Graduate work is interdisciplinary and cross-cultural, addressing complex 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.

The MA and PhD in Comparative Studies are designed for students whose scholarly interests require them to call upon the resources of several academic disciplines. 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.