Interdisciplinary minors consist of five or six courses. By faculty regulation, they must include courses in three different fields of knowledge, with no more than three courses drawn from any one field. Ordinarily, the course offerings of an academic department constitute a single field; thus, all Biology Department courses are in the field of biology, all Economics Department courses are in the field of economics, etc. In a few cases, however, a department encompasses more than one field. The Theater and Dance Department, for instance, offers courses in the separate fields of dance and theater; the Fine Arts Department includes the fields of art history and studio arts; and each of the several languages offered by the Department of Language and Culture Studies constitutes a field.
Courses in the minor may be double-counted toward the distribution requirement when they are otherwise eligible for distribution purposes. Furthermore, when the requirements of a major and minor overlap, up to two courses in a five-course minor may be double-counted toward the major and up to three courses in a six-course minor may be double-counted. Students may petition the Curriculum Committee for permission to undertake an individually tailored interdisciplinary minor. (For the complete set of faculty and student guidelines governing the program of interdisciplinary minors, the reader is referred to the Student Handbook.)
To declare an interdisciplinary minor, students should contact the minor’s faculty coordinator. Students are advised to make the declaration in a timely fashion, but ordinarily no earlier than the second semester of the first year. Some minors specify a time after which the minor may not be undertaken.
The descriptions of the minors that follow include only the numbers and titles of the component courses; for complete course descriptions, refer to the departmental course offerings later in the Bulletin. To assist students with their academic planning, courses in a minor that are offered less often than annually are marked with an asterisk (*). Some courses require the permission of the instructor or have an enrollment limit. See the Schedule of Classes for details.