Founded in 1952, Emory’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts (ILA) was one of the first interdisciplinary Ph.D programs in the United States. Today, the ILA provides a unique, interdisciplinary environment for the pursuit of intellectual projects that cross conventional disciplinary and methodological boundaries, particularly those between the social sciences and humanities. The Institute has a tradition of fostering emergent fields of study and has encouraged the practice of new modes of inquiry both at Emory and beyond, through its far-flung alumni. It continues to provide a challenging, interdisciplinary space for both faculty and students to pursue theoretically sophisticated and historically grounded studies of culture and society.

The ILA is an autonomous graduate institute with long-standing connections to other departments and programs at Emory, to other area universities, and to public and private institutions in Atlanta. Our faculty members’ diverse disciplinary backgrounds and intellectual commitments find expression in a wide range of courses and scholarly initiatives. (See Affiliated Programs.)
 
The faculty of The Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts includes notable scholarly practitioners of a wide array of kinds of research, including the roles of contemporary science and medicine in society; current theories of embodiment, gender and sexuality, including psychoanalysis and queer theory; anthropology, historical ethnography, and oral history; American Studies, emphasizing African American, Asian American, Native American, and southern regional cultures and popular culture; social memory and memorialization; intellectual history (ancient and modern), visual culture, digital media, and public scholarship.  The ILA is committed to sustaining its long history of interdisciplinary collaboration among its own members as well as in conjunction with the affiliated faculty of numerous other departments and schools of the university with which it maintains close working relations.