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Applications

The  application submission period for Fall 2023 admission is closed. We will be accepting applications for admission for Fall 2024 starting in September 2023 until December 15, 2023 at 11:59 p.m. (Central U.S. time).

REQUIRED MATERIALS:

To complete an online application or learn more about graduate programs at Northwestern, please visit the Graduate School.

If you have questions or would like further information, please email religious-studies@northwestern.edu or contact the Director of Graduate Studies, Prof. Mark McClish, at mark.mcclish@northwestern.edu.

APPLICATION FEE

The online application will prompt you to pay the application fee after all required questions have been answered. The application fee is $95 and must be paid via credit card at the time of application submission. Your application can not be processed without payment of the fee. 

To review the criteria for a fee waiver, click here.  If you are eligible for a fee waiver, a message will appear at the end of your application, in lieu of a payment entry page. 

Application Hints

The writing sample and statement of purpose are of particular importance to successful applications in all areas. These are normally submitted electronically, but if illustrations or special fonts cannot be uploaded onto the electronic application, they may be sent directly to the departmental Graduate Program Assistant either by PDF attachment or by regular mail.

The writing sample is a published or unpublished academic paper of about 20 to 30 double-spaced pages (article length). It should be a student’s best example of scholarly work to date; it need not reflect the student’s current area of interest precisely. Edited undergraduate theses, chapters of masters' theses, or seminar papers make good submissions. It may be accompanied by a brief explanation of its context and of the parameters provided for the original assignment.

The statement of purpose is essential for determining the fit between applicants and our program. The personal statement is a short essay (three or four double-spaced pages) that sketches a student’s proposed area of research, perhaps describing briefly studies that have formed the student’s interests. It should explain how Religious Studies' faculty is suited to the applicant’s goals, indicate another department and/or cluster in which the applicant would like to study, and name some faculty members in that program with whom the applicant would like to work.

The bulk of the statement should outline the region of research the student hopes to pursue in the dissertation, the disciplines and methods the student wishes to develop, and the approach that will guide the student's future teaching and academic research career.

For example:

Research interest: how ultrasound images shape Jewish women's theological and moral understandings of their fetuses

Method: Jewish law, medical ethics, and anthropology

Career plan: teaching and writing in Jewish bioethics, with a strong emphasis on the role experience plays in communal and individual moral discernment

Research interest: the interaction of European and Latin American immigrants in Roman Catholic parishes

Method: historical and sociological investigation, including ethnography

Career plan: teaching and writing about ethnicity in American religion

Research interest: the different ways in which Islamic education is shaping the moral and political views of Muslim children in Sudan and in Kenya

Method: ethical analysis; anthropology

Career plan: teaching and writing on contemporary Islamic thought and culture, with an emphasis on Islam in Africa

Research interest: changing notions of religious conversion in the late Middle Ages and Reformation

Method: historical, theological, and literary analysis, with a command of paleography and related research tools

Career plan: teaching and writing medieval/Reformation history in either a secular or a denominational program of religious studies

Research interest: the use of the themes of evolution and natural selection in four Protestant ethicists, two pre-WWII and two post-WWII

Method: theology, intellectual history, cultural studies

Career plan: teaching modern and contemporary Christian theology and ethics

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