Mission > Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford

The PhD Program in Modern Thought and Literature is an interdisciplinary program that studies critical issues in the formation of modern and contemporary cultures. Our underlying presumption is that texts and other cultural artifacts cannot adequately be understood outside the webs of social and historical relations in which they are produced, circulated, and consumed. The Program applies an array of critical, methodological, and disciplinary approaches to the study of intersections of literature, cultural formations, and society, which makes it distinct from departments focusing more exclusively on literature and using the methodologies of literary study.

MTL believes that a vantage point from outside single disciplines, and at the interstices of disciplines, is required to understand modern and contemporary cultures, which continue to challenge traditional disciplinary methods. An interdisciplinary approach allows for qualitatively more complex and nuanced understandings and explanations regarding both culture and its social and historical functions.

The Program trains students to understand the histories and methods of select disciplines and to test their assumptions. We consider how these disciplines shape knowledge and, most importantly, how interdisciplinary methods reshape their objects of study.

The basic methodological approaches of MTL are derived from literary and cultural studies. Our approaches include rhetorical analysis and the study of the inter-relation of cultural productions, practices and society. MTL students produce readings of diverse forms and practices such as literary works, films, visual art, performance, community narratives, ethnographies, technological objects, philosophical texts, histories of various kinds, scientific discourse, and music culture.

We use the approaches of critical cultural studies to explore fundamental questions of the modern and contemporary world, such as issues of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, science, technology and medicine, media and performance, legal studies and social theory. Our faculty is drawn from a variety of fields in the humanities and social sciences, as well as from education, law, and medicine. This diversity ensures that students have guidance in both mastering a field of study and in intelligently employing interdisciplinary methods.

Since MTL is driven by a desire to address a set of interdisciplinary problems, our mission is to train students to equip themselves with the tools necessary to approach those problems in a thorough and rigorous manner. As serious interdisciplinary study is impossible without a firm understanding of the disciplines under consideration, each student is expected to master the methods of one discipline to gain a firm foundation in a second field.

Modern Thought & Literature
August 2003