OSU Department of Comparative Studies Graduate Programs
Prospective students are encouraged to explore this Web site extensively to learn more about the department, especially about our core faculty and associated graduate faculty, and the graduate courses regularly offered by the department. They may also want to review our student pages and learn about recent MA alumni.Please direct queries to the academic program coordinator, Marge Lynd, or the Graduate Studies Committee Chair, Ruby Tapia, or contact the department (614-292-2559), 451 Hagerty Hall, 1775 College Road, Columbus, OH 43210-1340.
The Department of Comparative Studies offers the Ph.D. and the Master of Arts in Comparative Studies. For students in other graduate programs at Ohio State, the department offers the Graduate Minor in Comparative Cultural Studies.
Graduate work in Comparative Studies is interdisciplinary and cross-cultural, and explores comparative perspectives on a wide range of cultural and historical discourses and practices: literary, aesthetic, technological, scientific, religious, political, material. Research and scholarship in comparative studies addresses the processes of cultural change, stability, and interaction, with particular attention to the construction of knowledge and the dynamics of power and authority. Questions of difference—racial, gender, sexual, class, ethnic, national—and the ways in which those categorizations inform and are informed by other discourses and practices are central to scholarship in comparative studies.
Such an interdisciplinary, comparative approach to the study of culture assumes both flexibility and rigor in terms of theory, methodology, and object of study. Each graduate student, with the help of faculty advisers, designs an individualized academic program to meet specific research interests that cut across departmental and college boundaries. As a part of this process, students are encouraged to question the configuration of disciplinary boundaries and to place in historical context the development of disciplinary structures and their objects of study.
The element of comparison, both within and across cultures, is important to faculty and student research. Comparisons may be drawn among the several discourses and practices of a single society, group of people, geographical region, or historical era. Research projects may also involve the comparison of specific genres and media—textual, performative, material—across cultures. Both approaches to comparative work are encouraged; most projects will involve elements of both, since contextualization is integral to all such studies. The function of comparison is not to discover differences and similarities, but to understand more comprehensively the political, social, economic, and aesthetic dimensions of the various discourses and practices that constitute social and individual life.
