Carnegie Mellon’s Computational Cultural Studies Program

When the dean of Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU) Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences paused admissions to the Department of English’s PhD program in Literary and Cultural Studies in 2024, it could have felt like a crisis. Instead, Professor Stephen Wittek and his colleagues took it as an opportunity to ask fundamental questions about what a doctoral program in literary and cultural studies should actually be doing in the twenty-first century. The answer the faculty arrived at was to ask what humanistic scholarship becomes when inflected by the computational environments in which culture is now produced, distributed, and consumed. The result was a new PhD program in Computational Cultural Studies (CCS).

A Field in Formation

It would be easy to read the PhD in Computational Cultural Studies as a story about a humanities department pivoting toward technology to ensure survival. Wittek, director of the CCS program, is clear that this is not the case. The program is not a retreat from humanistic inquiry; it is a bet on its continued relevance and more so its expansion into a new field of study.

That outlook is exemplified by the faculty who helped build the program. Take Wittek’s own research: his work on Shakespeare in virtual reality uses immersive digital environments to recover something that traditional literary scholarship could not capture — the embodied, spatial, and social experience of theatrical performance in Shakespeare’s time. Computation, in this case, is in the service of a deeply humanistic question; that orientation runs throughout the CCS program.

The CCS PhD is organized around an intellectual method termed an “epistemology of collaborative humanistic praxis.” This collaboration is a deliberate departure from the model of the lone scholar working in isolation and toward an approach grounded in exchange, shared projects, and cross-disciplinary exchange. In computational humanities contexts, Wittek explains, datasets will function as “boundary objects” that bring together scholars from very different backgrounds and facilitate generative dialogue across fields. CCS students will be trained to lead those conversations, bringing the interpretive and critical tools of humanistic training — sensitivity to history, language, culture, and ethics — into technically oriented spaces.

The centerpiece of the curriculum is a new course, the Computational Humanities Practicum. In this course, students complete a project combining humanities research with a computational methodology of their choosing, be it mapping, text-mining, network visualization, digital curation, or other approaches. Students are also required to take computation-focused courses both within the English department and in outside units, including CMU’s Language Technologies Institute and the Human-Computer Interaction Institute. The expectation is that learning flows in multiple directions: CCS students develop new computational competencies while grounding that work in the questions and methods that animate humanistic scholarship.

The CCS curriculum builds transferable skills in data manipulation, digital curation, and database management, all competencies increasingly valued in cultural institutions, advocacy organizations, and other industries. In addition, students will have access to professionalization seminars, individualized coaching, and Individual Development Plans (IDPs) designed to help them think broadly about where their expertise can take them.

CMU’s English Literary and Cultural Studies program typically admits only three students per year. That number reflects both a commitment to intensive, individualized mentorship and an acknowledgment of the realities of the academic job market. With limited seats available, the program’s small size is designed as an opportunity to be more deliberate about who is recruited and what they are prepared for.

Computational Cultural Studies is a genuinely new field, and as such is without an established pipeline from undergraduate programs or a decades-long track record to draw on. The program has responded by leveraging what makes CMU distinctive: its reputation in computation and technology, its extensive interdisciplinary resources, and the intellectual challenge of building something that does not yet exist fully. As part of the admissions process, applicants are interviewed before receiving an offer. This practice is designed to ensure a strong fit between the students, their goals, and what the program has to offer.

A question the program is working through is one from on-going debates in doctoral education: what should count as the final scholarly output? The CCS program envisions students who are capable of producing dissertation-length research and journal-quality academic articles, but also digital projects, pedagogical tools, and public-facing work. In a field that is still defining its scholarly forms and standards, the question of what a dissertation could look like can remain open alongside the commitment to humanistic depth.

Wittek emphasizes that preparation for diverse career pathways will not come at the expense of scholarly rigor. The program will maintain emphasis on publication, grant writing, and academic conference participation, grounded in the belief that the most versatile graduates will also be the most accomplished humanities scholars. The proposed preparation for non-academic careers and preparation for academic careers will be seen as mutually reinforcing, in which the humanities training that makes a CCS graduate a compelling scholar is the same training that makes them valuable beyond the academy.

A Vision for What’s Possible

In addition to the CCS cohort, CMU is developing a university-wide Graduate Certificate in Computational Humanities, which will embed CCS students in a broader intellectual community across the university while offering students from other programs a meaningful credential in the field. The longer-term vision is to have a dedicated Computational Humanities Institute, a coordinated cluster hire across multiple departments, and teaching postdocs for students who complete the program within the designated six years.

When asked what success would look like for this program, Wittek points to something both concrete and expansive: graduates who go on to spread a distinctly CMU-inflected approach to their own students and institutions, PhDs who carry forward a way of thinking about what humanistic scholarship can do when it encounters computational methods.

Right now, when many humanities doctoral programs are shrinking or disappearing, the Computational Cultural Studies PhD at Carnegie Mellon offers a different model that asks not how to preserve what doctoral education has been, but how to imagine and build what it needs to become.