Theatre, Ph.D.

Overview

Administered by the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Theatre Program, the Columbia Ph.D. Program in Theatre encourages students to explore the reciprocal relationships between performance and scholarship, criticism and creation, theory and practice in one of the world's great centers of theatrical performance, New York City.

Overseen by an interdepartmental committee – faculty are drawn from the Department of English and Comparative Literature, the Theatre Program of the School of the Arts, the Center for Comparative Literature and Society, Germanic Languages, Philosophy, Classics, and others – the program encourages students to pursue interdisciplinary research across the wide spectrum of theatre and performance studies.

The relatively small size of the program ensures a close working relationship with supervising faculty; doctoral students in Theatre also work with doctoral students in other humanities fields, as well as with Theatre Program MFA students in Directing, Dramaturgy, and Playwriting.

Careers

 In the past decade, Ph.D. students from the program have been appointed to tenure-track positions in a range of fields at Stanford, Princeton, Boston University, Indiana University, King's College London, The University of Texas at Austin, to name a few.

Programme Structure

Course structure

• The relatively small size of the program ensures a close working relationship with supervising faculty; doctoral students in Theatre also work with doctoral students in other humanities fields, as well as with Theatre Program MFA students in Directing, Dramaturgy, and Playwriting.

• For the PhD degree, students submit and defend a scholarly dissertation on their choice of topic, subject to approval by the interdepartmental committee and a faculty sponsor.