Warren Wilson College

Warren Wilson College, an independent liberal arts college located on a beautiful 1135-acre campus in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, North Carolina.

The mission of Warren Wilson College is to provide a distinctive undergraduate and graduate liberal arts education. Our undergraduate education combines academics, work, and service in a learning community committed to environmental responsibility, cross-cultural understanding, and the common good.

The natural landscape is often what shapes the visitors’ first impression of the campus; our campus offers a distinct contrast to the typical college campus of vast manicured lawns and regimented planting plans. Emphasis is placed on using suitable native species and materials, drought and pest-resistant plants, along with consideration of form, seasonal, interest, and wise use of the area.

Simply put, it is stunning.

But it is much more than that.

It is your laboratory that allows you to apply what you learn in the classroom. It is your studio, inspiring creative and moving works of art. It is your home, where you will learn the traditions of Appalachia while enjoying the urban experiences of nearby Asheville.

Warren Wilson is pleased to offer the MA in Critical and Historical Craft Studies is the first program in the U.S. to focus its curriculum on craft history and theory, and brings together a rotating faculty from multiple disciplines and varied cultural and global locations to broaden understanding of craft as a field of study.

Students will investigate research methods from archives to oral histories, public modes of presenting craft from street fairs to museum exhibitions, forms of writing in the field from exhibition reviews to academic journal articles, and alternative forms of documenting and communicating history, such as podcasts, symposia, online platforms, and curricular development. The program challenges the boundaries of craft and spans media specific work to craft-like contemporary art, folk art to artisanal explorations. Research as an applied practice is the principle that will connect students’ project work in the Swannanoa/Asheville area to that in their own hometowns, offering training in primary and secondary source analysis and experience while studying and shaping a new field.