The Department of History

Department Chair: John Marino

Department Webpage: http://historyweb.ucsd.edu//

The UCSD Department of History has 39 regular faculty, 81 full-time graduate students, has averaged 7 completed dissertations per year between 2000 and 2006, and services more than 400 undergraduate majors.  The department has achieved national and international recognition both for the quality of its members' publications and for its graduate program.  Its faculty have garnered many honors and awards including the National Humanities Medal, fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. Several faculty have also been the recipients of campus teaching prizes. In the latest National Research Council survey of U.S. graduate programs in 1995, the PhD program ranked 26th out of 111 graduate programs in history, the youngest and the third smallest in the upper quartile (Brown and Johns Hopkins being smaller).  The department’s programs in Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical History, Modern Chinese History, and Latin American History rank in the top ten of their sub-fields, and the department also has strong programs in European History, the History of Science, and United States History, as well as in the History of the Modern Middle East and Africa.  Across the traditional geographical and temporal fields the department offers teaching and research strengths in thematic areas like the history of women, gender, and sexuality, cultural history, economic history, urban history, African-American history, and the history of the U.S. West, among others.  

The History Department currently has nine endowed chairs: four in Judaic Studies (Ancient Near Eastern Languages, Biblical Studies, Pre-Islamic Judaism, and Modern Jewish History); two in modern Chinese History, and three in Greek History (Ancient, Byzantine, and Modern).  In 2007/2008 the department will be searching to recruit new colleagues in African-American History, Brazilian History, U.S. Urban History, and the history of the U.S. and the World, in addition to continuing the recruitment of the Endowed Chair in Byzantine Greek History.  

The Department of Literature

Department Chair: Don Wayne

Department Webpage: http://literature.ucsd.edu/

A pioneering institutional innovation at its inception more than forty years ago, UCSD’s single Department of Literature gathers together a group of scholars, critics, and writers committed to research and debate on international and interdisciplinary issues related to the study of literature and culture. The department has a distinguished reputation for scholarship that combines formal and historical study from a comparative and transnational perspective, and for experimental creative writing in multiple genres. The organization of the Department of Literature is unusual in that it is neither a department of English nor a department of Comparative Literature as either is traditionally construed. Rather, from its beginning, the Literature Department at UCSD has aimed to be a department of world literatures and cultures within a single unit committed to the multilingual historical study of the connections and conflicts between cultures and society. This commitment includes the ambitious project of teaching and conducting research in Chinese, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Italian, Korean, Latin, Russian, and Spanish, as well as the study of creative writing and composition. In addition to its strengths in traditional areas of literary study organized according to language, period, national, and regional lines, members of the department’s faculty are known for leading-edge work in emergent fields such as Asian American Studies, Chicano/a and Latino/a Studies, African American and African Diaspora Studies, and postcolonial studies. Members of the Writing faculty have national and international reputations for their experimental work in poetry, fiction, and multimedia production.

The Literature Department offers ten undergraduate majors, including Literatures in English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Literatures of the World, Writing, Cultural Studies, and the composite major in two literatures. At the graduate level UCSD offers an M.A. in Comparative Literature, Literatures in English, French, German, and Spanish, as well as a single Ph.D. in Literature which was designed to emphasize the transnational outlook of the Department’s program and its stake in theoretical, interdisciplinary, and cultural studies. The department is scheduled to inaugurate an MFA in Writing in Fall 2009.
 Graduates of the department’s Ph.D. program have gone on to successful academic careers at major colleges and universities in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

Literature faculty have been the recipients of many prestigious awards and grants, including the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize, the Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Theater Library Association's George Freedley Memorial Book Award; fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Getty Institute, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the Japan and Korea Foundations, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation; and creative writing grants from the California Arts Council, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. 
A number of Literature faculty have also been the recipients of the campus’ distinguished teaching awards.

Each year the Department of Literature’s New Writing Series brings internationally renowned writers to campus to read and interact with students. Recordings of such readings over the past thirty years are part of the UCSD Library’s Archive for New Poetry, one of the world’s most important collections of its kind.

In the Summer of 2007, the UCSD Literature Department became the home of the annual Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, the oldest and most distinguished writers’ workshop of its kind.

In 2006-07 the Literature Department had 496 majors and 105 graduate students.. The department’s enrollments for undergraduate Literature courses for 2006-07 totaled 8,481 (not counting 2,829 students taught by Literature faculty outside of the department in courses for other campus programs). Enrollments in Literature graduate seminars for 2006-07 were 307.

The Department of Music

Department Chair: Rand Steiger

Department Webpage: http://music.ucsd.edu/

UCSD's Department of Music is internationally recognized as the West Coast's premiere center for education and innovation in new music. Founded in 1966 by composers Robert Erickson and Will Ogdon, it was designed to provide a unique environment in which composers, performers and scholars could collaborate and engage with the most vital ideas and newest technologies in order to push the boundaries of contemporary music. Today, graduate students come from around the world to pursue M.A., Ph.D. and DMA degrees in Composition, Computer Music , Critical Studies/Experimental Practices (CSEP) and Performance. Undergraduate majors include Performance, Composition, Music Technology and Music Literature, as well as the cutting-edge Interdisciplinary Computing in the Arts Major (ICAM). In addition, the Department has many performance ensembles and courses that are open to all UCSD students.


Included among the many awards garnered by members of the Department of Music, past and present, are two Pulitzer Prizes, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Grawemeyer Award, and several awards from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP).

In addition to authoring important books and articles in the fields of music and musicology, members of the faculty have served as resident composers with major orchestras such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Orchestre de Paris; they have created operas for major companies and festivals such as the Paris Opera , Salzburg Festival, Munich Bienale, New York City Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera; and they have composed works for major orchestras including the American Composers Orchestra/Carnegie Hall, Atlanta Symphony, BBC Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Houston Symphony, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony, San Diego Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and Tokyo Philharmonic.

The UCSD Music Department was the home of the Center for Music Experiment (CME), one of the country’s earliest centers for new and computer-based music.
 CME also supported the development of the Computer Audio Research Laboratory( CARL), a series of acoustic programs written by F. Richard Moore. Revitalized as the Center for Research for Computing in the Arts (CRCA), the center has expanded to include faculty who represent computing interests from such diverse departments as visual arts, theatre, psychology, computer science and engineering. Fostering advanced research and production at the crossroads between digital technology and new art forms, current areas of interest include interactive networked multimedia, virtual reality, computer-spatialized audio and live performance techniques for computer music and graphics.

Graduates of UCSD’s Department of Music have gone on to important careers in composition, performance, and teaching. Among the institutions that alumni hold academic appointments in are California Institute of the Arts (2), Colorado, Dartmouth, Florida, Maryland (3), Princeton, North Texas State (2), NYU, SMU, Stanford (2), UCSC (3), UCI (2), UCR (2), and USC. In recent years, graduates of the department’s undergraduate ICAM Program have taken positions with major technology firms (including Alesis, Digidesign, Electronic Arts, Qualcom and Sony), initiated their own start-ups, and gone on to advanced degrees in major graduate programs.

The Department of Philosophy

Department Chair: David Brink

Department Webpage: http://philosophy.ucsd.edu/

Historically, philosophy lies at the intersection of the sciences, the arts, and religion. It examines the nature and limits of knowledge, meaning, and value in ways that aim to integrate new developments in our scientific world-view and self-understanding with a rich tradition of philosophical concepts. True to this tradition, the UCSD Philosophy Department offers undergraduates a well-rounded education in traditional and contemporary philosophical perspectives and contributes significantly to the teaching of general education requirements in all of UCSD’s colleges. The Department has a highly-ranked graduate program with specialties in three broad areas -- philosophy of the sciences and the mind; moral, political, and legal philosophy; and the history of philosophy. Philosophy at UCSD is often practiced in an interdisciplinary spirit, as is reflected in the Department’s participation in interdisciplinary graduate programs in Cognitive Science and Science Studies and in the Institute for Law and Philosophy, based at the University of San Diego Law School.

Philosophy faculty have active research programs, publishing recently on a wide variety of topics, including Plato’s theory of forms, Aristotle on natural teleology, a comparison of Stoic and rationalist conceptions of the final good, Kant’s theory of causality, Hegel’s theory of reconciliation, the history of logic, the nature of truth, the metaphysics and psychology of color, the nature of time and space-time, idealization and models in the natural and social sciences, the role of mechanisms in biological explanation, embodied cognition, neuroscience and moral judgment, the reconciliation of responsibility with determinism, practical reason and the good, and the role of responsibility and luck in matters of distributive justice. Department members have won numerous awards and honors, including two prestigious MacArthur (“Genius”) Fellowships, Fulbright Fellowships, and grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Ford Foundation.

The Department of Theatre and Dance

Department Chair: Charlie Oates

Department Webpage: http://www-theatre.ucsd.edu/

The Department of Theatre and Dance has long been a leader in the field. Its MFA Program in Theatre has been rated number three in the nation by US News and World Report for over ten years.  Faculty and graduates have been the recipients of two Tony Awards, the European Union Theatre Award, Time Out/Dance Umbrella Award, the Helen Hayes Award, T.C.G. National Theater Artist Residency Award, N.E.A. New Forms Grant, PEN/Laura Pels Award, the Alpert Award, the Craig Noel Award for Excellence in Theatre, Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Lifetime Achievement Award. The department's faculty features artists and scholars with national and international profiles who work in the New York theatre, regionally, in Europe and elsewhere around the world. This past year the work of faculty artists was seen on Broadway, at major theatres in Romania, Austria and Italy and at American theatres such as the Arena Stage, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, the Utah Shakespearean Theatre, The Alley, the Old Globe and Theatre for a New Audience in New York.  This year dance faculty have had their original choreography presented in New York, London, Mexico, Hungary and extensively in Southern California. During the 2007 faculty members have served as guest teacher/artists at arts institutes in China, Mexico, Latvia and Germany.  All faculty members teach both graduate and undergraduate courses.

Placing a high value upon innovation, the department consistently mounts adventurous seasons, producing plays in six different performance spaces. The department's affiliation with the La Jolla Playhouse features guaranteed residences for MFA students in acting, directing, design and stage management and regular interaction with staff and guest artists employed by LJP.  The department's Baldwin New Play Festival has blossomed into a national showcase for MFA playwrights with artistic directors, leading playwrights, literary managers and agents coming from around the country to see four to five new plays in rotating repertory.  MFA designers are showcased at Ming's Clambake in New York and Design West at UCLA and MFA actors are presented to industry professionals in a consortium showcase along with graduating actors from the Yale School of Drama and New York University.  MFA Stage Managers, as a group have had 100% employment with major theatre companies and in television and film.  More than half of the department’s recent MFA writers have been signed by top literary agents in their first year after graduation. MFA graduates have had artistic associate appointments at major theatre festivals around the country including the Williamstown Theatre Festival, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and on major Broadway shows including, most recently, the musicals Rent, and Grey Gardens.

In 1999 a new joint PhD program in conjunction with UC Irvine was inaugurated and has added immensely to the fabric of the department with students working as editors for Theatre Forum, an international journal based at UCSD, and attending conferences internationally.

In 2006, the department took in its first MFA students in Sound Design (scenic design, costume design and lighting design already existed).  This new program takes advantage of the many design opportunities available during the season and maintains an ongoing relationship with UCSD’s groundbreaking CalIT2 research center in digital technology.

In 2008, the department will take in its first MFA students in Dance Theatre, a program in choreography that will integrate a cutting edge modern dance sensibility along with the department's substantial theatre production capabilities.

The undergraduate program is steadily growing with 200 majors in BA programs in Theatre, in Dance, and a double major in Theatre and Dance. In addition to three productions per year that are dedicated to undergraduates, undergraduates also compete for roles in the graduate productions and enjoy near limitless opportunities to produce their own work in the department's cabaret system that puts to use two of the department's six theatres.

The Department of Visual Arts

Department Chair: Lesley Stern

Department Webpage: http://visarts.ucsd.edu/html/splash.html

The Visual Arts Department at UCSD, solidly grounded in an interdisciplinary and conceptual approach, is one of the most highly ranked art programs within one of the foremost research institutions in the country. The pairing of UCSD, uniquely endowed as a premier scientific research institution, and the Visual Arts Departments’ interdisciplinary ethos and tradition for innovation and risk-taking opens up opportunities to create an unprecedented experimental environment where the arts, humanities, science and technology intersect.

The Visual Arts Department was founded by some of the country’s leading artists–David and Eleanor Antin, Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison, Allan Kaprow, Manny Farber, Harold Cohen– and has evolved to encompass a vibrant range of artists, critics, theorists and historians including Norman Bryson, Rubén Ortiz-Torres, Lev Manovich, Teddy Cruz and many others. Faculty routinely develop organic relationships with colleagues in a variety of departments across the university and within the larger community. It is this conversational model that characterizes the Visual Arts at UCSD, producing critical connections between the university, the city and region it occupies and the shifting dynamics of a global culture. Faculty regularly exhibit in major art museums and international shows, publish widely, and receive major awards from bodies such as the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH and NEA, the Warhol Foundation, and the American Academy in Rome.

The Visual Arts Department offers Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) and Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) across painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, computing in the arts, film, video, photography and criticism; as well as a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in art history and a Ph.D. in art and media history, theory and criticism, and with a new emphasis in Art Practice. Rather than being sequestered in their studios, students at all levels are expected to actively engage with the Department, as well as the larger campus and regional art communities. Art history and critical theory influence the art practice of studio artists, and conversely, art history/critical theory majors and Ph.D. students may be deeply engaged with issues of contemporary art practice. The faculty in the Department's more recently established Ph.D. program teach in areas ranging from antiquity to contemporary public art, from aesthetic theory to the most cutting edge digital media. In addition to an emphasis on Latin American Art (from the pre-Columbian period to the twentieth-century) the program has a critical mass of scholars working in modern and contemporary art and media history — a rarity in conventional graduate art history departments.

In recent years the Department has developed curricular and research initiatives in areas such as Latin America, Asia and Public Culture, thus extending existing conversations to include architecture, urbanism and the environment. Located twenty minutes away from the busiest border in the world UCSD is a place of intersections: not only do the US and Latin America touch here, but we are also at the threshold of Asia and the Pacific Rim. This trans-border geographic condition positions the Visual Arts Department at the center of a North-South, East-West cross roads between Los Angeles and Mexico City, New York and Shanghai, making it a unique cross-cultural platform where conventional disciplinary boundaries are constantly being re-defined by faculty and students, as they collaborate in researching new forms of art making and critical thinking.

The Department has on-going relationships with many divisions of the university, including literature, humanities, and music, as well as the Center for Latin American Studies, Center for Research for Computing in the Arts, Center for Humanities, the Division of Social Sciences, and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Strong ties have also been developed with many regional and bi-national art institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, The San Diego Museum of Art, InSite and the Centro Cultural de Tijuana.

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