Explore Residential College Majors
The Residential College is a living-learning community and academic program within LSA. Alongside four-year residential life in East Quad, it offers a set of majors, minors, and courses that are open to every LSA student. You don't have to live here, or join the residential community, to make an RC major your own.
What ties the four majors together is how you learn, not only what you study. Each one is interdisciplinary and largely self-designed: instead of following a fixed sequence inside a single department, you work across fields and build a path around the questions that pull you in, in small classes where the faculty know your name. And in every one, ideas come paired with practice, whether that means making art, writing, performing, or doing community-engaged work.
Four majors, four ways in. Each one links to its own page where you can dig into requirements, courses, and the people who teach them
Arts & Ideas
Arts & Ideas is for students who don't want to give up one art or field for another. Instead of picking a single department, you bring two together, either two humanities disciplines or a humanities discipline paired with a studio practice, and follow how ideas move across media, cultures, and centuries. You make art and study it rather than choosing between the studio and the seminar. Courses run from art history and literature to music, dance, and visual art, and from the ancient world to the present. It's the RC's only umbrella major, with a Music Program and a Visual Arts Program under it, each with its own courses and faculty.
Creative Writing and Literature
Creative Writing and Literature treats you as a serious writer from your first term, whatever year you're in and however much you've written before. The heart of it is personal attention. Small workshops and one-on-one tutorials give you far more feedback on your own pages than a large department can, and the faculty coach toward the writer you're trying to become rather than one house style. You work in fiction, poetry, and digital storytelling while reading closely as a writer, letting the literature sharpen your craft. It's one of the RC's signature programs, with a long line of accomplished writers among its faculty and alumni.
Drama
Drama at the RC is for theatremakers who want the whole craft, not one corner of it. The program treats performance, design, playwriting, and scholarship as one collaborative practice, community-engaged and committed to social change. Courses pair theory with practice and often end in public performance, and you can get involved through programs like Telling It, the Prison Creative Arts Project, Shakespeare in the Arb, and the student-run RC Players.
Social Theory and Practice
Social Theory and Practice (STP) is for students who want to understand how injustice works and then do something about it. It's an interdisciplinary, justice-focused major built around a social-justice question you choose, drawing on sociology, psychology, women's and gender studies, political science, education, and more. You move through it with a cohort, taking several courses alongside the same group, and community-engaged work is a graded part of the major, not an add-on. You finish with a senior project you design yourself, a research paper, a reflection on community work, or a creative piece, on a question you care about.
Ready to take the next step?
Any LSA student can declare an RC major. The best first move is a quick conversation with an RC advisor who can walk you through requirements and how a major fits your plan.
Curious but not ready to commit? You can also take RC classes or explore RC minors, both are open to all LSA students.
Last Updated: 07/17/2026
