The Graduate Program in Humanities

Office Location:
Building 240, Rm. 108
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2022

Phone: 650-723-3413
Fax: 650-725-1838
Program Administrator: Monica Moore
email: monica.moore@stanford.edu

The Graduate Program in Humanities includes both a Master of Arts Program and a Joint Ph.D. Program.

The Joint Ph.D. Program is affiliated with a number of humanities departments at Stanford. It provides students with a unique opportunity to engage with some of the most influential texts and theoretical approaches in intellectual and cultural history and combine them with their own fields of study. Students participate in a series of chronological seminars that focus on the Classical period to the present. The seminars need not be taken successively, but as individual schedules permit, though a chronological order is preferable. (Completion of the Program may take as long as necessary, certainly not required by the end of two years.)

The program brings together faculty and students from a variety of academic fields and fosters a lively cross-fertilization of ideas generally unattainable from within a single discipline. Participating departments include:

Art, Classics, Comparative Literature, Drama, English, French and Italian, German Studies, History, Modern Thought and Literature, Music, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Spanish and Portuguese.

Candidates must first apply to and be accepted into one of the above Stanford doctoral programs. Applicants enrolled in other academic departments will be considered on an individual basis.

Program Requirements

• Five chronological seminars from Classical Antiquity to the present (see below).
• Participation in the GPH Symposium following completion of the required Seminars.
• One quarter of student teaching as an apprentice in Stanford's Introduction to Humanities Program.
• A reading knowledge of at least one foreign language, ancient or modern.

Seminars in 2007-08

• HUMNTIES 321. Classics Seminar
  Topic this year is interpreting antiquity: methodologies and interpretations of ancient texts. The dialogue between literature and philosophy in Greek and Roman cultures. Sources include Homer, Greek tragedy, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Petronius, Augustine, and Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy.
  3-5 units, Aut (Nightingale, A)
  TTh 3:15-4:45 (240-202)

• HUMNTIES 322. Medieval Seminar -(Same as ENGLISH 370A.)
  The cultural, literary, and artistic evolution of the Middle Ages. The barbarian invasions and the Germanic ethos, the Celtic heritage, and the monastic tradition. Romanesque art and architecture, pilgrimages, and the Crusades. Gothic aesthetics, chivalry and courtly love, scholasticism, and the rise of universities. The late Middle Ages, humanism, and the threshold of the Renaissance. Texts include: Beowulf, Mabinogion, Song of Roland, Chretien de Troyes' Lancelot and Yvain, Dante's Comedy, Boccaccio's Decameron, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. 3-5 units, Win (Steidle, E)
  MW 415-6:05 (200-124)

• HUMNTIES 323. Renaissance/Early Modern Seminar
  Focus is on this period as it records the impact of major historical forces: the advent of printing; the reappropriation of classical thought; the expansion of trade; revolutions in religion; the exploration of uncharted realms of the self, the world, and the heavens; and the rise of historiography. Authors: Attar, de Pizan, Pico della Mirandola, Columbus, De Las Casas, Machiavelli, Luther, Montaigne, Marlowe, Donne, Shakespeare, and Galileo.
  3-5 units, Spr (Brooks, H)
  MW 4:15-6:05 (Education 130)

• HUMNTIES 324. Enlightenment Seminar
  How 18-century opera and literature reflect changing conceptions of the self, reason, and emotion; the proper basis of social and political authority; natural and supernatural justice; women's nature and status. Texts include Manon Lescaut, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Les liaisons dangereuses, and Vindication of the Rights of Women.
  3-5 units, Aut (Hadlock, H))
  MF2:15-4:05 (Braun Music 106 on M; Braun Music 102 on F)

• HUMNTIES 325. Modern Seminar-(Same as FRENGEN 325.)
  The postmodern condition as post-WW II rupture in Western tradition; moral, political, cultural, and aesthetical dimensions. Sources include literature, philosophy, essays, films, and painting. Authors and artists include : Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Alain Resnais, Samuel Beckett, Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Theodor Adorno, David Riesman, Georges Perec, Juliet Mitchell, and Francis Bacon.
  3-5 units, Win (Apostolides, J)
  TTh 10:00-11:50 (200-105)

Affiliated Faculty