A Champion of Interdisciplinary Discovery and Discourse

Published June 30, 2025

Laura DeSisto is comfortable with being uncomfortable.

For this reason, she wants her students to land in the sweet spot of their intellectual questions and interests, yet preferably a bit outside of their own comfort zones.

Established in 1962 as one of the first of its kind in the country, JHU’s nationally recognized Master of Liberal Arts program remains relevant under DeSisto’s direction. With her help, the program continues to examine the history of ideas with an interdisciplinary approach. The result is a unique, non-traditional graduate degree.

“At its heart, an interdisciplinary liberal arts education allows for questions to be asked in increasingly interesting ways and accommodates conversations and discourse without the expectation that there is a neat and tidy answer,” said DeSisto. “Unlike the disciplinary perspectives that equate the lack of answers to failing, in the liberal arts, there is room to live and breathe and dwell inside those questions and to see what is revealed through asking them.”

Drawing from her experience as a board member for the Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs and with an emphasis on scholarly research, DeSisto fosters that spirit of inquisitiveness, curiosity, and discovery. She routinely encourages MLA students to enroll in courses that they would have never imagined taking prior to joining the program.

“What I see and hear from students, time and time again, is that those courses end up being among the most impactful,” she said. “They help our students rethink things in a way that adds depth, nuisance, and complexity to the ideas they already care about. By stepping outside of a singular disciplinary focus and by studying a more diverse range of topics, students often revisit their primary areas of academic interest with a broader analytical lens and a widened perspective. When our students buy into this approach with their MLA studies, it plays out in really exciting ways through their capstone research, ongoing questions, and future intellectual commitments.”

Broad Appeal

DeSisto and her faculty pour great thought and intentionality into developing a flexible, online program that attracts a diverse population of learners, ranging in age from their twenties to their eighties. They are professionals coming from data-driven corporate worlds and financial and computer tech fields – engineers, doctors, and lawyers. The degree also attracts artists, social workers, and teachers, and yes, retirees who have accomplished their professional goals but remain engaged in the search for knowledge. The course catalog includes varied topic-driven interdisciplinary offerings that draw from a cross-section of subjects including literature, history, art, music, political theory, philosophy, cultural studies, and the social and natural sciences. An equally diverse and accomplished faculty of jazz musicians, historians, art historians, cultural anthropologists, philosophers, religious scholars, sociologists, and literary critics work closely with MLA students.

Call it enrichment – personal and professional – with a capital E.

Inquiring Minds

While many other liberal arts graduate programs serve as a conduit for securing a specialized degree within a subset of the liberal arts, the JHU MLA program creates opportunities for students to establish a solid foundation in the history of ideas while also considering enduring humanistic questions.

These questions lead students on ever-interesting paths. Through their MLA coursework, students have the opportunity to bring music and conversation together with sociology, history, and politics. They can analyze how art history opens up new angles of analysis to interpret social movements. Courses that appear to focus on films also connect them to literature. Many classes incorporate philosophical texts and ideas that students otherwise would not have encountered outside of a philosophy major. Anecdotally, students share that they have chosen to enroll in this program to fill a void in their day-to-day landscape, to expand conversations that have become too narrow, to fill gaps between what is happening in their daily lives and what they see occurring in broader social and political spheres, and to pursue what they are most passionate about.

Ever-Evolving Options

The program continues to launch engaging courses such as “The War for Reality: The Use, Misuse, and Abuse of History by Non-Historians” and “Islamic Art and Architecture.” DeSisto hopes to develop new offerings that highlight the connections between the natural sciences and the humanities. She also is revising and re-imagining student favorites, like “The Self in Question,” that will be presented from the point of a view of a faculty member who is a cultural anthropologist.

“Our faculty are committed to helping students figure out what they are called to do and what drives their interests and then augment this based on our course offerings,” DeSisto said. “Our students routinely express a desire to hone their critical thinking and writing skills, their social awareness and ethical reasoning, their ability to think from a broader range of perspectives, and to be a little more creative and innovative in their thinking. They are seeking a different type of space, particularly ones where they can pose questions and have permission to explore them with people who share a similar inclination toward curiosity and intellectual engagement.”

Enviable End Results

“Our graduates are well-rounded as scholars and intellectually open-minded individuals,” DeSisto said. “They tend to be divergent thinkers who find value in approaching the world of ideas with curiosity and a genuine interest to learn from others. This program creates a space for them that suits their inclinations to think across disciplinary boundaries and explore topics in creative and challenging ways. For many, this is the type of study they always knew they wanted to do, but they didn’t know how, until they found us.”