School of Interdisciplinary Studies (Graduate)

Founded in the 1960s, the Purdue American Studies program is invested in studying how American culture shapes and influences the ways people live. The program provides students with opportunities to explore American culture through a diversity of ideas, texts, objects, institutions, practices, and histories, as well as the complex social and political relationships that continue to shape the evolving configurations of Americanness in a transnational context. Our program promotes the crossing of disciplinary boundaries and the interdisciplinary exploration of questions that generate new understandings of colonization, disability, diversity, environmentalism, ethnicity, gender, incarceration, inequality, media, migration, protest, race, sexuality, technology, transnationalism, and violence.

Activism, Resistance, and Social Movement Studies; Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies; Design and Material Cultural Studies; Gender, Sexuality, and Queer Studies; New Media and Popular Cultural Studies; Science, Technology, and Environment Studies; Transnational American Studies

 

Comparative Literature takes as its special mandate the teaching and comparing of world literature not only as social documents but also as works of art whose full appreciation depends on the study of languages, an understanding of diversity and globalization, and an appreciation of various media. Comparative Literature is a Master of Arts and Ph.D. granting program.

Comparative Literature at Purdue is especially geared towards studies that cut across traditional national, linguistic, and temporal boundaries, such as Medieval, Renaissance, 18th and 19th Century, Postcolonial, and Global studies. Our affiliated faculty represent interests in multiple literature, film, and theory.

Purdue Linguistics offers thorough training in theoretical and applied linguistics. One of its main strengths is the analysis of bilingual language systems and the characterization of the linguistic and psycholinguistic development of bilingualism. Students can be admitted at the M.A. level or M.A./Ph.D. track. Students should specify in their applications the program or track into which they seek admission. They are required to specify the faculty members they would like to work with.

Theoretical and experimental approaches to syntax, pragmatics, phonetics, and phonology; Bilingualism in children and adults; Second language acquisition; Heritage language acquisition; Spanish linguistics (L2 and heritage acquistion of Spanish morphosyntax, phonetics, and pragmatics); German linguistics (historical linguistics, language contact and change); Sign Language; Fieldwork and language documentation; Computational linguistics (speech and language technology, large language models, natural language processing, conversational AI)

Purdue’s interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Philosophy and Literature allows graduate students to develop a plan of study and research that lies at the intersection of the fields of philosophy and literature, broadly conceived.  The program seeks to foster critical and independent thinking while providing cohesive professional training.

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