Scholarship beyond words
We all know the look of a doctoral dissertation: thick, heavy, and tightly bound. Inside it are phalanxes of paragraphs. Words march past by the thousands. Text-heavy dissertations, after all, are artifacts of a medieval university culture that gave the printed word scholastic pre-eminence. But Harvard anticipates scholarship that goes beyond the written word. It welcomes film, photo, audio, and other means of cultural expression, without abandoning the traditional rigor of academic investigation. One sign of this new wave came last fall, when the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) approved a secondary Ph.D. field in “critical media practice,” proposed by Harvard anthropologist Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Joseph Pellegrino University Professor Peter Galison. For the first time, doctoral students can now incorporate video, film, photography, exhibition, hypermedia, the Internet, and other sources of nontextual information into their academic work. Students can apply starting this semester. They are required to take two core courses, two...