Language, Literacy and Culture

The Language, Literacy and Culture PhD program from University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) draws upon the departments of Africana Studies; American Studies; Education; English; Gender and Women’s Studies; History; Modern Languages, Linguistics and Intercultural Communication; and Sociology, Anthropology, and Health Administration and Policy at UMBC. The goal of the program is to provide research and applications that will enable professionals to work with interdisciplinary issues in language, literacy and culture.

Key facts:

In their research and teaching, our faculty members represent interdisciplinary areas of research across the humanities, social sciences, and education. The alliances made with other academic departments at UMBC have made our program an ideal incubator of knowledge and interdisciplinary inquiry.

A unique value of this program is our wide range of contemporary multi-disciplinary perspectives and a continuum of methodological approaches from the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Our research and teaching community includes affiliated faculty from more than nine programs and departments across our campus. We expand beyond traditional methodological and disciplinary divisions, encouraging synergistic, collaborative, community- and place-based approaches that combine theories andapplications. Our vision of language, literacy, and culture places those processes as crucially important to participatory democracy.

Courses include:

• Social Inequality and Social Policy
• Theorizing Identity in Multi-Cultural Contexts
• Constructing Race, Class and Gender
• Language in Diverse Schools and Communities
• Language, Gender and Sexuality
• Immigration, Race, and Society
• Inequality in Education
• Quantitative Research Methods
• Research Writing and Design
• Ethnoaraphic Methods.