The Ph.D. program in Interdisciplinary Humanities is an innovative comparative humanistic program specializing in analytical and theoretical approaches to the study of societies and cultures in relation to power and difference through social practices and cultural expressions across time and space.
We offer a course of study designed to produce scholarship that seriously engages humanistic and social scientific inquiries as inherently comparative to investigate the global and contemporaneous nature of cultures and societies today and in the past. A comprehensive analytical approach to studying the long history of exchange and interplay between times, places, events, and cultural expressions positions our graduates to contribute to the humanities as an endeavor for public good.
As scholars, we foreground theorizing and historicizing both social issues and cultural production, with groundings in traditional disciplinary methods and interdisciplinary fields. We ask students to use the intersections of methods, theories, and bodies of knowledge to advance our understanding of new and existing questions. Graduate students reflect on how interdisciplinary and intersectional methods and studies unsettle knowledge traditions, and how they might result in undiscipline or undoing disciplines. Such analysis and reflection allows students to broaden the horizons of their respective specializations. Interdisciplinary Humanities exists in the tradition of creative frameworks for understanding complex political, social, and cultural issues, past, present, and future.
