harvard university linguistics phd

Linguistics

Undergraduate Program

The concentration in Linguistics, the scientific study of language, emphasizes linguistic theory, historical linguistics, and the relationship between language and cognition, and cuts across the humanities, social sciences, cognitive sciences, physical sciences, and biological sciences. Students are also eligible to apply for an A.B./A.M. degree program.

The Department of Linguistics is home to one of the oldest and most distinguished linguistics programs in the United States. Today, students and faculty come from many different backgrounds and represent a wide range of interests, from purely theoretical to typological, historical, and experimental. What they share is a commitment to empirically grounded research and a respect for the rich traditions of the field.

• Translation Studies
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The Graduate Secondary Field in Translation Studies (GSFTS) offers graduate students the opportunity to undertake sustained study of the theory and practice of translation, broadly understood across languages, media, and the arts. The secondary field in translation studies has a triple rationale: intellectual, multidisciplinary, and practical. By examining a range of linguistic encounters and cultural exchanges, students pursuing the secondary field have the opportunity to root their translation work within their knowledge of at least two languages while expanding their engagement with the craft of translation. As they move through the curriculum, graduate students do more than simply examine how meaning is transferred from one language to another; they acquire the knowledge necessary to intervene in current scholarly debates in the growing field of translation studies, as well as the ability to teach translation to undergraduate and graduate students. While deepening their expertise in at least two languages, students enroll in a range of courses offered across departments that consider theoretical issues raised by and through the process of translation and will then complete a capstone project, supervised by a faculty advisor. 

The secondary field provides enrolled students with opportunities for professional development, training in translation pedagogy, and an additional credential in today’s extremely competitive academic job market. It complements students’ main PhD programs while providing the competitive edge that they need to distinguish themselves as outstanding candidates for jobs at research universities and liberal arts colleges in North America, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. Faculty with expertise in one or two national languages and literatures are often now expected to teach broad-ranging comparative courses in and on translation. Even a cursory look at this year’s MLA Job List shows that more and more advertisements for junior searches make explicit the desirability for practical and theoretical knowledge of translation studies as proof of interdisciplinarity and crossover intellectual capacity for a prospective faculty member. 

Admission Eligibility

A student may apply for the secondary field in translation studies at any point in their academic progression. Students from any PhD program in the FAS may apply; students may pursue only one secondary field. Students in the comparative literature PhD program interested in the translation studies secondary field must ensure that no courses taken for the field are double counted toward the PhD; that is, any courses counted toward the secondary field, including Translation Studies 280, may not be used also to meet requirements for the doctoral program. 

Requirements

The Graduate Secondary Field in Translation Studies involves the following requirements: 

Translation Studies 280: Proseminar in Translation Studies : The Proseminar will be a team-taught course that combines the study of translation theory with translation practice and will emphasize the development of projects that have the potential to become capstone projects. 

Two graduate-level seminars in translation studies , including, for example, Translation Studies 260: Literary Translation Workshop, which, with recurring support from the FAS Elson Arts Fund, pairs professional translators and source language experts with students as they workshop their manuscripts-in-progress. With approval of the student’s advisor and the Translation Studies Executive Committee, a summer internship in publishing, literary translation, or design may take the place of one of these two seminars.  

A capstone project which features a substantive translation, of variable length (dependent upon the difficulty of the languages involved), potentially publishable in a scholarly journal or as a short book. The capstone project will be accompanied by a critical essay of 4,000–7,000 words, or, if approved by the student’s advisor and the Executive Committee, a digital humanities project or public exhibition. As they complete the capstone project, graduate students will enroll in a semester-long 300-level Translation Studies reading course with their faculty advisor. The project will be supervised by the student’s translation studies advisor and evaluated by two appropriate readers from the Harvard faculty who, together with the advisor, will be responsible for assessing the completed project. 

The Executive Committee of GSFTS will appoint from among itself or, in the case of a language that is not represented on the Committee, from among the experts on the Harvard faculty, an appropriate advisor for each student in the secondary field, who will offer tailored guidance throughout the curriculum and on the capstone project.    

The co-chairs of the Executive Committee that governs the Graduate Secondary Field in Translation Studies for 2023–2024 are Professors Sandra Naddaff and Jeffrey Schnapp. The members of the Executive Committee for 2023–2024 are: Luke Leafgren, Sandra Naddaff, Luis Girón-Negrón, John Mugane, Stephanie Sandler, Jeffrey Schnapp, Karen Thornber, and Tom Wisniewski (fall). 

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Linguistics, ph.d. in linguistics.

The Department of Linguistics is home to one of the oldest and most distinguished linguistics programs in the United States. The study of linguistics at Harvard draws much of its strength from the unique range and depth of the University's offerings in related fields, especially ancient and modern languages.

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Meaning & Modality Linguistics Laboratory

Director kathryn davidson.

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Welcome to the lab!

Welcome to the Meaning and Modality (M&M) Laboratory at Harvard Linguistics! We are interested in understanding the uniquely human capacity for language, especially the ability to convey abstract, infinite, specific meanings across the multiple modalities for natural language, including but not limited to speech and sign. Our work spans the subfields of formal semantics, pragmatics, syntax, language acquisition, logic and psycholinguistics in an effort to understand the relationship between linguistic meaning, language mode, language development, and human cognition.

(Lab meeting, October 2023)

Latest News

Hande at chicago linguistic society.

Our 5th year graduate student  Hande Sevgi   presented a talk on "Two-handed classifiers in sign languages: an investigation in Turkish Sign Language" at the Chicago Linguistic Society April 26-28. Here is Hande with fellow Harvard Linguists (Tanya Bondarenko and Jacob Kodner) at the beautiful U Chicago campus!

Kate awarded the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award by GSAS!

If you've ever had the chance to work with Kate, you'd know she's a truly exceptional mentor. And now, it's official. Kate has won the 2024 Everett I. Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award!

What is this award? Well, this award is a big deal because it's all about recognizing outstanding mentors like Kate. Every year, students nominate faculty members who go above and beyond to support them. There were 77, yes SEVENTY-SEVEN, faculty members who got nominated this year, and our wonderful Kate was among the seven winners. Congratulations!

Kate, your win isn't just about a fancy title—it's about the countless lives you've positively impacted. Thank you for being such an incredible mentor! Thank you for your academic and emotional support! We're lucky to have you.

(We will have more photos :D)

Lab members attend the LSA in NYC

M&M at Sinn & Bedeutung

This year Sinn & Bedeutung (SuB 28) at Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) from September 5-8, 2023, with several lab members and alums participating. Natasha Thalluri  and  Kathryn Davidson  presented their paper "Degrees and depiction - Gradability in sign languages", Anatasia Tsilia  and  Kathryn Davidson  presented their paper "Effects of iconicity and monocity on licensing complement anaphora", and  Yağmur Sağ presented their paper "Cardinality and (in)definiteness. Our former graduate student and lab member Dorothy Ahn presented their work "Deriving (anti-)uniquness in definite expressions" as an invited speaker.

Iconicity workshop at the LSA Summer Institute at UMass

Commencement 2023

Harvard at SALT

This year Semantics And Linguistic Theory (SALT) was held at Yale, with several lab members and alums participating. Ankana Saha, Yağmur Sağ & Kathryn Davidson presented a poster "Focus on demonstratives: Experiments in English & Turkish", Gennaro Chierchia gave an invited talk, and (alums) Becky Jarvis presented on "Movement & interpretation of quantifiers in internally-headed relative clauses" and Johanna Alstott presented a poster on "Ordinal Numbers: Not Superlatives, but Modifiers of Superlatives", and Ankana , Yağmur and Dasha Bikina  all presented posters at the workshop on "(In)definiteness and genericity across language". Pictured are the Harvard semantics crew, present and past, at SALT.

Mikaela to Penn, Richard to Yale

Anna lim at the m&m lab.

Harvard at HSP

Meaning & Modality Laboratory Harvard University 2 Arrow Street, 4th floor Cambridge, MA 02138

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Department of Romance Languages & Literatures

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Spanish and Latin American

The Ph.D. Program in Spanish and Latin American Literatures draws on the talents of a diverse faculty whose research interests span Spain and the Americas, from Medieval and colonial multiculturalism to postmodern currents. Our specialties include Renaissance humanism, the transatlantic Baroque, nineteenth-century nation building, and contemporary negotiations between culture and politics, including gender studies and Latino studies. Language is the core of literary analysis, and our faculty teaches texts in the original, primarily in Spanish and Portuguese, but often including other languages (Arabic, Catalan, French, Galician, Hebrew, Mapuche, Quechua, etc.). At the doctoral level, our classes are small seminars and discussion groups, some with specialized foci and others with a panoramic approach.

The graduate student at RLL can expect a vibrant intellectual life, which promotes originality and rigor in students, encouraging them to explore new close and contextual readings in our own field, and also interdisciplinary paths across the university. Some students develop clusters of courses in other sections of the Department, which allows them to pursue comparative studies in Romance languages, while other students develop links to allied disciplines, such as philosophy, film studies, government, women's studies, African and African American Studies.

The collaboration among faculty members and our graduate students in a range of intellectual projects had grown steadily and encourages our future colleagues to gain experience in the administration of conferences, the design of courses, and the edition and translation of books and manuscripts. Currently, our faculty sponsors conferences and lecture series on Hispanic Cultures, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Cultural Agents, at the Center for the Humanities, as well as research seminar sessions in the Houghton Rare Books Library, and events at the Real Colegio Complutense and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS). A new initiative on Cultural Agents, housed at the Center for Government and International Studies, promotes the social contributions to be made through humanist scholarship.

Our current distinguished program in Hispanic Literatures continues an illustrious history which dates from the nineteenth century, when figures such as George Ticknor and Henry Longfellow fostered the study and dissemination of the literatures of Spain in the U.S. During the twentieth century, the program grew to include stellar Latin American figures such as Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa and other writers who have taught in our Department, together with renowned scholars including Raimundo Lida, Juan Marichal, Dámaso Alonso, Jorge Guillén, Claudio Guillén, Stephen Gilman. Yet today, our greatest source of pride are the young colleagues who have graduated from our program and who enrich the intellectual lives of many prominent universities, including Harvard.

Diana Sorensen  

To see our program requirements, see the  GSAS Policies .

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Kathy Hanley (Graduate Program Coordinator)

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Harvard University PhD in Foreign Languages & Linguistics

Foreign Languages & Linguistics is a program of study at Harvard University. The school offers a doctor’s degree in the area. Here, you’ll find out more about the major doctor’s degree program in foreign languages and linguistics, including such details as the number of graduates, diversity of students, and more.

If there’s something special you’re looking for, you can use one of the links below to find it:

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How Much Does a Doctorate in Foreign Languages & Linguistics from Harvard Cost?

Harvard graduate tuition and fees.

Part-time graduates at Harvard paid an average of $1,545 per credit hour in 2019-2020. This tuition was the same for both in-state and out-of-state students. Information about average full-time graduate student tuition and fees is shown in the table below.

Does Harvard Offer an Online PhD in Foreign Languages & Linguistics?

Online degrees for the Harvard foreign languages and linguistics doctor’s degree program are not available at this time. To see if the school offers distance learning options in other areas, visit the Harvard Online Learning page.

Harvard Doctorate Student Diversity for Foreign Languages & Linguistics

Male-to-female ratio.

Women made up around 65.2% of the foreign languages and linguistics students who took home a doctor’s degree in 2019-2020. This is higher than the nationwide number of 55.2%.

Racial-Ethnic Diversity

Racial-ethnic minority graduates* made up 8.7% of the foreign languages and linguistics doctor’s degrees at Harvard in 2019-2020. This is lower than the nationwide number of 18%.

PhD in Foreign Languages & Linguistics Focus Areas at Harvard

Foreign Languages & Linguistics students may decide to major in one of the following focus areas.

*The racial-ethnic minorities count is calculated by taking the total number of students and subtracting white students, international students, and students whose race/ethnicity was unknown. This number is then divided by the total number of students at the school to obtain the racial-ethnic minorities percentage.

• National Center for Education Statistics
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More about our data sources and methodologies .

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