Strongly correlated material systems have been at the forefront of condensed matter physics for a few decades, and yet the physics of correlated systems is not fully understood. Theoretically, it is difficult to model these systems fully analytically since the dynamics of many-body interactions that are required to model the electron-electron or electron-phonon physics, for example, quickly become intractable beyond limits one dimensional limit. However, with the advent of novel and improved experimental techniques, it has now become possible to access these phases of matter and study the physics of real materials. More specifically, optoelectronic methods have become invaluable tools to probe the physics of strongly correlated materials beyond what traditional transport techniques can achieve. In this thesis we use optoelectronic measurements to study two strongly correlated material systems – the excitonic insulator (EI) candidate Ta2NiSe5, and the charge density wave (CDW) system 1T-TiSe2. We discover a novel form of circular photogalvanic effect (CPGE) in centrosymmetric material systems, which we name quadrupolar CPGE or QCPGE, and use this novel variant of CPGE to demonstrate that the crystalline symmetry in Ta2NiSe5 is lower than previously reported in literature. We also demonstrate that light or applied bias can fundamentally alter the phase of matter being studied in systems with strong correlations, as we observe clear signatures of disruption of the CDW phase in 1T-TiSe2 in the presence of optically excited carriers, which lowers the symmetry of the crystalline phase due to strong electron-electron correlations in the CDW system. We thus show it to be necessary for future studies to carefully consider the interaction between the probes used and the system under study in order to get a much better understanding of the intrinsic behavior of the correlated material as well as result in more ways to control the phase of matter in these complex systems. In conclusion we demonstrate that circular photogalvanic effect and its higher order variants are an incisive probe of the underlying physics of strongly correlated material systems, and a better understanding of the intrinsic light-matter interaction in correlated systems is essential to further discover new physics in these systems.