About the Department

The Department of Religious Studies at UCSB is one of the major centers in North America for the comparative and interdisciplinary study of religion. It has strong faculty and resources and typically is involved in teaching up to 2,000 undergraduates and some 75 graduate students each quarter. It houses the prestigious Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life; maintains close ties with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies; boasts several endowed chairs located within it—the XIV Dalai Lama Chair in Tibetan Studies, the Virgil Cordano Chair in Catholic Studies, and the Tipton Distinguished Visiting Chair in Catholic Studies; teaches a plethora of research languages including Arabic, Aramaic, Coptic, Hebrew, Hindi, Persian, Punjabi, Sanskrit, and Tibetan; oversees, besides its undergraduate major in Religious Studies, undergraduate minors in American Indian & Indigenous Studies and Jewish Studies; and offers, for its Ph.D. students, opportunities to add a Global Studies Emphasis, a Translation Studies Emphasis, a European Medieval Studies Emphasis, or a Women’s Studies Emphasis to their degree. Graduate study in the Department fans out into major areas that represent work in the Philosophy of Religion, the Sociology and Anthropology of Religion, Religion and Culture, Buddhist Studies, Mediterranean and West Asian Religions, South Asian Religions, East Asian Religions, Religion in America, Native American Religions, and Christian Traditions. Meanwhile, the Department is also actively involved in foreign exchange programming.

The University of California, Santa Barbara, provides an exciting intellectual environment in a setting of great natural beauty. One of the nine University of California campuses, it is situated on an 989-acre promontory between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Ynez mountains, ten miles west of downtown Santa Barbara. The campus community numbers about 20,000 students, of whom about 13 percent are graduate students.

Offering instruction, professional training, and research in more than 40 fields of scholarship, the campus is the site of numerous laboratories, centers, institutes, an art museum, and libraries containing 2.5 million volumes in specialized and wide-ranging collections. Throughout the year the campus is the scene of cultural programs including concerts, films, art exhibits, and dance and theater events.

The city of Santa Barbara offers a wide variety of outstanding theatrical and musical productions, art and natural history museums, botanical gardens, and numerous shops and restaurants. The environment affords abundant opportunities for swimming, hiking, camping, cycling, riding, sailing, and other outdoor activities. The Santa Barbara airport, located next to the campus, offers direct flights to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Dallas, and Chicago, with easy connections to other destinations.