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WHAT YOU'LL GAIN
Program Outcomes
In the MLS program, students have the unique opportunity to hone communication, research and writing skills transferrable to any professional or academic field.
- Sharpen your critical thinking and analytical skills
- Engage with world-class Rice University faculty
- Enhance your understanding of interdisciplinary analysis and communication skills
- Develop the research methods needed to foster analytical and strategic mindsets
- Gain the opportunity to attain career advancement or prepare for further graduate study
- Grow with peers who are equally committed and energetic about exploring and learning
- Build your professional and personal network by joining our dedicated Alumni Community
- Add Rice to your resume
STUDENT JOURNEY
Coursework Progression
The MLS degree requires 12 courses for 34 credit hours. The multidisciplinary approach to your graduate education allows you to apply your life and professional experiences to develop new perspectives and understanding of the world.
FOUNDATIONS
All new students start the program by taking Introduction to Graduate Liberal Studies and three core courses, one of each in our three main academic disciplines: humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.
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ELECTIVES
Once the foundational courses are complete, students may take their 6 elective courses in any of the subject areas offered.
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CAPSTONE
The final sequence of courses are the Capstone Seminar and Capstone course. These involve independent study where the student researches a multidisciplinary or creative project under the mentorship of two faculty members and presents their final project to the entire MLS community.
CURRICULUM SPOTLIGHT
What Students Are Learning Now
Courses vary each semester to support students' curiosity and interests.
Interested in previewing the Rice experience before you apply? Contact mls@rice.edu to learn how you can join MLS students for a day.
Solving the Climate Challenge
Dr. Daniel Cohan
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Solving the Climate Challenge
MLSC 553
Semester: Spring 2023
Credit Hours: 3
This course overviews climate science and explores strategies for transforming electricity, transportation, and agriculture to avert the impacts of abrupt climate change. Averting abrupt climate change will likely require developed countries to reduce their emissions 80% by 2050. How can we get there from here? This course will begin by introducing the science of climate change and its impacts. It will then explore what it will take to curtail emissions quickly enough to stave off abrupt climate change. In particular, we will consider the economic and policy challenges of mitigating emissions from electricity, transportation, and agriculture. The course will culminate with each student developing and presenting a recommended approach for curtailing emissions from one of those sectors.
Daniel Cohan, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice University. His research specializes in the development of photochemical models and their application to air quality management, uncertainty analysis, energy policy, and health impact studies. Before joining Rice, Dr. Cohan worked for the Air Protection Branch of the Georgia Environmental Protection Division. He received a B.A. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University, a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Chemistry from Georgia Tech, and served as a Fulbright Scholar to Australia at the Cooperative Research Centre for Southern Hemisphere Meteorology. Dr. Cohan is a recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER young investigator award and past member of the NASA Air Quality Applied Sciences Team.
Foresight in Social Justice
Dr. Richard Baker
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Foresight in Social Justice
MLSC 569
Semester: Spring 2023
Credit Hours: 3
Foresight in Social Justice will explore and analyze social justice issues, and then suggest positive action for social change. This course introduces students to future studies research, enabling individuals to spot emerging opportunities and threats within the context of social justice and develop innovative responses to serve changing needs. Foresight in Social Justice is a course that challenges students to engage in the process of identifying and evaluating major issues, trends and uncertainties impacting social justice in the future and exploring potential societal implications that can drive sustainable innovation. Students will provide a final project, written and oral presentation, related to how they would use current trends to impact social justice in the future.
Richard Baker, Ph.D. - Dr. Richard Anthony Baker’s involvement in diversity and equal opportunity matters spans more than 20 years. Starting as a student then as entry-level staff, Dr. Baker has worked at every level of equal opportunity compliance. He eventually became the chief equal opportunity officer for the third-largest university system in Texas. After serving in that role for eight years, Dr. Baker transitioned to Rice University in August 2019 and became the Executive Director for Institutional Equity, EO/AA, and Title IX. In this role, Dr. Baker’s responsibilities include assessing the University’s diversity management effectiveness, specifically in the area of recruitment and retention of diverse personnel. Dr. Baker’s responsibilities also include overseeing the University’s anti-discrimination initiatives, including authoring and enforcing policies, procedures, practices, and other institutional strategies aimed at eliminating disparate treatment and impact on its community. In addition to providing high-level strategic guidance on equal opportunity matters, Dr. Baker conducts formal investigations of individual complaints and systemic reviews of allegations of discrimination. In order to prevent these events from occurring, Dr. Baker provides anti-discrimination training for thousands of employees and students and presents on the topic of equal opportunity and Title IX at academic conferences throughout the country. Additionally, Dr. Baker is the President of the Board for the American Association for Access, Equity, and Diversity (AAAED) which is the oldest operating national association serving equal opportunity professionals.
Dr. Baker has the distinction of being the first African-American to obtain a doctorate of jurisprudence and graduate degrees in Public Administration (M.P.A.) and Higher Education (Ph.D.) from Texas Tech University.
Biblical Ethics
Dr. Matthias Henze
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Biblical Ethics
MLSC 572
Semester: Spring 2023
Credit Hours: 3
Biblical Ethics is a course on what the Bible has to say about some of the major moral issues of our time. Many pundits today claim that they know what biblical ethics are, when, in fact, only few of them care to read the Bible, let alone read it critically. The absence of biblical literacy and the unwillingness to engage the Bible critically become especially problematic in the context of our current debates on a range of moral issues. In this class we examine both. We will read a variety of biblical texts and familiarize ourselves with the authors’ ethical and moral positions. Only then will we be in a position to discuss which role, if any, the Bible should play in our contemporary debates. To examine the ethics within the Bible is essentially a historical-critical task. It investigates what the Bible meant in ancient times when the texts were written. The attempt to articulate an ethics of the Bible is a modern enterprise driven by our own questions. It asks what the Bible means today. The former is descriptive. It observes and describes what we learn from our historical-critical reading of the Bible. The latter is prescriptive. It examines how such a critical reading in the context of our contemporary moral debates might inform our moral reasoning.
Matthias Henze, Ph.D, is the Watt J. and Lilly G. Jackson Professor in Biblical Studies and Founding Director of the Program in Jewish Studies at Rice University, where he has taught since 1997. His areas of interest are broad and include the Hebrew Bible, Judaism of the Second Temple period, apocalyptic literature, Syriac language and literature, and the Qumran fragments. In particular, he is interested in those early texts that never became part of the Jewish Bible - the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha - and what we can learn when these texts are read side by side with the canonical writings. Dr. Henze has written and edited nine books and currently he is at work on a critical commentary on Second Baruch. Dr. Henze is the 2009 and 2010 recipient of the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching and the 2003 Rice University Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.
Creative Nonfiction
Dr. Deborah Barrett
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Creative Nonfiction
MLSC 617
Semester: Spring 2023
Credit Hours: 3
Creative nonfiction takes many forms, including expository writing, personal essay, narrative story-telling, literary journalism, memoir, nature and science writing, travel and food writing, historical narrative, biographical narrative, and academic and cultural criticism. This course is designed to help students read and write creative nonfiction with a focus on the voice, structure, messages, style, and technique found in contemporary creative nonfiction. The material covered applies to the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences.
The course will include critical reading and discussion of modern and contemporary essays specifically selected to demonstrate the breadth of the genre coupled with writing exercises and the respectful criticism of peer work in a workshop format. In addition, we will look at publishing creative nonfiction, including selecting the publication, understanding the process, and editing of their work. Students will turn in short essays to be read and critiqued by their peers throughout the semester and develop and turn in a portfolio as the final project for the course.
Deborah Barrett, Ph.D. is a professor in the practice of writing and communication at Rice University where she teaches graduate courses in creative writing and literature. She was awarded the John Freeman Faculty Teaching Award in 2019 for her work in the GLS Program, which she joined as faculty in 2009. She served as the director of MBA communication at the Jones School and director of the Program for Communication Excellence for Rice undergraduates after joining the Rice faculty in 1998. She has a Ph.D. in English from Rice and has published scholarly articles on literature, communication, and leadership and a textbook, Leadership Communication (McGraw-Hill). She has participated in several major writing conferences, including the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences for creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. She has published several creative nonfiction essays as Deborah Burch-Lavis and published a chapbook of poetry, The Desert Speaks to the Dreamer (Finishing Line Press, 2019). Currently, she participates in poetry workshops with the Circle of Wise Women at Stanford University, and is working on publishing her novel. You can read some of her creative writing and see her photography at https://www.mydeborahbarrett.com and see some of her academic publications and presentations at https://scholarship.rice.edu.
Women Writers and Heroines: From Myth to Reality
Dr. Deborah Barrett
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Women Writers and Heroines: From Myth to Reality
MLSC 573
Semester: Summer 2023
Credit Hours: 3
Women Writers and Heroines will focus on the poetry, fiction, nonfiction writing, and feminist criticism of selected women writers in the 20th and 21st centuries, looking at major literary themes and the characterization and history of women as writers and heroines, including the misrepresentation of women's stories in folklore and mythology. The course will consist of reading and discussing major women writers of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction of the 20th and 21st centuries, the characterization of women as heroines in fiction and nonfiction, and historical and feminist literary criticism. The readings will include selections from the following writers: Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Doris Lessing, Ursula Le Guin, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sharon Olds, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates, Louise Gluck, Eavan Boland, Leslie Silko, Joy Harjo, and Alice Walker and the critical and historical writing of Gilbert, Gubar, Showalter, Tatar, Eagleton, and Cixous. Students will conduct historical and literary analysis of the texts and apply different approaches to reading and understanding literature, such as classical, historical, feminist, cultural, and psychological, in addition to learning how narrative techniques, point of view, and characterization influence the writing and reading of the works.
Deborah Barrett, Ph.D. is a professor in the practice of writing and communication at Rice University where she teaches graduate courses in creative writing and literature. She was awarded the John Freeman Faculty Teaching Award in 2019 for her work in the GLS Program, which she joined as faculty in 2009. She served as the director of MBA communication at the Jones School and director of the Program for Communication Excellence for Rice undergraduates after joining the Rice faculty in 1998. She has a Ph.D. in English from Rice and has published scholarly articles on literature, communication, and leadership and a textbook, Leadership Communication (McGraw-Hill). She has participated in several major writing conferences, including the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences for creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. She has published several creative nonfiction essays as Deborah Burch-Lavis and published a chapbook of poetry, The Desert Speaks to the Dreamer (Finishing Line Press, 2019). Currently, she participates in poetry workshops with the Circle of Wise Women at Stanford University, and is working on publishing her novel. You can read some of her creative writing and see her photography at https://www.mydeborahbarrett.com and see some of her academic publications and presentations at https://scholarship.rice.edu.
Changing Views of Victorian England
Dr. Newell D. Boyd
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Changing Views of Victorian England
MLSC 613
Semester: Summer 2023
Credit Hours: 3
Ever since the early days of Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministership when she frequently ballyhooed the virtues of “Victorian Values,” scholars have been revisiting the stereotypical history of live and lifestyles during Victorian times in Great Britain. For much of the last century we have perceived Victorian as living soberly prudent lives, living in overstuffed houses, filled with overstuffed furniture. We have commonly depicted the Victorians as persons who revered the institutions of religion, family, country, and social convention. This course stresses the result of the most recent historical research which challenges the more traditional views. What has emerged has been a Victorian England that was more irreverent, less inhibited, and more sensual than has been understood before.
Newell D. Boyd, Ph.D, is a semi-retired professor of history whose primary teaching field is Victorian Britain and the British Empire. He has presented papers at academic meetings and been published regularly in a variety of books and scholarly journals in the field of British history. He has recently published historical novels on the lives of John Ruskin and Joseph Chamberlain. He holds a PhD in history from Texas Tech University and has done post-doctoral research at the University of London, Birmingham University, the London School of Economics, Oxford University and the University of Edinburgh. Dr. Boyd has been a fellow at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London and is a member of England's Society of Authors and the Royal Historical Society.
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