Italian Graduate Program

The Italian Studies Graduate Program at the University of Texas at Austin is a broad-based, interdisciplinary program designed to offer students maximum flexibility in course selection and choice of specialization. Based in the Department of French and Italian, the program leads to both the Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees, with the M.A. conceived as a step toward the Ph.D. rather than as a terminal professional degree.

Download an Italian Studies graduate brochure (PDF, 115K)

While core courses in Italian literature and culture are taught by Italian professors in the Department of French and Italian, the program also draws heavily on the talents of scholars in other disciplines--such as Archeology, Art History, Classics, Comparative Literature, English, Film Studies, History, Linguistics, and Music--who have expertise on Italian topics. Students therefore benefit from ample training in specialized Italian courses as well as from the intellectually stimulating experience of being in the classroom with graduate students from other departments. For today's competitive job market, in which interdisciplinary skills are at a premium, graduates of the program will be exceptionally well-prepared.

Resources

The General Libraries at the University of Texas at Austin, among the top ten research libraries in the U.S. and Canada, is well furnished with primary and secondary source materials in Italian language, history, literature, and film. The Fine Arts Library and the Architecture and Planning Library both have excellent holdings on Italian arts and culture, and the Visual Resources Collections contain over 50,000 slides of Italian artwork. Manuscripts and rare books on Italian subjects from the holdings of the renowned Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center provide unprecedented research opportunities for Italian Studies graduate students: holdings include 20 medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, 200 incunabula, 5,345 manuscripts from the fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth century, and over 1,600 other rare works.

The Suida-Manning Collection, one of the finest collections of Renaissance and Baroque art in the United States, is another world-class resource for graduate work in Italian Studies. Housed in the new Blanton Museum, this collection includes approximately 250 paintings, 400 drawings, and 50 sculptures spanning the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries, with exceptional depth in sixteenth through eighteenth-century Italian art.

The University currently has three excavation projects in Italy: Metaponto and Croton (Southern Italy), Torre Annunziata (Naples), and Ostia (Rome).

Competitive study abroad scholarships are available