yale university communication phd

Film and Media Studies Program

The graduate program in film and media studies.

Inaugurated in 2002, Yale’s doctoral Program in Film and Media Studies quickly achieved the international stature it enjoys today. Building on a core faculty that had long overseen an impressive undergraduate major, the graduate program attracted incoming faculty who were eager to help shape it. The quality of the students who have applied has been superior, and the large majority of those selected have chosen to study here. Fifty students have completed, or are in the midst of, their degrees. Our alumni hold positions at a range of institutions, including universities with major graduate programs, and several have already seen their revised dissertations published as books by important presses. 

Graduate students have been able to produce such significant research thanks not least to Yale’s unparalleled resources.  Specialized librarians and curators keep our students in mind as they collect and make available the massive amounts of material held by the Sterling Memorial Library, the Haas library in the History of Art, and especially the Beinecke rare book library that houses the archives of hundreds of filmmakers, writers, and artists.  Two of America’s great art museums, The Yale University Art Gallery and the British Art Center (with buildings designed by Louis Kahn), retain a continuing relation with our graduate students.  As for primary material in our field,  the Yale Film Archive is home to a growing collection of 35mm and 16mm film prints, and is a member of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). The Archive also oversees a large circulating library of DVDs, Blu-rays, and VHS tapes.

A dedicated, expert projectionist oversees hundreds of screenings each year, mainly in two spaces (the auditorium of 250 in our building and a projection room holding 40 on York Street) that are equipped for 35mm, 16mm, and virtually all video formats. 4K and 2K projections are common.

Graduate students absorb and generate the energy and enthusiasm so important to dynamic film scholarship thanks to the bustling intellectual climate at the Humanities Quadrangle, where faculty and students meet continually—almost daily it seems—around screenings, lectures, conferences and workshops, some initiated by the graduate students themselves. 

By design the doctorate in Film and Media Studies at Yale is always undertaken in combination with one of ten other disciplines in the Humanities (African-American Studies, American Studies, Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Literatures, English, French, German, History of Art, Italian, Slavic Languages and Literatures).   It was thought, and has proven true, that upon completing their degrees, students who are prepared for positions in both Film and Media and in another discipline would hold a particular advantage, and not merely because of the wider range of openings available to them in the job market, but because the calculated interdisciplinarity of their research makes them stand out. Thoroughly grounded in Film and Media Studies, they become expert in certain of its issues by offering authoritative perspectives and methods that derive from systematic work with the outstanding faculty and graduate students in another Yale department or program. Our students are welcomed throughout the Humanities on campus as they enliven traditional disciplines with the images, sounds, and ideas they bring from Film and Media Studies.

The faculty and its curriculum represent a full range of topics that have been at the center of Film Studies from its outset: theory, criticism, and history, plus cultural approaches to American, European, Latin American and Japanese national cinemas.  Naturally, as the field and its discipline evolve, so too do we, though always keeping ourselves based in this tradition. Transnational and global approaches bring the national cinemas, and their specialists, into productive contact. Overarching concerns involving technological, aesthetic, social and cultural issues (especially race and gender), have developed to the point that in 2015 the Program added “Media” to its name and mission. FMS, as our Program is now called for short, officially embraces images and sounds from an array of sources and channels, especially as these coexist and intertwine with cinema, something that has occurred throughout its long history.  We study that history as well as the challenge and possibilities of “new media,” which we know to be on the minds of graduate students. This keeps Yale’s Program vigilant as it looks to the past for cues about ways to best approach the future. The faculty recognizes that graduate students must be in the lead of an evolving discipline, and so encourages them to take up the most current developments and debates. The goal of the Program’s pedagogy is to provide its current students with a steady anchor in what the discipline has been, so that they can confidently and creatively participate at the highest level in its discourse and institutions, leading it forward while passing continuing its legacy.

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Graduate & professional study.

Yale offers advanced degrees through its Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and 13 professional schools. Browse the organizations below for information on programs of study, academic requirements, and faculty research.

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Yale’s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences offers programs leading to M.A., M.S., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in 73 departments and programs.

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The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is composed of the departments and academic programs that provide instruction in Yale College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

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A number of our centers and institutes offer additional opportunities for graduate and professional study.

• English Language & Literature

Fields include English language and literature from Old English to the present, American literature, and Anglophone world literature.

• Programs of Study
• PhD - Doctor of Philosophy
• Combined PhD
• MA - Master of Arts

Jonathan Kramnick

Director of Graduate Studies

• [email protected]

Erica Sayers

Departmental Registrar

• [email protected]
• 203-432-2226

Admission Requirements

Standardized testing requirements.

GRE is not accepted.

Program-Specific Application Requirements

A writing sample is required by this program. 

English Language Requirement

TOEFL iBT or IELTS Academic is required of most applicants whose native language is not English.

You may be exempt from this requirement if you have received (or will receive) an undergraduate degree from a college or university where English is the primary language of instruction, and if you have studied in residence at that institution for at least three years.

Combined Degree Program Application Deadline

*The deadline to submit an application to a combined program is always the earlier deadline of the two individual programs, or December 15, whichever comes first.

Academic Information

Combined phd information.

English Language & Literature offers a combined PhD in conjunction with several other departments and programs including: African American Studies , Film and Media Studies , History of Art , and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies .

Program Advising Guidelines

GSAS Advising Guidelines

Academic Resources

Academic calendar.

The Graduate School's academic calendar lists important dates and deadlines related to coursework, registration, financial processes, and milestone events such as graduation.

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Registration Information and Dates

https://registration.yale.edu/

Students must register every term in which they are enrolled in the Graduate School. Registration for a given term takes place the semester prior, and so it's important to stay on top of your academic plan. The University Registrar's Office oversees the systems that students use to register. Instructions about how to use those systems and the dates during which registration occurs can be found on their registration website.

Financial Information

Phd stipend & funding.

PhD students at Yale are normally fully-funded. During their programs, our students receive a twelve-month stipend to cover living expenses and a fellowship that covers the full cost of tuition and student healthcare.

• PhD Student Funding Overview
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While Master's programs are not generally funded, there are resources available to students to help navigate financial responsibilities during graduate school.

• Master's Student Funding Overview
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Below you will find alumni placement data for our departments and programs.

• Research & Impact
• Centers, Programs, and Initiatives

Yale Center for Environmental Communication

YCEC conducts research on the psychological, cultural, and political factors that influence environmental attitudes and behavior; teaches students and trains working professionals; informs and engages the public through environmental journalism; and supports a global network of organizations seeking to build public and political will for environmental solutions.

On This Page

The Center for Environmental Communication includes:

• The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication

Yale Climate Connections

Yale environment 360.

• The Environmental Film Festival at Yale (EFFY)
• Sage Magazine
• The Yale Environment Review

Teaching and Training

The YCEC provides courses in environmental communication for Yale graduate and undergraduate students and training programs for working environmental professionals. Current environmental communication courses include (all at YSE except as noted):

• Strategic Environmental Communication (Leiserowitz)
• Writing as a Public Scholar (Hanes)
• Writing the World (Klinkenborg)
• Writing Workshop (Cohn)
• Documentary Film and the Environment (Musser, in American Studies)
• Documentary Film Workshop (Musser, in American Studies)
• Global Communication Skills (Vance)
• Professional Skills Course: Environmental Communicator (Vance)
• Delivering Effective Presentations (Reich)
• Food and Documentary (Cheney)
• Introduction to Environmental Data Science (Fenichel, Marlon, Queenborough)
• Environmental Data Visualization and Communication (Marlon, Queenborough)
• Environmental Risk Communication (Schwarz)
• Yale Environment Review (student-led; Kotchen is Faculty Advisor)
• Understanding Environmental Campaigns and Policymaking: Strategies and Tactics  (Northrop)
• Ethical Consumption, by Ian Robinson
• Environmental Organizing , by Ian Robinson
• A Toolkit for Communicating Environmental Science , taught by Washington Post Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Chris Mooney

Beyond YCEC, professional development courses in environmental communication at Yale include Marketing for Sustainability offered by the Yale School of Management's Executive Education program and a course on Communicating Climate Change and Health at the Yale School of Public Health.

Environmental Journalism

The YCEC informs and engages the public in environmental science and solutions through several environmental journalism initiatives.

• Yale Environment 360 is an award-winning online magazine featuring reporting, opinion, and analysis on global environmental issues.
• Yale Climate Connections is a climate change news service featuring articles, videos and a radio program broadcast daily on more than 680 stations and frequencies nationwide.
• The Environmental Film Festival at Yale is a student-run annual film festival showcasing incisive, cutting edge films that highlight the environmental and social issues of our time.
• Sage Magazine is a student-run literary magazine that expands environmentalism through provocative conversation and the arts.
• The Yale Environment Review is a student-run magazine that provides weekly updates translating cutting edge research for a lay audience.

The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting have partnered to connect journalists reporting on climate change with leading researchers and students studying climate change communication. YPCCC and the Pulitzer Center bring leading environmental journalists to Yale for faculty and student seminars and public presentations. The Pulitzer Center also supports a competitive fellowship program, giving Yale students an opportunity to work directly with Pulitzer journalists as part of a training program in Washington, D.C. Finally, YPCCC and the Pulitzer Center produce and distribute climate-focused content to a wide national audience.

Supporting A Global Network of Environmental Communicators

The YCEC organizes national and international meetings, conferences and events to convene climate change and environmental leaders and supports a global network of environmental communications scholars and practitioners. Recent examples of YCEC convenings:

• The Environmental Film Festival at Yale hosted its 13 th annual festival in Spring 2021 highlighting the urgent global and social issues of our time.
• In April 2021, YCEC presented a talk with Blanca Begert, 2020  YPCCC/Pulitzer Center Climate Reporting Fellow, pairing her with Pulitzer Center reporter Dan Grossman and photojournalist Dado Galdieri to share their research and reporting on complications of tropical forest carbon in Central and South America.
• In 2019, Yale Environment 360 hosted video talks for YSE students with award-winning author and biologist David George Haskell; New Yorker writer Ian Frazier, and Pulitzer Prize winner and E360 contributor Elizabeth Kolbert. And Yale Environment 360 continued to host its annual International Video Contest , with more than 400 entries from six continents in 2020.
• In February 2021, the YPCCC was hosted by the Institute of Technology and Society of Brazil to announce and discuss findings of a study of Brazilian public perception of climate change  on which YPCCC advised

The YCEC is supported by the Tides Foundation, the Grantham Foundation for Protection of the Environment, and the MacArthur Foundation.

Related Centers, Programs, and Initiatives

Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC)

YPCCC is a leader in climate change communication, tracking Americans’ perception of climate change at all scales and building public and political will for climate action.

An original, independent voice in environmental journalism, E360 is an online magazine that publishes opinion, analysis, reporting, and debate on global environmental issues.

Across hundreds of radio frequencies and streaming services, Climate Connections is creating nonpartisan reporting, commentary, and analysis on the issue of climate change.

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Media, Public Relations, and Marketing

Start with our Common Good and Creative Careers community which offers resources, advice and job postings on media and communications careers.

News from OCS

Public relations careers: options, job titles, and descriptions.

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This article is originally published on liveabout.com by Alison Doyle.

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Make appointments on the Yale Career Link.

Learn From Other PhDs

Andrew Cohen (PhD ’17, Sociology)

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• Advertising Strategist Phenomenon

Michael Zimm (PhD ’16, Classics)

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• Creative Strategist Digital Surgeons

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Graduate Program

Our PhD program takes a distinctively integrative and interdisciplinary approach in investigating the systems of knowledge that comprise our linguistic competence.

Program and Policies

The conception of linguistics embraced by the Yale PhD program requires that students receive training that is both deep in its coverage of areas of linguistic inquiry and broad in the range of methodological approaches. The course work requirements are designed to accomplish these complementary goals. More information on the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Programs and Policies page.

Requirements

Foundational courses.

This requirement ensures that students achieve breadth in at least four linguistic subfields, such as the following: Language Change, Phonology, Neurolinguistics, Syntax, Semantics, Morphology, Phonetics and Computational Linguistics . 

See the Linguistics Program at GSAS for specific course information.

Methodology Courses

This requirement ensures that students achieve sufficient training in different linguistic methodologies, such as the following: 

• Experimental Methodology
• Statistical Modeling  
• Computational Methods
• Field Methods

One of the methodology courses must be taken during the first year of the program, and two must be completed by the end of the second year. Courses cannot simultaneously satisfy the foundational and methodology requirements. 

Seminar Courses

This requirement ensures students participate in advanced seminars in which they read the original literature of the field and write a research paper. Seminar courses are typically 790s-numbered LING courses, however,  active participation in a department reading group, including the submission of a final research paper, also satisfies this requirement.  

Language Requirement

Students are expected to exhibit some breadth in their knowledge of the languages of the world beyond those most commonly studied and those most similar in structure to the student’s first language. Field Methods , fulfills this requirement. Alternatively, students may instead take an appropriate language structure course , or one or more courses characterized as L3 or higher at Yale or the equivalent elsewhere. 

The primary focus of a PhD program is independent research . In the course of our PhD program, students carry out cutting-edge linguistic research, culminating in the completion of a dissertation. To help students in the transition from “consuming” to also “producing” linguistic research, there are a number of structures and requirements in place.

Research Milestones

Research advisor and first-year directed readings.

By the end of the first term of the program, students find a department faculty member who acts as their research advisor. This choice should be made on the basis of compatibility of research interests and discussions between the student, faculty member, and DGS . More on choosing an advisor.

Starting from the spring term of the first year, students work with the help of their advisor to define a topic of research interest, meeting regularly, and carrying out a series of readings on this topic. It is the faculty’s expectation that this exploration will form the foundation for the research reported in the student’s first qualifying paper . See the Linguistics Program at GSAS for more information. 

At the conclusion of the first year of the program, students submit to the faculty a portfolio of two research papers , in two distinct areas. The portfolio will typically consist of term papers from courses taken during the first year in the program, and should demonstrate a student’s mastery of the material in these fields to the level covered in the core courses in the area, as well as the ability to identify a significant research question and argue for a possible solution. 

See the Linguistics Program at GSAS for more information.   

Annotated Bibliography/Research Plan

During the summer after their first year, students will prepare an annotated bibliography and research plan (ABRP) for their first qualifying paper. The ABRP, which should be approximately twenty pages in length , should lay out the question that the student wants to explore, motivating its importance through a presentation and synthesis of relevant past literature on the topic. 

See the Linguistics Program at GSAS for more information. 

Qualifying Papers

Once the ABRP has been completed, the student will proceed to work on the qualifying papers (QPs) . The goal of the QPs is to develop a student’s ability to conduct independent research in linguistics at the level of current scholarship in two different areas of linguistics. The faculty expect a QP to report on the results of a substantial project, which are written up in a manner consistent with the standards of the field, and to be eventually published in an academic journal or working papers. Each QP should be in a different area of linguistics with a different advisor. 

The process of writing each QP is broken into a number of smaller steps, including a department presentation, with specific deadlines for each. See the Linguistics Program at GSAS for more information.

By the beginning of the fourth year, students will present a dissertation prospectus (~15 pages in length) to the entire faculty. The prospectus should lay out clearly the student’s proposed dissertation topic. It should motivate the importance of the topic, present the core idea of the proposed work together with its promise and viability, and demonstrate how this work fits into past research in the area. The prospectus should also identify a dissertation committee. 

After it is submitted, the prospectus is defended orally in front of the faculty. Upon successful completion of the prospectus defense, students advance to Ph.D. candidacy. 

See the Linguistics Program at GSAS for specific information on the Prospectus.

Dissertation

By the end of the seventh term, students must complete a chapter of the dissertation, together with a detailed outline of the dissertation and comprehensive bibliography. When the dissertation committee approves the chapter and dissertation outline, students are eligible for a University Dissertation Fellowship, which will support them in their fifth year of graduate study. 

Students are expected to complete their dissertations by the end of the sixth year . At least one month prior to the dissertation filing date, the completed dissertation must be orally defended. This defense will typically involve a public presentation of the main results of the dissertation and oral examination by the members of the dissertation committee. 

See the Linguistics Program at GSAS for more information.

Yale Child Study Center

Wu Tsai Institute

Yale Library Linguistics Research Guide

Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning

Teaching Assistantships

All students serve as Teaching Fellows for a minimum of two terms , beginning in the first term of the third year . In addition, students must complete two additional terms of assistantship . These are also typically fulfilled via a Teaching Fellowship. 

A student with external funding may instead fulfill these two terms with a research project supervised by the Linguistics faculty or by various Yale and Yale-affiliated units. 

Director of Graduate Studies

Any questions about the graduate program can be directed to the DGS.

Associate Professor & DGS