Effective Autumn 2023, the Department of Comparative Studies has amended the Comparative Studies major program. Included in these changes is the elimination of specific concentrations. The information provided here is applicable to students who declared their major using this system prior to Autumn 2023.
COMPARATIVE CULTURAL STUDIES (requirements)
The undergraduate concentration in Comparative Cultural Studies draws on social and aesthetic theory to understand how social identities, actions, and desires are produced and practiced in everyday life. The approach is both interdisciplinary and cross-cultural; we lend particular attention to social politics—such issues as race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, and ethnicity—in their encounter with different forms of cultural production.
Because cultural studies wants to know how culture is lived and experienced by a full range of participants, it does not limit itself to studying "high art" or "official" history. Rather, cultural studies pays special attention to those forms that permeate everyday experience: subcultures, popular media (television, film, the internet), and a range of performance practices—dance, music, sports, and fashion.
Through their studies, students learn the key words, critical tools, and basic methods used in the practice of cultural critique: we interpret dominant popular media, and learn to engage alternative forms aimed at producing social change. Cultural studies does not assume that consumers of cultural forms—students, audiences, readers, believers, bystanders—are passive in their consumption. To the contrary, cultural studies invites students to see themselves also as potential producers and authors of creative analysis, new cultural theory, and as creators of alternative cultural forms.
COMPARATIVE ETHNIC AND AMERICAN STUDIES (requirements)
How do people come to identify themselves with a group or multiple groups? How do different cultures produce knowledge differently? How do lived experiences, social structures, belief systems and cultural and literary traditions and forms shape or interact with values, expectations, and identities as well as institutions and power?
Students in Comparative Ethnic and American Studies ask—and begin to answer—these and other broad questions from different perspectives, while focusing their work in the study of ethnicity, race, gender, class, sexuality, and the intersections of these cultural differences.
In Comparative Ethnic and American Studies, students study specific ethnic cultures, arts, and communities within the contexts of changing national, transnational, and global realities as well as broader questions of power and difference in society. Students consider indigenous cultures, transnational migrations, and dislocations of peoples, as well as the historic position of the United States within the Americas and in the world at large.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE (requirements)
Comparative Literature focuses on the study of literature from different cultures, nations, and genres, and explores relationships between literature and other forms of cultural expression. Comparative Literature poses such questions as, What is the place of literature in society? How does literature as a form change over time, and in relation to other forms of making art? How does literature shape and respond to values, social movements, or political contexts?
If you have interests in literature, and have or can achieve command of one language in addition to English, comparative literature will be a rewarding course of study for you. Focused study of two literary traditions and advanced skills in a second language are required for the concentration. As a student of comparative literature, you will have the opportunity to study texts from a range of cultural contexts, historical periods, or literary movements. You will also engage more complex questions of comparison, translation, and transmission across cultural, linguistic, and national boundaries, and study literature in relation to other disciplines (e.g., religious studies, philosophy, ethnic studies) and to other forms of art and cultural production (e.g., film, digital culture, performance). Further, comparative literature includes study of historical and contemporary literary theory and criticism. Like all other concentrations in Comparative Studies, this concentration allows students, with the help of their advisers, to design a course of study that suits their particular interests.
FOLKLORE STUDIES (requirements)
The study of folklore focuses on a broad spectrum of social expression, examining the forms and ways of living through which communities shape their reality. Those forms include language, work, food, play, dance, song, gestures, beliefs, and so forth. Folklore tends to focus on those cultural forms that permeate the everyday, which are passed from generation to generation, usually orally, with no single author or creator. Folklorists might study such activities as riddles, bell ringing, ethnic joking, or urban legends, apparently trivial practices which, when examined in context, reveal themselves as significant performances: constructions of identity, presentations of self, strategies of control or resistance, manipulations of resources, exercises of virtuosity, spaces of reflection upon the nature of things.
Ohio State boasts one of the largest concentrations of folklorists in the country, who work in various departments throughout the University as well as in Comparative Studies.
The Folklore concentration provides an introduction to the study of folklore methods and folk materials, as well as a further focus within a particular area to provide depth. That area of focus might be the folklore of a particular geographical region or community, or the study of a particular genre, such as oral narrative or per-formance. Students will learn how different cultural groups interact among themselves and with others, while focusing their study on particular subjects (verbal arts, material culture, etc.) or particular geographical regions or cultural groups.
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY STUDIES (requirements)
This emerging field focuses on the comparative study of the many relationships between science, technology, and culture. The concentration offers courses covering a wide range of concerns and perspectives. These include an introduction to the history and philosophy of science, the role of technology in contemporary society, cultural dimensions of medicine, relations between gender and science, historical and contemporary studies of visuality, and the intertwining of science and technology with western and other cultures in local and global contexts.
In Science Studies students consider not only the ways in which science and technology shape culture, but how culture shapes the direction and growth of science and technology and how science is interwoven with other aspects of culture. The contributions of science to our understanding and misunderstanding of difference—racial, ethnic, gender, sexual—is also of central concern, along with social and political problems related to economic globalization, environmental deterioration, and global networks of communication, transportation, and migration.