Department of Interdisciplinary Studies

Our Mission

The Department of Interdisciplinary Studies provides a progressive, open model for an academic department that promotes creative and imaginative investigations of complex systems and problems. We support innovative scholarship and teaching that is responsive to changes in fields of study inside and outside of academia. We foster courses and programs of study that are engaged with the needs of global and local communities as well as social justice issues. We support new modes of teaching, learning, and research that cut across disciplinary boundaries and explore interstitial areas of concern. Our department recognizes the diversity of our students, faculty, staff, and community, and we cultivate diversity in our teaching, scholarship, and community engagement.

Our Vision

We recognize that disciplinary boundaries are not static. The department strives to become a home for emerging and established interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary programs. We seek to take a leading role within the university as a home for innovation and experimentation in teaching and scholarship. We seek to be a leader within the UNC and across the nation in fostering and supporting multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary programs that address critical issues in a complex world.

The Department of Interdisciplinary Studies affirms diversity and difference in all their forms as a starting point for creating responsible discourse and collective engagement. Diversity remains central to our mission, goals and objectives, and we encourage and celebrate it through faculty and student research and scholarship.

As interdisciplinary teachers and scholars, we attest to the value of diversity in creating communities of inquiry and solidarity. We reject bigotry, hate, willful ignorance and intolerance. We advocate for a diverse classroom, campus, community, and nation inclusive of all.

Dr. Emily Lutenski (far right in photo) joined the IDS faculty in Fall 2023 to direct the Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies program. Before that, she spent over a decade in American Studies at Saint Louis University; a year in African American Studies at Princeton University; and three years in Ethnic Studies at Bowling Green State University. She arrived at these interdisciplinary locations--and to IDS--with a deep commitment to the study of how gender, sexuality, and race co-constitute one another, largely through the examination of U.S. literary histories. This was an interest she explored as a student, both in graduate school in English and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan and in undergraduate school in English and Women's Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. But it's also a commitment to study--and to change--that developed out of her personal experience, which includes growing up on the outskirts of Detroit, where she could see while walking around her own neighborhood how her opportunities were shaped by the de facto race and class-based segregation that cleaved the urban and suburban landscapes. Emily is thrilled to connect with students at App State, where she aims to deliver the highest quality teaching and mentoring in GWS. In the photo she is furthering that goal by accompanying GWS students to present their research at the 2024 WGS South conference.