(Multilingual) Romance Linguistics Programs

[xani]

Currently I am double majoring in Linguistics and Romance Languages (Primary: Spanish, Secondary: French, Tertiary: Italian) and minoring in Latin.  For a while now I have been exploring various PhD programs for linguistics (general as well as historical linguistics and Indo-European Studies), but I am also interested in seeing what options there are in the field of Romance linguistics.  I have found that Berkley has an interdepartmental program that leads to a degree in the multiple Romance languages (in either a linguistics or a literature track), and I have yet to find another program like this. Does anyone know of other similar programs?

[ExponentialDecay]

Harvard and Princeton have Romance Languages departments; if my memory serves me, so does Brown. If you want to work in multiple languages, any Comp Lit program will accommodate you. However, I don't understand why you need a PhD in multiple Romance languages. It is unlikely to be helpful to you on the academic job market, compared to a PhD in one language. 

[Bleep_Bloop]

On 7/11/2016 at 9:33 AM, ExponentialDecay said:

Harvard and Princeton have Romance Languages departments; if my memory serves me, so does Brown. If you want to work in multiple languages, any Comp Lit program will accommodate you. However, I don't understand why you need a PhD in multiple Romance languages. It is unlikely to be helpful to you on the academic job market, compared to a PhD in one language. 

Harvard does have a Romance Languages department but its focus is on literature, theory, cultural and visual studies, etc. I really doubt they'd take on a linguistics candidate, but I might be wrong about that. Not sure how much Romance linguistics you'd be able to do in Harvard's linguistics department, but it's worth checking out. Princeton has not had a Romance Language department for some time now. It split into Spanish & Portuguese and French & Italian. To my knowledge, Princeton doesn't offer any linguistics training at the graduate level. Cornell and UPenn also have Romance departments, but again their focus is not on linguistics. That said, at some schools you might be able to base yourself in a linguistics department and collaborate with Romance language departments if they happen to offer relevant coursework. In my experience, faculty in Romance/language departments don't have backgrounds in linguistics, but many lecturers do.

[Bleep_Bloop]

On 7/11/2016 at 9:33 AM, ExponentialDecay said:

Harvard and Princeton have Romance Languages departments; if my memory serves me, so does Brown. If you want to work in multiple languages, any Comp Lit program will accommodate you. However, I don't understand why you need a PhD in multiple Romance languages. It is unlikely to be helpful to you on the academic job market, compared to a PhD in one language. 

Also just wanted to add that I agree with ExponentialDecay's advice that it's more advantageous on the job market to get your degree in a language department than in an interdisciplinary, multi-language program. Again, you can always take courses outside your department.

You'll likely be applying for jobs in language departments and hiring committees will look for grad students who trained in similar departments. They'll also be tempted to see a candidate from a multi-language program as a jack of all trades and master of none. Not that I entirely agree with that, but I've seen it happen (also with comp lit candidates applying to language departments though obviously this is case-by-case). 

[Glasperlenspieler]

As a general rule, it seems that language departments at elite private universities tend to have very limited offerings in linguistics (often a pedagogy course and not much more). So you're probably better off looking at flagship public universities, which tend to have richer linguistics-related resources in their language departments (I'd be curious to hear an explanation of why this is the case) or at linguistics departments.

[ExponentialDecay]

On 7/15/2016 at 9:54 PM, Bleep_Bloop said:

Harvard does have a Romance Languages department but its focus is on literature, theory, cultural and visual studies, etc. I really doubt they'd take on a linguistics candidate, but I might be wrong about that. Not sure how much Romance linguistics you'd be able to do in Harvard's linguistics department, but it's worth checking out. Princeton has not had a Romance Language department for some time now. It split into Spanish & Portuguese and French & Italian. To my knowledge, Princeton doesn't offer any linguistics training at the graduate level. Cornell and UPenn also have Romance departments, but again their focus is not on linguistics. That said, at some schools you might be able to base yourself in a linguistics department and collaborate with Romance language departments if they happen to offer relevant coursework. In my experience, faculty in Romance/language departments don't have backgrounds in linguistics, but many lecturers do.

No, they probably wouldn't, and I doubt any literature department in the country would. If OP wants to do linguistics, surely they must apply to linguistics programs and concentrate on Romance languages if they so wish. In my understanding, a career in linguistics academia is a different animal from a career in literary studies.

[Bleep_Bloop]

On 7/15/2016 at 5:20 PM, DerPhilosoph said:

As a general rule, it seems that language departments at elite private universities tend to have very limited offerings in linguistics (often a pedagogy course and not much more). So you're probably better off looking at flagship public universities, which tend to have richer linguistics-related resources in their language departments (I'd be curious to hear an explanation of why this is the case) or at linguistics departments.

As a disclosure, I have no expertise in the history of American higher education, but I'll venture a guess. I agree with your observation, and I think it might be due to the fact that these universities are much older and thus their literature departments (regardless of how they're organized now, these arbitrary structures come and go, as evidenced by the boom and bust of comp lit departments over the last few decades) were well-established far before the arrival of modern linguistics. Chomsky published Syntactic Structures in 1957, so the rise of modern linguistics would have coincided with the post-war boom of the public university in the United States. So, as modern language departments grew in this period they were able to incorporate linguistics from a pretty early on in their history. The scientific methodology of any branch of modern linguistics would have been at odds with what scholars in foreign language departments had been doing at these elite universities for centuries and so, not surprisingly, it emerged in a separate department. 

Edited July 22, 2016 by Bleep_Bloop