Prospective Students

The IHGG Vision

Interdisciplinarity is the hallmark of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Graduate Group. Our faculty and graduate students read and engage with scholarship from every one of our disciplines—all IHGG graduate students and affiliated faculty utilize each other’s frames of understanding to express cultural complexity and contingency. In addition to working closely with humanists, IHGG graduate students may also work with social and cognitive scientists, natural scientists, and engineers.

The IHGG offers an integrative program that is committed to training specialists. Along with foundational interdisciplinary coursework, students select courses from the cross-disciplinary areas of Past Worlds, Social and Spatial Dynamics, or Expressive and Imaginative Works. IHGG faculty are disciplinary experts—often with cross-disciplinary training and scholarship, with a commitment and ability to prepare students for a range of academic and professional careers. Many IHGG graduate students work as teaching assistants for undergraduate majors in Anthropology, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, English, Global Arts, History, Spanish, and World Heritage.

The IHGG Program adopts the UC Merced guiding principle of “The World at Home/At Home in the World” as its signature focus.  Our location in Merced inspires this programmatic concentration, which guides and structures the IHGG curriculum and mission in two ways.

1. Merced is a global crossroads.  This can inspire IHGG students to think about any entrepôts, battlefields, trade routes and other kinds of locales past and present that exemplify the crossroads destination.  The crossroads concept educates students about how to approach questions at scales ranging from the global to the local, and how to move with facility among these spatial frames.  
    
2. We are committed to socially engaged education and research.  We use The World At Home/At Home in the World to communicate the perspective that scholarship exists in and for the larger world, and thus, graduate education can lead to many career paths. Our curriculum includes a required Humanities in the World course in which students learn about socially engaged scholarship, and a Study Plan to prepare for degree progress as well as eplore academic and professional career paths.