Mark Sussman, CISSC Director
The Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture is Concordia’s home for discussion, exchange, and collaborative research across the humanities and the arts. The Centre serves as a crossroads and gathering place, hosting affiliated faculty, students, and researchers at public lectures, small-scale conferences, intimate colloquia, self-directed working groups, and other hybrid events.
Co-sponsored by the Faculties of Arts and Science and Fine Arts, the Centre encourages and sustains cross-disciplinary scholarship and creative work, enriching the academic life of the university with new manifestations of thought. Committed to interdisciplinary work as an alternative to the increased professionalization and specialization in many aspects of academic life, the Centre promotes new topics of scholarship and experimental methods of presentation by offering sites of formal and informal intellectual and artistic investigation.
The Centre is the home of Concordia's PhD in Humanities Program, inaugurated in 1973. Grounded in multi-disciplinary approaches to research topics and methods, the Humanities program welcomes doctoral students working in a broad spectrum of research topics and methodologies in society, the arts, and culture. The Humanities program affords Concordia faculty the chance to work with colleagues from outside their home disciplines, supervising challenging and groundbreaking projects brought by a fiercely independent and creative cohort of doctoral researchers.
The Centre encourages and supports cross-field collaboration, fostering exchange between research and teaching, promoting new forms and objects of scholarship, and forging partnerships across Montreal, North America, and north-to-south within the Hemisphere. The Centre enables working groups to launch new fields of study not yet reflected in the university’s departmental structures, addressing current challenges demanding creative thought, critical interpretation, and rapid response to the urgent issues of the day.
