Graduate Programs: Ph.D Sample Programs
The following sample program is offered to illustrate the range of subjects students may choose to investigate for the doctorate. Students might also explore recent MA programs of study for additional examples of comparative studies projects.- Women, Folklore, and Religious Practice in North Africa. Doctoral research would involve particular instances of the extra-institutional involvement of women in new forms of religious practice and the ways in which such creative manipulations of religious tradition may contribute to the empowerment of women. The project would compare the development of such practices in the varying cultural and political contexts of post-World War II North Africa, for example, in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. The student would take courses in Comparative Studies, folklore courses in English, and several courses in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, History, and Women’s Studies. Comparative Studies faculty who could serve as advisers for such a project could include particularly Hugh Urban and Sabra Webber. Their expertise in religious movements, urban studies, and North African folklore would be complemented by associated faculty in English, Near Eastern Languages and Literatures, and Women’s Studies.
General Examination Areas:
Critical, Social, and Cultural Theory
Folklore
Religious Studies
Languages:
French and Arabic
- Science, Capitalism, and Contemporary Fiction in the Americas. Much contemporary Latin American and North American fiction addresses both epistemological questions about science (which could be related here to the literary techniques of magical realism and of postmodernism) and political and economic consequences of technological development promoted through processes of economic globalization. Recent novels such as Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s One-Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra or The Death of Artemio Cruz, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow or Mason and Dixon, for example, all address these issues in different ways using a wide range of innovative literary techniques. Comparative Studies faculty with expertise in narrative theory and comparative literature, ethnic and American studies, and science studies and associated faculty members from the departments of Spanish and Portuguese, English, and French would serve as advisors for such a project. In the sample program below, students would find most useful those courses in English, History, and Spanish that provide the cultural and historical contexts within which a number of 20th-century fiction writers in the Americas came to focus in their writing on a critique of the causes and effects of scientific and technological development.
Critical, Social, and Cultural Theory
Science Studies
Contemporary North and Latin American Fiction
Languages:
Spanish and French
Graduate Programs
PhD
. MA
. PhD Minor
