What is the Ph.D. in Literature Program?
An innovative interdisciplinary program which studies literature from transnational and intercultural perspectives within traditional disciplines and across disciplinary and national boundaries.
By combining the resources of a broad spectrum of departments, programs, and research institutes at the University of Notre Dame, the Ph.D. in Literature Program provides students with the opportunity to engage in an academic community that values the study of literature in more than one language from transnational, transdisciplinary, and theoretical perspectives. The Program encourages approaches to literary study that supersede national(istic) boundaries and examine new relations between Europe and the globe, between antiquity and modernity, between mass culture and elite productions. Learn more >
Featured Faculty
Vittorio Hösle
Hösle’s specializations include philosophy (ethics, metaphysics, political philosophy, aesthetics) and intellectual history. In the field of literature he has published a book on Greek tragedy (in German 1984; Italian translation 1986) as well as one on Woody Allen (in German in 2001, in Spanish in 2002, in English in 2007) and a major study on the philosophical dialogue (in German 2006). In philosophy his major works are: Hegels System (2 volumes, Hamburg 1987, in Korean and Portuguese in 2007) and Moral und Politik (Munich, 1997; English translation Notre Dame 2004). His exchange of letters with a young girl, The Dead Philosopher’s Café, has been translated into thirteen languages. He is concurrent professor in the Department of Philosophy and in the Department of Political Science. More >
Terry Eagleton
Professor Terry Eagleton is the Excellence in English Distinguished Visitor. He has written around fifty books and is himself the subject of at least two monographs, is one of the world’s leading literary critics and, according to The Independent in 2007, ‘the man who succeeded F. R. Leavis as Britain’s most influential academic critic.’ Prior to his move to Lancaster, Terry Eagleton was John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester (2001-2008) and before that Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford (1992-2001). Professor Eagleton is a Fellow of both the British Academy and the English Association, and has held visiting appointments at such universities as Cornell, Duke, Iowa, Melbourne, Notre Dame, Trinity College Dublin, and Yale.
Breandán Ó Buachalla
Breandán Ó Buachalla is the first Thomas J. and Kathleen O’Donnell Chair in Irish Language and Literature. He is a former Professor of Modern Irish in University College Dublin (1978-1996) and Professor of Irish in the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (1973-1978). Ó Buachalla has held the Parnell Fellowship at Cambridge University and visiting Professorships at Notre Dame, New York University and Boston College. The leading authority on the literature and ideology of early modern Ireland, he has published extensively on the impact of the Counter-Reformation on Irish political thought, early modern historiography and the cult of the Stuarts in Irish literature and has been editor and co-editor of numerous collections of verse. Besides cultural studies, literature and politics, he has published extensively in the field of linguistics; his most recent book being an analysis of the dialect of Irish spoken in Cape Clear, West Cork. More >
Piero Boitani
Professor Boitani received his Laurea in Lettere from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” then went on to earn degrees from Wittenberg and Cambridge Universities. Currently professor of comparative literature at La Sapienza, Boitani has been a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Connecticut, Ohio State University and Keio University in Tokyo, and is a corresponding fellow of the British Academy.
