Master of Arts in Japanese - Literature

UW–Madison offers MA and PhD degrees in Japanese, specializing either in linguistics or in literature and culture. The program provides broad foundations and focused training in these two specialties, assuring that our graduates are amply prepared to teach and conduct research. The linguistics specialty excels in areas such as functional linguistics, pragmatics, discourseconversation analysis, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and language pedagogy.The literature and culture specialty covers the classical Heian through contemporary Reiwa periods, offering a wide range of courses on fiction, poetry, drama, popular culture, visual culture, cinema, acoustic culture, and cutting-edge cross-media and avant-garde topics, particularly manga and anime.

A bachelor’s degree from a regionally accredited U.S. institution or a comparable degree from an international institution is required. International applicants must have a degree comparable to a regionally accredited U.S. bachelor’s degree. You must have completed your undergraduate degree, or similar, before starting graduate school. A minimum undergraduate grade point average (GPA) of 3.00 on the equivalent of the last 60 credit hours (approximately two years of work) or a master’s degree with a minimum cumulative GPA of 3.00 is required. The Graduate School will take into consideration different grade scales from institutions that do not have 4.00 scales (e.g., institutions outside the United States of America).