The Cultural Studies Ph.D. program comprises the following three fields:
1. Culture and the Arts
This field encompasses the work Cultural Studies Ph.D students are invited to do in relation to materials traditionally classified as aesthetic. While many types of research are possible, one of the main strengths of our faculty is on comparative, historical, and theoretical approaches to visual culture.
More specifically, students working in visual studies are free to pursue research into a single medium, form, or genre; but they would also be expected to understand that medium in relation to other visual and non-visual media. Similarly, students working on narrative might branch out from narrative in fiction to other forms of narrative in media such as television, theatre, newspapers, film, or digital media through worldbuilding.
Many of our faculty work with experimental, cutting-edge materials (in film, documentary, narrative, theatre, art, and music), precisely because these experiments engage in the issue of the grammar of their own media and in the history and conditions of their own production, and students will be invited to come to terms with such materials and concerns. Cultural Studies faculty have published widely on decolonization and artistic research; media arts history; the arts and environment; aesthetic experience; modernism and the avant-garde; popular and experimental music
2. Culture and Technology
This area provides an opportunity for advanced humanistic research into modern and contemporary technoculture. Students are encouraged to explore how technology influences the definition, history, and transformation of culture, drawing on examples from digital media and from developments in artificial intelligence, logistics, robotics, and science.
Explorations in this field may encompass the development of possible worlds, the role of media in shaping perceptions of community and senses of belonging, the ways technology influences our understanding of aesthetics, ethics, and desire, and the transformation of bodies through technological means.
Faculty in Cultural Studies have contributed to scholarship on intersections of culture and technology, addressing topics such as environmental communication; science fiction and worldbuilding; the influence of media platforms in shaping public discourse and debate; and the technologies shaping contemporary labour and violence. Additionally, the program has a large collection of volumes dedicated to the study of science fiction.
3. Culture and Theory
One of the distinctive features of the Cultural Studies Graduate Program at Trent is a commitment to theoretical inquiry into the foundations of cultural studies as an interdisciplinary field. We encourage students to critically engage with theoretical frameworks and concepts that are taken for granted in national or disciplinary perspectives. Rather than serving solely as a lens for interpreting culture, this approach to theory treats theory itself as a subject for critical exploration.
Cultural Studies faculty have published many articles and books relating to the work of diverse theorists (eg. Arendt, Bataille, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Deleuze, Derrida, Fanon, Habermas, Haraway, Hayles, Jameson, Kristiva, Lacan, Lyotard, McLuhan, Rancière, Saussure); and focusing on recent developments in biopolitics, environmentalism, narratology, postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and semiotics. The program is also home to Media Theory, a scholar-led, open access journal of peer-reviewed, theoretical interventions into all aspects of media and communications.