyse how dress has meaning in people’s lives; as a form of cultural formation, negotiation and re-formation.

Publications
Cleo: Irish Clothes in The Wider World received the overall Golden Fleece Award. Published in 2014, it was selected as one of seven books for the yearly reviews edition of Fashion Theory; The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture (Vol 19, Issue 4, Sept 2015)

‘Parcels from America’ in Old Clothes, New Looks: Second Hand Fashion (2005) Berg is a chapter on American clothes in Ireland, their domestic and emotional significance, as well as their ambivalent reception in terms of gender, age and class. The socio-economic politics of style in Ireland has been a long-standing subject in her work published in a number of edited volumes: ‘Reconstructing Irishness; Dress in the Celtic Revival, 1880 – 1920’ (1992) in Chic Thrills; a Fashion Reader. Pandora ‘Set Up Before the People; Images and Ideals of Boys’ Clothing in Ireland c. 1910- 1940’ in Constructions of the Irish Child in The Independence Period, 1910-1940, Palgrave Macmillan. & ‘Dressing rebellion: national revival dress and 1916’ in Making 1916, Liverpool.

‘Famine & Workhouse Clothing’ in The Atlas of the Great Famine (2012), UCC, a multi award-winning publication.

Alongside publications in dress she has also written about craft including essays, reviews and catalogues on individual craftspeople and craft collectives for the Crafts Council of Ireland (now DCCOI).

Admissions Team

postgraduate@ncad.ie