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Enhance your powers of perception in Penn’s Master of Philosophy in Liberal Arts
One benefit of a liberal arts degree is that interdisciplinary study refines a suite of related skills: communication, analytical thinking, nimble problem-solving, and keen observation. The pleasure of a liberal arts degree is the same. Penn’s Master of Philosophy in Liberal Arts (MPhil) invites students who have already completed a master’s degree to deepen or redefine their expertise by following their curiosity. Choose five courses from more than 50 academic disciplines across the University, and combine the skills and knowledge from each to refine a final thesis project of your own design.
At Penn, MPhil students work closely with an academic advisor and faculty mentors to select courses and chart an academic course that will challenge and cultivate your thinking. No two students will follow the same curriculum—but consider the following pairs of spring courses, which would introduce an ambitious MPhil student to different methodologies and theoretical frameworks that could change the way you see the world.
Pair CIMS 5030: Transnational TV with CIMS 5000: Food and Film
In a manner of speaking, media studies are human studies: by analyzing the visual, rhetorical, and economic strategies of storytelling and communication, you can diversify your academic skill set in a wide range of fields. For example, you might kick off your interdisciplinary curriculum by taking a course in Transnational TV, which explores the role television content plays in shaping national identity or advancing globalization. In this course, you get down to the nuts and bolts of television production and reception, from the global footprint of satellites and fiber optics to the ways television schedules have historically shaped everyday life—and how global television culture has been transformed by streaming. You also explore the rise of specific cultural phenomena such as Latin American telenovelas and Korean and Turkish TV dramas, and how they became transnational exports. This close analysis of television around the world has lessons for students of politics and global affairs, art and literature, cultural studies, and more.
If your interest in media studies leans more toward cinema—or if you are more of a foodie than a film buff—then you may enjoy visiting classic movies including Babette’s Feast and Tampopo in Food and Film. This course posits that food is much more than sustenance on the silver screen: food in film ties into fundamental questions of passion and desire, family, survival, art, gender, race, and ethnicity. Immersing yourself in food-focused Hollywood features as well as independent film and international documentaries, you will deepen your cinematic vocabulary and analysis while exploring the erotics of food, gender and cultural norms, the moral and religious aspects of consumption, and the realities of food production and consumption among other frameworks. Both Transnational TV and Food and Film are Proseminars, which means you can expect an intensive seminar with a small class size designed to maximize thoughtful discussions and feedback on student research, writing, and critical thinking skills.
Pair MLA 5020: Theater of Everyday Life: Ethnographic Writing in Public Spaces with ENGL 9016: Being Human: A Personal Approach to Race, Class & Gender
Every MPhil student can benefit from a writing-intensive course or two; even if you are not working toward a creative project for your thesis, a writing workshop can unlock your imagination, introduce you to new perspectives, and of course enhance your abilities to communicate and shape a narrative. Consider ethnography, a genre of writing common in the social sciences. Ethnography uses narrative immersion and storytelling techniques alongside objective description and analysis to collect and convey observations about human behavior. In Theater of Everyday Life: Ethnographic Writing in Public Spaces, your object of study is the function of performance in public life—that is, the way ordinary people present or mask themselves in ordinary situations out in the world. For the ethnographer, meaning can be conveyed bodily as well as verbally or textually; drawing on anthropology and theater for your assignments, you collect information by observing and writing about the way people act in public spaces—including yourself.
Being Human: A Personal Approach to Race, Class & Gender is more than a creative writing workshop: in addition to daily writing and analytical reading, you can expect to practice deep listening and observation, and create connections with your fellow writers as well as your own community. By increasing awareness of yourself and others, you increase your sensitivity to the dynamics of power and privilege at work in our own lives and in the world at large. In this course, writing is the place where you grapple with your own identity, narrative is an opportunity to bridge difference and division, and the techniques of writing craft are tools to help you see and be seen. Both courses practice writing as a tool of understanding, whether we are writing about our own lives or others, public life or private.
Design a degree at the intersection of your interests
Course offerings vary from term to term. The above pairings represent a fraction of what’s available to MPhil students this spring—and just a taste of the interdisciplinary coursework that characterizes Penn’s Master of Philosophy in Liberal Arts. Available on a full- or part-time basis, with evening and online courses to suit your schedule, this advanced graduate degree opens doors across the University.
Contact our program director, Dr. Christopher Pastore, to schedule an appointment to review your current research and explore your options for pursuing a Master of Philosophy in Liberal Arts at Penn.
(215) 898-7326
lps@sas.upenn.edu
www.upenn.edu/mla-mphil
