The Ph.D. in Performance Studies is a four to five year program. In the first two years of study, students develop an understanding of performance by drawing from a range of regular course offerings in the field to identify, explore, and define a field or fields of research. Students are required to complete four core courses out of nine. Each individual program is then built from seminar and/or practice as research courses, as well as independent or group studies. The four courses consist of PFS 200, and three of the four offered PFS 265 A, B, C, or D. Each quarter there are a variety of PFS 265s offered apart from core 265s that will satisfy the requirements. Students are required to complete four core courses out of five in performance studies, and one colloquium course. Each individual program is then built from seminar and/or practice as research courses, as well as independent or group studies, developing one or more of the four strands of the program: Comparative Medias, Embodiments, Cultures/Ecologies, and History/Text. A wide range of affiliated faculty offer courses throughout the HArCS faculty, and Designated Emphases are available in Studies in Performance & Practice, African American & African Studies, Critical Theory, Feminist Theory & Research, Native American Studies, Religious Studies, Science & Technology Studies, and Writing, Rhetoric & Composition Studies. Students are required to complete a minimum of 60 units before taking the qualifying examination. No more than 12 units may be taken below the graduate level unless specifically approved by the Ph.D. graduate program advisor.
The DE in the Study of Religion provides graduate students with an interdisciplinary understanding of how religion in general has been conceptualized and studied historically and how these understandings continue to inform basic categories of thought, behavior and identity across the world and especially in the West. Rather than approaching religion as a fixed entity that informs change in other more dynamic fields (e.g. literature, culture, society, behavior), this program helps students think about the study of religion as historically variable, contextualized, and itself constitutive of the subject of inquiry.
