About Cultural Studies

The Graduate Program for Cultural Studies (CLST) provides the University of Pittsburgh with a vibrant intellectual center for interdisciplinary cultural critique and analysis. Through its

•         graduate certificate programs,
•         course offerings,
•         common seminar and colloquium,
•         graduate student fellowships,
•         dissertation-writers’ colloquium,
•         dissertation prize,
•         incoming graduate student meet-and-greet,
•         open house,
•         professional workshops,
•         small grant fund for graduate student summer research,
•         distinguished guest lecture,
•         major annual or biennial conference,
•         and its co-sponsorship of dozens of talks and forums,

CLST fosters the intensive study of cultural formations, past and present, from around the world.

One of the oldest and, with about one hundred course offerings annually, most extensive cultural studies programs in the US, CLST serves as a site where 193 faculty members and 92 enrolled graduate certificate students from twenty-four of Pitt's departments and schools exchange ideas about studying culture, beyond national boundaries and disciplinary divisions.  CLST, in short, stands as an institutional forum for responding to the increasingly global need to engage, through interdisciplinary and postdisciplinary lenses, the problematics of culture.

The program's current director is Ronald J. Zboray, Professor of Communication, an affiliate faculty member in Cultural Studies, Global Studies, and Gender, Sexuality, & Women's Studies.