The Program in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies offers an interdisciplinary B.A., second major and minor, and both an M.A. and a graduate minor. Students define their own field of study as they complete core courses in cultural and literary studies and critical theory offered by participating departments and programs across the university.
How do language, literature, film and other media operate? What allows us to understand (or misunderstand) meaning? Where do stories come from and what purposes do they serve? How do racial, sexual, national and class identities come to seem "normal"? What happens when different cultural traditions collide or collaborate? Are we born or do we become women or men? Where does taste come from? Does the medium in which an idea is expressed matter? Is literature merely a reflection of society or is it an agent of change? The Program in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies provides students with a framework for responding to these kinds of questions.
Students in the program have defined a wide variety of fields of study, including, images of motherhood in Greek tragedy, the migration of Flamenco to New Mexico, theories of monsters, sites of Memory in Haitian women's writing, postmodernity in Chinese architecture, environmental justice and the silicon chip industry, and the cultural politics of the debate on capital punishment.
Both the undergraduate and graduate programs offer students an exceptional opportunity to devise their own program of study and to work in close collaboration with faculty advisors. B.A. students may choose from two concentrations, the cultural studies concentration and the comparative literature concentration. M.A. students may choose a concentration in cultural studies, comparative literature or classics.