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Literature Literature
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  2. Welcome to UCSD’s Department of Literature

Welcome to UCSD’s Department of Literature!

Department Chair, Professor Daisuke MiyaoLiterature Department Chair
Professor Daisuke Miyao
Faculty Profile
litchair@ucsd.edu 

The Department of Literature at UCSD is a community of scholars, critics, and writers working with transnational, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary perspectives and creativity. Since its founding in the 1960s, our department has been known for its unique structure among similar departments and programs in the UC system and across the country.

Our faculty have accomplished innovative research and teaching in literatures and cultures in multiple languages including Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Russian, Spanish, and other world languages. We are dedicated to enhancing and exploring the communication and dialogue between diverse cultures and societies from antiquity to the present. We have built our strengths in both theoretical and historical thinking.  

On the undergraduate level, our department includes undergraduate majors in English, Spanish, World Literatures, and Creative Writing. At the graduate level, we offer PhD program in English, Spanish, Comparative Literature, and Cultural Studies and an MFA in Writing. In addition to many successes as writers and academics, our graduates have gone on to successful positions in education, broadcast and print journalism, non-profit and NGO work, communications, government, law, advertising, and many other fields.

Students are encouraged to build connections between the fields of study in our department, but also with other disciplines like Communications, Ethnic Studies, History, Philosophy, Visual Arts, and the sciences. A rigorous Honors program, with critical and creative components, is available for students wishing to take their scholarship and creative work to the next level.

Considering the challenges that we are facing in the current world, our department emphasizes that dialogue is indispensable among many incommensurable voices. It is important to cloister ourselves to study texts closely. At the same time, it is essential to think about how to engage with social movements that have defined ourselves as global citizens and human beings. That is the mission of the Department of Literature at UCSD.