PhD Study Areas
Northwestern offers several areas of concentration in Religious Studies for doctoral students:
- American Religions
- Buddhist Studies
- Classical Judaism
- Hinduism
- Islam
- Latin American Religions
- Religion, Law, and Politics
Each area of study is interdisciplinary, involving work with Northwestern faculty specialists outside the Department as well as within it. This flexibility allows students and advisers to craft flexible programs of study deeply grounded in religious studies methods but also informed by methods in history, the social sciences, literary studies, art history, developmental psychology, or another discipline. All students take courses outside the department, most choose at least one dissertation adviser from another department, and many students take one qualifying examination in another discipline.
In addition, we encourage applicants to strengthen interdisciplinary connections thematically by exploring the programs, seminars, and additional fellowships available to Religious Studies PhD students through The Graduate School’s new Interdisciplinary Cluster Initiative. TGS also offers Graduate Certificates that enable students to gain competencies in or across fields.
TGS currently sponsors clusters in the following areas:
- African Studies
- Asian Studies
- British Studies
- Classics
- Comparative and Historical Social Science
- Comparative Race and Diaspora
- Critical Dance Studies
- Critical Studies in Theatre and Performance
- Critical Theory
- Environment, Culture, and Society
- Gender and Sexuality Studies
- Global Avant-garde and Modernist Studies
- Jewish Studies
- Latin American and Caribbean Studies
- Medieval Studies
- Middle East and North African Studies (MENA)
- Native American and Indigenous Studies
- Poetry and Poetics
- Public Humanities
- Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies
- Science Studies
- Water Security