The Literature Faculty at MIT emerged gradually – nearly one hundred years after the founding of the Institute – from a group of scholars assembled at mid-twentieth century, under the stewardship of John Burchard, first Dean of what was then the School of Humanities and Social Science. The formation of this group was requisite for a novel undergraduate requirement – that all students, whatever their major, take at least one subject in humanities or social science each semester during their four-year course of study.

Early Formations and Divisions

The group initially forming the Humanities department consisted of a heterogeneous array of linguists, philosophers, historians, musicians and musicologists, anthropologists, and scholars of English and Foreign languages and literatures. By the early '60s, however, MIT's heightened intellectual investment in these various fields prompted the division of this group into semi-autonomous units, termed sections, each with limited powers of appointment to staff independent courses of study leading to a degree in Humanities.

At the time, the field of literary studies was still largely devoted to teaching the literature of a given language against a background of the political history of a particular nation-state. Study and scholarship in the literature of the English language was everywhere termed "English" for short: its proponents were "professors of English," and its subject was divided into periods according to either ruling monarchies – Elizabethan, Jacobean, Queen Anne, Victorian, and the like – or into major periods of American political history.

It therefore marked a significant departure from the norm that the newly-formed group of scholars in this field at MIT chose to call themselves the Literature Section rather than the English Section, and to found the units of their curriculum upon theoretical principles appropriate to the study of literature as a trans-national cultural phenomenon (rather than borrowing divisions from the political history of any English-speaking population).

A Concept Ahead of Its Time

Here the study of literature at MIT proved in advance of its time – a step made easier by the absence of a primary obligation to train proficient applicants for graduate schools, a requirement hampering undergraduate programs at universities elsewhere by effectively locking undergraduate curricula into a system of scholarship that was fast becoming obsolete. Under Richard Douglas, first Head of the Humanities Department, and Chair of Section Louis Kampf, MIT gradually mounted a resolutely interdisciplinary curriculum in literary studies, drawing upon texts in philosophy, anthropology, and linguistics, as well as works of literature either native to English or in reliable translation.

Committed to the idea that the disciplined study of literary forms – narrative, lyric, dramatic, expository – transcended not only linguistic and national boundaries but also the division between high and popular culture, the Literature Section introduced subjects rare or unknown in curricula elsewhere: among them, a two-semester survey of Great Books, one of the earliest undergraduate subject in film, and what was arguably the first undergraduate subject anywhere to study television as an embodiment of narrative forms. Its early work in these respects was recognized by two major awards from the premier scholarly organization for literary studies in this country, the Modern Language Association, during the early 'seventies, at a time when the idea of literary studies as a theoretical discipline at last began to have a major effect upon undergraduate curricula across the country.

LIT@MIT Today

By the mid-eighties, the various Sections of the original Humanities department were granted further autonomy and the Literature Section became a department in all but name. Under Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts and the Social Sciences Anne Friedlander, the section was re-named the Literature Faculty and its curriculum was awarded degree-bearing status for both major and minor programs.

To this day, the Literature Section continues its foundational practice of innovation, its tiered progam of studies remains a model, and its faculty ranks among the most distinguished undergraduate faculties in the nation.