The Study of Religion Ph.D. program is designed as a 6-year program. Students gain advanced knowledge of the literatures of particular religious traditions and the intersections of these with contemporary thematic and regional phenomena including values, ethics and human rights, modernity, science and secularism, visual culture, media and technology, language, rhetoric and performance, body and praxis, and theory and method. Students graduate with the qualitative and quantitative skills necessary for professional research and teaching in religious studies. Graduate students in our program receive two kinds of training: classical research in the corpus of a particular religious tradition, and theoretical training to place this tradition at the center of broader concerns, in contemporary and regional context. We offer distinctive research strengths in three regions: American religious cultures, ancient Mediterranean religions, and Asian religions. A second regional specialization gives students an in-depth comparative basis. Students focus their scholarship through one of the following thematic lenses: Values, Ethics, and Human Rights, Modernity, Science, and Secularism, Visual Culture, Media and Technology, Language, Rhetoric, and Performance, Body and Praxis, Theory and Method. This curriculum provides the depth to produce rigorous scholarship that is on the cutting edge, redefining what religious studies has to say to the academy and public.
The DE in Science and Technology Studies offers graduate students in PhD programs the opportunity to augment their studies with an understanding of the variety of methods and theoretical approaches of STS. Any PhD student in good standing is eligible to enroll. In particular, those students whose topic of research includes an aspect of the interactions of science, technology and society will greatly benefit from the wealth of case studies of other interactions collected in the STS literature, and from the focus in STS on the relevance of understanding the ways in which the practices of scientists and engineers and the travel of facts and technologies are intricately social and themselves an inseparable part of the impacts of science and technology. The curriculum is flexible with courses being offered across many disciplines. Students are able to choose courses from the DE offerings to widen their range of approaches and enable cross-training as interdisciplinary scholars. DE students will benefit from the thriving community of STS scholars on campus, the STS colloquia series, and may attend the annual STS Summer Retreat.
