Chair: Wendy Martin, Vice Provost and Director

Administrative Assistant: Mary Ellen Wanderlingh

Academic Program 

PLEASE NOTE: Any student may take a Transdisciplinary (T-) course at any time.  Doctoral students must take a T-course during the first 48 units of course work at CGU.

With the growing need to create disciplinary boundaries in search of solutions to issues in academia, communities, and the world, the CGU faculty recognized the opportunity to enhance the academic experience of students by providing an innovative approach to doctoral education.  Transdisciplinary scholarship is an approach to knowledge, research, and problem-solving that takes the core ideas, methods, concepts, and history of several disciplines and uses them to study a broad range of problems.  Transdisciplinary Studies extends the scope of interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary scholarship by traversing the range of traditional disciplines, enabling students to move beyond academic silos to position their research and scholarship for the advancement of knowledge and solutions to the world’s most important issues.

In the 2004-2005 academic year, the CGU faculty initiated the Transdisciplinary Course, or T-course, as part of the required curriculum for doctoral students in order to enhance their academic experience.

The T-course provides an excellent opportunity for doctoral students and graduate faculty to work collaboratively and across tradition disciplines on a common set of questions and issues, while drawing on their own individual disciplinary training.  It is an advanced, intensive experience that prepares doctoral students for high-level discourse, research and inquiry, and provides practical experience working with colleagues in different fields.  At Claremont Graduate University, the T-course is a significant component in the university-wide effort to foster transdisciplinary research among faculty and students to enhance our community of scholars through collaborative work.

The Transdisciplinary Studies Program at CGU offers courses in seminar and lecture/discussion format that combines scholarship and methodologies from a range of disciplines thereby creating an enriched pedagogical and research environment for faculty and students.