Jesse Arseneault, Graduate Program Director (Humanities PhD)
Welcome to the Humanities PhD at Concordia University! Our program is designed for students whose work doesn’t have a traditional disciplinary home. Their work might not fit within the confines of a single department, may ask questions that that can’t be answered within the confines of a single field, or involve a mix of research, research creation, and artistic output. If this sounds like you or you have a project that hasn’t found a home elsewhere, consider applying to our program.
Students in our program typically arrive with an MA or MFA and a burgeoning record of scholarly activity or artistic practice. We strive to provide an exciting hub for students from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, giving them an opportunity for collegial exchange and conversation with academics and artists working in a variety of areas. Situated between the Faculty of Arts and Science and the Faculty of Fine Arts, our program enlists faculty from across the broad umbrella of humanities scholarship and creative activity, providing a dynamic community for cutting edge and field-advancing work. We are housed within the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC), whose annual program of activities gives students an environment that nourishes innovative scholarship and creation. Our goal is to give students access to the tools they need to allow original questions to take shape.
To give students the range they need to complete their projects, our program allows students to construct a committee of faculty from three different fields. While primary advisors must come from Concordia, we sometimes have students with committee members from other universities as well. Through the course of their PhD, students will have the opportunity to take courses in foundational humanities theoretical and methodological approaches. Students then pursue independent studies in different disciplines and acquire specialization in three different areas of research and/or creative practice. The Humanities dissertation might take the familiar form of a long-form research project, or a combination of research creation and original scholarship on a specific topic, method, or practice. If you are considering applying to our program, know that you will have significant leeway to pursue a project tailored to your interests in consultation with your committee. For more information about what we offer, you can take a look at Concordia’s Research Currents, and peruse some of our program’s Student Profiles and PhD theses.
Concordia University, located in Montreal, is an ideal place for the kind of work described above. Not only is Montreal a vibrant, multilingual global city, the university has a longstanding commitment to interdisclinarity that is responsive to the local community and the wider world with several research centres, labs, and studios, including Hexagram, Milieux (and its 7 research clusters: Indigenous Futures; Textiles & Materiality; Technoculture Art and Games; Speculative Life; Post Image; LeParc, the Performing Arts Research Cluster; Participatory Media; Media History), Matralab; SenseLab; Mobile Media Lab (mobility studies); Feminist Media Studio; Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling; Centre for Sensory Studies, Centre for Expanded Poetics, Centre for Curating & Public Scholarship, and the Loyola Sustainability Research Centre. Alongside their advisors, Humanities students are also engaged in exciting inter-university collaborative research projects such as CRIHN, Figura/NT2, QCBS, and IMMERSe.
If you want more information about our program or how to apply, don’t hesitate to reach out to us.
Jesse Arseneault
Humanities PhD Graduate Program Director
English Department
Concordia University
Contact me at: gpdhumanities@concordia.ca
