The Interdisciplinary Humanities (M.Phil.) Program is a two-year Master’s program. You will gain new expressive skills.  You will be exposed to new ways of thinking from across the Humanities and Social Sciences.  Your interdisciplinary experience highlights how disciplines are distinct as well as how they use common interpretive and theoretical strategies. This broad exposure helps pose problems and issues in new and distinct ways. Drawing from this experience you will build a clear and unique intellectual voice.  

The program is bookended by an entrance course and an exit course. The entrance course—HUMN 6000: Key Topics in Interdisciplinary Humanities—is taken by everyone. It helps develop reading, writing and argumentative skills for success not just at graduate school but in any future career path. 

The backbone of the Humanities Program are four curated interdisciplinary seminars. Each course is situated in a key area indispensable to humanistic thinking and research: (1) History and Memory, (2) Literature, Art and Language, (3) Philosophy and Critical Theory, (4) Science, Technology and Nature. For each course, program participants collectively decide on a topic or theme related to the key area.  Past themes have included: Utopia, Making Meaning, Truth and Lie, Migration, and the Anthropocene.

Each curated course becomes an exceptional interdisciplinary experience. Every week a scholar from across the Humanities and Social Sciences joins the seminar to discuss a specific issue related to the course theme. What this brings to life is how different disciplines tackle issues in both common and yet interestingly distinct ways. As interdisciplinary researchers, we build the key skills of listening to differences, conversing about differences, and negotiating among differences. These skills are practiced by completing and defending a research essay of about twenty pages related to the course theme.

There is also the opportunity to pursue specific disciplinary interests as part of the program. Everyone takes two graduate-level courses outside of the Humanities Program in a specific discipline, whether it be Geography, Philosophy, History, Gender Studies, Education or another discipline. The choice of courses is up to you.

The culmination of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program is a capstone research project. The final course—HUMN 6041 Seminar in Research and Writing in Interdisciplinary Humanities—helps you put together this project.  The specific research topic is entirely up to you, but is often based on an idea developed in one of the curated courses.  The project links theoretical and practical knowledge by recognizing and articulating a problem from multiple disciplinary vantage points. The project may take the form of a traditional written analysis, but it may also incorporate an alternative mode of academic expression (e.g., a film or video; a website; a manual, guidebook, or other learning resource; digital, audio, or video files, etc.).