Overview
Minnesota is a land-grant institution of 35,000 students; 8,000 are in its 150 graduate programs. Straddling the Mississippi, its campus has a traditional tree-lined mall surrounded by Beaux Arts–style buildings.

CSCL is one of the premier departments in the humanities, a center of theoretical work known for excellent teaching. Its faculty includes three Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professors and has won numerous Guggenheim, ACLS, Rockefeller, and NEH Fellowships. The department houses Cultural Critique and works closely with the Minnesota Press.

Both graduate programs have 100 percent placement rates. Recent graduates are working at Penn State; the Universities of Alberta, Leeds (England), Maryland, and Texas; and many liberal arts colleges.

The Community
The University is in the heart of Minneapolis/St. Paul, with 3 million people in one of the country's most progressive communities. The Twin Cities area is a center for new music, radical and traditional visual arts, experimental theater, and more—with easy access to many cultures. Recreation abounds; there are 12,500 acres of metropolitan parks, woodland and lakes, and abundant running, biking, skiing, and wilderness sports.

Both programs enroll about 50 students, equally divided by gender. All areas of the country and the world are represented, with current students from China, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Jordan, and Scandinavia. The community is close and supportive, highly learned, highly productive, and politically committed.

Programs of study and degree requirements
The Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature (CSCL) supports two graduate programs, the Program in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society (CSDS) and the Program in Comparative Literature, both offering the Ph.D. and M.A. degrees. Students may obtain teaching experience through three undergraduate majors (cultural studies, comparative literature, and cinema and mass culture). The community is coherent, with close advising relationships fostered and collaborative work encouraged. Course work takes about two years, followed by a preliminary examination constructed in consultation with committee members. Dissertation writing takes about two years; six years is a reasonable amount of time to complete the doctorate.

CSDS examines how cultural production both shapes and is shaped by life in time, space, matter, and society across various discourses, such as music, film, myth, ritual, architecture, landscape and urban design, painting, sculpture, and literature in elite and mass culture—understanding these as sites and as instruments of contestation and negotiation.

The Program in Comparative Literature leads in refocusing the discipline on questions of literary and cultural theory, as well as examining more familiar national or linguistic literary traditions interwoven with other humanistic research.

The two graduate programs share the same theoretical substrate, each enriching and informing the other. Interdisciplinary, even antidisciplinary, cross-cultural work is encouraged.

Fourteen departmental faculty members are supplemented by 15 members from other departments. All offer courses, serve as committee members, and advise students.

Both programs prepare candidates for academic positions, generally in humanities departments, film studies, gender studies, and the like. Training in pedagogy is integral; all students take a Pedagogy Seminar, engage in guided teaching and curriculum design, and are mentored in professionalism, placement, and academic culture.

Facilities & Resources
The University Libraries contain 5.7 million volumes, including government publications, manuscripts, archives, maps, and sound and video recordings. Wilson Library, the seventeenth-largest research library in North America, provides more than 45,000 subscriptions to periodicals and journals.

Special interest collections include the Social Welfare History Archives; the Immigration History Research Center, containing noncirculating original sources documenting immigration and ethnicity throughout the United States; and the Manuscripts Division, incorporating the Northwest Architectural Archives, the Performing Arts Archives, and the Literary Manuscripts Collections. The history of information processing is documented in the Charles Babbage Institute Archives. The Special Collections and Rare Books Division houses rare materials and examples of fine bindings and typography. The expansion of Western commerce and civilization from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century is documented in the James Ford Bell Library. Rare and historical works in the health and biological sciences dating from the fifteenth century to 1920 are found in the Wangensteen Historical Library.

Expenses and Aid
Semester tuition for 2001–02 was $465 per credit for residents and $875 per credit for nonresidents. A typical load is 8–12 credits. Fellows and assistants do not pay tuition. A Student Services fee of $238 per semester is required and is not covered by tuition benefits.

Financial Aid: The department seeks to provide full support for five years for every entering student. Typical aid combines Teaching Assistantship and Fellowship support with a full tuition benefit for up to 14 credits each semester. Students appointed as assistants or fellows receive health-care coverage and subsidized coverage for dental expenses and dependents. Like all University appointments, aid cannot be guaranteed and is contingent each year on funding.

Fellowships supported by the Graduate School and through several national agencies are available at different stages of graduate work. The department provides careful guidance to applicants for these awards.

Housing/Living Expenses: The Twin Cities housing market is tight, with average rent for a one-bedroom apartment about $650 per month. Other living costs are reasonable; public transportation is excellent. Yearly expenses, including books, for a single student living in the Twin Cities are about $13,000.

How to Apply
Application is for doctoral study; students are not admitted for the M.A. Both graduate programs are small and selective, admitting only 4 students each per year.

Minnesota requires a dual admission process (different materials to the department and the Graduate School); prospective students should consult the University's Graduate School Web site (listed below) for details, including application forms and the Graduate School Bulletin. Application materials for both admission and financial aid must be postmarked no later than January 4.

The GRE General Test is required, as is the TOEFL for applicants whose first language is not English.

John Archer, Ph.D., Harvard. Architecture, space, cities and suburbia.

Timothy Brennan, Ph.D., Columbia. Theories of culture and colonialism, Caribbean literatures and culture.

Robin Brown, Ph.D., Michigan. Rhetoric, rhetoric of science, discourse theory, pedagogy.

Cesare Casarino, Ph.D., Duke. Philosophy, cinema, literature, queer theory.

Keya Ganguly, Ph.D., Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Feminism, modernism, postcolonial theory, cinema.

Elizabeth Kotz, Ph.D., Columbia. Post-WWII aesthetics of visual art, performance, poetics, and media art; cinema; television; feminism.

Richard Leppert, Ph.D., Indiana. Music, visual representation, and sociocultural formation; Frankfurt School, especially Adorno.

Catherine Liu, Ph.D., CUNY Graduate Center. Psychoanalysis, theories of technology, sexual difference, deconstruction.

John Mowitt, Ph.D., Wisconsin. Metacriticism, postcolonial theory, cinema, popular discursive practices.

Thomas Pepper, Ph.D., Yale. Psychoanalysis, gender theory, textual theory, philosophy of language.

Harvey Sarles, Ph.D., Chicago. Pragmatics, language and discourse, the body and interaction, pedagogy.

Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Ph.D., Ruhr (Germany). Literary and aesthetic theory, popular culture, philosophy, German literature.

Gary Thomas, Ph.D., Harvard. Cultural musicology, German literature, gay studies, queer theory.

Haidee Wasson, Ph.D., McGill. Film and media historiography, visual technologies, modernity, gender, cultural institutions, alternative media practice.

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