Graduate Courses

The Graduate School of Humanities was established as a section of the post-war University of Tokyo in 1953. The School of Sociology was founded 10 years later. The two Schools merged to become the present Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology in 1995.

The School as a whole seeks to provide students with a high level of cultural acquisition, and the ability to think and express ideas, and thus offer personnel that will contribute to the development of human culture, by endeavouring to understand human thought, history, language and society through teaching and research. In order to realise this, we hope to attract students who can make logical arguments on problems concerning thought, history, language and society from a unique perspective, can acquire a high level of language skills according to his or her interests, and can carry out a fully verified, solid research.

 

The Graduate School is comprised of 7 Divisions. Each Division are divided into Courses and the Courses are divided into Fields of Specialisation. These Courses or Fields of Specialisation more or less correspond to the ‘Offices’ that we referred to in the overview of the Faculty, though it must be noted that the Divisions of Cultural Resources Studies and Korean Studies are independent Divisions which do not have Divisions in the Faculty. The Japanese synopses of the PhD theses are available on the PhD Theses Database.

• General Culture: Linguistics, Archaeology, History of Art, Philosophy, Ethics, Religious Studies, Aesthetics, and Psychology

The Division of General Culture seeks to attain profound understandings of human thought, cognition, emotion and moreover of languages, representations, things cultural and systems in terms of theory and verification.

• Japanese Studies: Japanese Language, Japanese Literature, and Japanese History

The Division of Japanese Studies investigates the history of Japanese society and the representations of thoughts and emotions therein from a global perspective, by synthesising the two Fields of Japanese History and Japanese Language and Literature.

• Asian Studies: Chinese Language and Literature, East Asian Thought and Culture, Indian Literature, Indian Philosophy and Buddhist Studies, Islamic Studies, and Asian History

The Division of Asian Studies nalyses the complex aspects and historical developments of thoughts, religions, languages, literatures, politics, economics and societies in the various areas in Asia and also the disseminations, exchanges and transfigurations of cultures which originate in Asia.

• European and American Studies: Classics, French Language and Literature, South European Languages and Literatures, English Language and Literature, German Language and Literature, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Contemporary Literary Studies, and Occidental History

The Division of European and American Studies offers training in the precise comprehension of original texts and resources in the fields of language, literature and history regarding the formation and development of European culture from antiquity to the present day, and encourages talent in various cultural activities and public speech.

• Socio-cultural Studies: Sociology, and Social Psychology

The Division of Socio-cultural Studies deals with human beings and phenomena arising from human interactions and seeks to discover and solve problems in contemporary people and society through theory and verification, aided by methods of research, experimentation, observation, analysis of resources etc.

• Cultural Resources Studies: Cultural Resources, and Cultural Management

The Division of Cultural Resources Studies synthesises excavation, editing and evaluation, organisation and preservation, and exhibition and utilisation of resources for the purpose of utilising cultural resources (written resources, historical resources, art resources, archaeological resources, cultural research resources, cultural statistics resources etc) for academic research and cultural activities.

• Korean Studies: Korean History and Culture, and Korean Linguistics and Social Studies

The Division of Korean Studies investigates Korean culture and exchanges with neighbouring areas from the perspective of tradition and the present, or diachronic and synchronic, using a composite method referring to history, sociology, linguistics, philosophy and anthropology.