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Office: Humanities Center, Room 250p
Telephone: 410‑617‑2841
email: liberalstudies@loyola.edu
Website: www.loyola.edu/academics/liberal-studies

Director: Randall P. Donaldson, Associate Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures (German)
Director, Program Operations: Steven A. Burr, Affiliate in Liberal Studies
 

Core Faculty

Professors: Drew Leder, Graham McAleer; Brian Murray; Thomas Ward
Associate Professors: Randall P. Donaldson

Faculty from a variety of academic departments and specializations, particularly in the humanities, also teach courses in the program.

The graduate program in liberal studies is designed to satisfy a wide variety of student interests. It exists for those whose professional lives demand a greater expertise or a broader knowledge base: teachers who want a graduate degree in a content area and government workers or librarians whose advancement requires further academic work. It also exists for those whose professions demand a greater breadth: business persons, lawyers, physicians, and anyone whose education has been so specialized that it did not provide the diversity necessary to an understanding of the complex social and intellectual currents of the time. The program exists for those who are intellectually curious: people from all walks of life who feel the need to examine unexpected aspects of the modern experience just to see what is there and to refine their perspectives. It exists for all who believe that the mind constantly needs to be enriched, to be challenged to see new things, or to see old things in new ways.

Because of its convictions, the program blends the traditional with the innovative. It is traditional in that it is a graduate program which emphasizes the academic rigor long associated with a graduate school and with the Jesuit traditions of Loyola University Maryland. It is innovative in that the traditional graduate emphasis upon depth of focus and research has been replaced by an emphasis upon breadth of reading and study.

The graduate program in liberal studies challenges students to continue their journey as citizens who: interact energetically and creatively with a changing world; grow in their awareness of cultural tendencies; cultivate their analytical and communication skills to reach their full potential; develop and expand a commitment to others; attain a broader perspective on contemporary problems and opportunities; and become, in the Jesuit ideal central to Loyola's educational mission, men and women for others.

Grounded in a core commitment to the liberal arts and sciences central to the University's mission, the graduate program in liberal studies aims to liberate in the classic sense of that term. It reaches out to those who want a rich and satisfying intellectual experience, as well as enhancement of their analytical and communication skills. Its subject matter is the whole spectrum of the modern American experience, as well as the roots of that experience as we discover them in other times and cultures. Areas of study include, but are not limited to, literature, business, economics, the arts, politics, philosophy, science, sociology, and intellectual and social history. Although the program is not practitioner-oriented and does not inevitably lead to a doctorate, liberal studies graduates often discover career benefits—in the development of the Jesuit ideal eloquentia perfecta— as well as personal satisfaction and enrichment.

Classes are held on the Baltimore, Columbia, and Timonium Campuses. Inquiries and questions can be sent to liberalstudies@loyola.edu.

Programs

• Liberal Studies, M.A.

• Liberal Studies, Master's Plus

Courses

Courses change each semester. The following listing reflects courses offered in the past and those the program may offer in the future. Students are encouraged to consult the liberal studies website for lists and extended descriptions of classes to be offered in coming semesters. All courses are three credits.

• LS 600 - Self and World: Fundamental Issues in Human Existence
• LS 629 - Black America: From Slave Narratives to Hip Hop
• LS 678 - Persuasion: The Lawyer's Craft
• LS 782 - Baltimore Stories
• LS 798 - Special Topics in Liberal Studies
• LS 799 - Capstone Project in Liberal Studies

• LS 671 - Surrealism and Cinema
• LS 673 - Minding Metaphors
• LS 675 - The Critical Eye: Looking at Art
• LS 677 - Understanding Comics: The World of Graphic Literature
• LS 679 - Literary Biography
• LS 680 - Critical Methodologies: Humor Studies
• LS 681 - Living Theatre
• LS 684 - All is Fair in Love and War: A Survey of Women's Texts from 900 to 2012
• LS 685 - Religion and Popular Culture
• LS 687 - A Sensory Approach to Creative and Practical Nonfiction Writing
• LS 689 - American Film Classics
• LS 690 - The 1970s: Ideas Have Consequences
• LS 691 - Writing a Life: Architecture of the Memoir
• LS 695 - Books in Context: The American Best Seller, 1960-1990
• LS 697 - Reading Television
• LS 760 - Women on the Verge: Adventures in the Transgressive Feminine
• LS 766 - The Art of the Modern Essay
• LS 770 - Relationships Between Men and Women in Literature
• LS 772 - The Sagas of the Seventies
• LS 773 - American Film and Society, 1955-1975
• LS 776 - Thinking through Genre
• LS 777 - Short Story Writing

• LS 601 - Guilt and Innocence: America in the Twentieth Century
• LS 604 - Modern Hispanic-American Fiction
• LS 608 - Latino Perspectives on the United States
• LS 610 - The Existential Imagination
• LS 613 - The American Ethos
• LS 614 - Working in Baltimore: Local and Global Perspectives
• LS 616 - America at Work: Local and Global Perspectives
• LS 617 - Voters, Campaigns, and Elections in the United States
• LS 620 - Power and Money: Understanding a Global Economy in Flux
• LS 621 - Reading the Nobel Prize Winners
• LS 623 - Another America, Central America
• LS 625 - The American Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1976
• LS 626 - Music and Technology, 1700 to the Present
• LS 628 - Scientists and Psychics
• LS 630 - The Philosophy of Faith
• LS 632 - Tradition and Revolt in Literature: Twentieth-Century Modernism(s)
• LS 635 - Genealogy of Race
• LS 636 - Deconstructing Postmodernism: Literary Theory in a Postmodern, Postcolonial World
• LS 702 - Scientists or Psychics: Victorian Era Science, Empiricism, and Belief
• LS 705 - Underground Film
• LS 706 - Liberation Thinking
• LS 709 - The Moral and Political Ideas of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings
• LS 710 - Fiction and Film of the 1980s
• LS 711 - Comedy and the Novel
• LS 712 - Nature: The History of a Philosophical Concept
• LS 713 - The Many Faces of Immigration
• LS 715 - Detective Fiction and the Quest Romance
• LS 718 - Hell and Us: The Question of Evil from Medieval to Modern
• LS 720 - Forgiveness and Revenge
• LS 723 - Challenges of Radical Dissent

• LS 640 - Contemporary Mysticism and Spirituality
• LS 641 - Human, Animal, Machine: Nature in Technological Society
• LS 642 - Science, Magic, and Religion: European Cultural History of the Scientific Revolution
• LS 644 - African American Religious Thought
• LS 645 - The Pre-Civil Rights Movement: The Generation before Brown, 1932-1954
• LS 646 - The Philosophy of Happiness
• LS 647 - Jesus and Relationships
• LS 649 - Philosophical Anthropology in Slave Narratives
• LS 650 - The Absurd in Life and Literature
• LS 651 - Fashion and Philosophy
• LS 652 - Making Foreign Policy
• LS 654 - Spiritual Classics from the East
• LS 655 - World Short Fiction: Diversity and Common Ground
• LS 656 - Numeracy: A Language of the World and the Imagination
• LS 657 - Challenges to Democracy
• LS 658 - Revisiting the Classics
• LS 659 - Violence and Competition in Urban America
• LS 660 - Practicing Death
• LS 661 - Exploring Digital Culture
• LS 662 - Generosity
• LS 663 - Between the Cracks: Reviving Neglected Texts
• LS 664 - Work and American Identity
• LS 665 - The Law as a Tool for Social Change
• LS 666 - Personhood at the Extremes
• LS 669 - Jane Austen's World: Marrying Literature and Philosophy
• LS 730 - Tragedy, Comedy, and the Human Condition
• LS 731 - The American Sixties: Transformations in Film and Fiction
• LS 733 - Philosophy of Culture and the American Dream
• LS 735 - We Are What We Buy: The Culture of Consumption
• LS 736 - The Experience of Evil
• LS 740 - Bargains with the Devil: The Faust Legend in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture
• LS 741 - Stories of the South
• LS 742 - Shades of Black: Film Noir and Post-War America
• LS 743 - We Are What We Eat: Food and the American Identity
• LS 744 - American Manhood in the Making
• LS 745 - After King: Civil Rights and the Black Freedom Movement, 1968-1985
• LS 747 - New Myths on the American Landscape: Writing (and) the American Dream
• LS 748 - The Psychoanalysis of Culture
• LS 750 - Studies in Catholic Autobiography
• LS 751 - Holy Land: Freedom and Truth in a Violent World
• LS 752 - Sex and Modernity
• LS 753 - Philosophy of Peace
• LS 755 - The Dynamic of the City

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