Interdisciplinary Majors– Make Them What you Will
One of the great things about liberal arts colleges is the opportunity to study a whole variety of things. At Wesleyan, this doesn’t stop at our open curriculum or annual course catalog of over 1000 classes. There is a strong commitment here to interdisciplinary learning; that is, the combination of several seemingly separate fields of study that coalesce on a particular topic of study (Peter Hill has already talked about one– the College of Letters– which is a more broadly-focused interdisciplinary program unique to Wesleyan). Some examples include:
- African-American Studies: …”Majors are required to take courses from a variety of disciplinary areas, including literature, the social sciences, and the arts. Each major also concentrates in a specific discipline or in a particular thematic area…”
- American Studies: “…The complexity of culture and of its historical development is such that its analysis requires the intellectual tools of more than one discipline and the interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives emerging in American Studies and other interdisciplinary fields…”
- Medieval Studies: “…the program may also provide a framework for students wishing to cross the somewhat arbitrary temporal, topical, and geographical boundaries of medieval studies in order to consider such problems as relationship between classical and medieval literature or art or the broader history of the preindustrial European studies…”
- Science in Society: “…an interdisciplinary undergraduate major program that encourages integrated study of the sciences and medicine as institutions, practices, material cultures, intellectual achievements, and constituents of culture and politics…”
- Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies: “…encourages students to explore and critique past and present cultural structures of power, focusing in particular on the social construction of gender as a category of analysis within the broader matrix of race, class, ethnicity, and sexual identity…”
These are just a handful of the interdisciplinary majors available to you at Wes. And if you don’t find one that suits your fancy, you can arrange to design your own!
Jessie Spector ‘08
Senior Interviewer
