About the Department

• Message from the Chair
• Contact & Directions

John Archer
Department Chair

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A message from the department Chair

Hello and welcome to the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature.

Ours is a vibrant intellectual community where practices and products of all sorts—musical, urban, literary, cinematic, traditional, global, popular, electronic, and more—are studied critically in relation to their social, historical, and political contexts.

Founded in 1992, our department is a site of remarkable intellectual ferment. We have scholars researching and teaching about everything from global literatures and the soundtracks of films, to the formation of suburbs, the theory of cultural criticism, and practices of the cultural avant-garde both inside and outside the West.

We have organized our work around two dynamic undergraduate majors and two rigorous, progressive doctoral programs. In the CSCL major, undergraduatesexplore the fields of cultural studies (emphasizing discourse and media) and comparative literature (emphasizing literature and language). The other major, Studies in Cinema and Media Culture, addresses cinema as a social institution that is part of a global culture industry, and examines filmmaking as a cultural practice.

Our two distinguished doctoral programs parallel the two tracks of the CSCL undergraduate major. Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society was founded in 1986, as one of the pioneering cultural studies graduate programs in the United States. Our work in this program both theorizes and analyzes encounters among multiple discourses (musical, filmic, artistic, literary, architectural, and more) as they occur within specific socio-historical contexts. Comparative Literature, while addressing such encounters, fosters work that foregrounds the close reading of texts in their languages of composition.

The faculty and graduate students in CSCL are committed to powerful teaching and progressive scholarship. They understand that you cannot have one without the other. Over half the faculty have won teaching and/or advising awards, and prestigious national research fellowships; and our undergraduate and graduate students have gone on to exciting and fruitful careers. Our expectations are high, but that is what you are looking for, right?

John Archer
Chair