For Prospective PhD Students

The first two years are devoted to coursework, including one required course in Old French.  Students are required to take fourteen courses in total. At least two—and up to four—of these courses should be outside French, in departments such as Comparative Literature, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, History of Science and Medicine, History of Art, and Film.  

Students must also fulfill the language requirement by the end of the second year, which is to demonstrate proficiency in any two languages beyond English and French that are relevant to the students’ research interests. There are a number of ways to fulfill the requirement.

In the third year, students take their oral qualifying exam and prepare their dissertation prospectus. Students typically teach one course per semester during two of their years of graduate study, beginning in the third year. They receive training in language teaching methodology and teach two semesters of French language. After fulfilling this language teaching requirement, students often work as teaching assistants in advanced undergraduate literature courses. Students are required to teach for four semesters in total.

In the fourth or fifth year, after completing their dissertation prospectus, most students choose to pursue dissertation research outside the US.  Many students participate in the exchange program with the Ecole Normale Supérieure, rue d’Ulm, in Paris. Our students have also conducted dissertation research in Algeria, Morocco, Haiti, and Senegal.

Students complete their dissertation in the fifth or sixth year, and receive guidance and support as they navigate professional paths beyond the PhD.

For detailed information about each of these requirements, see our Ph.D. program guidelines. 

For a schematic overview of the program requirements, see the GSAS Bulletin. 

In addition to the PhD in French, we collaborate with other departments to offer three combined PhD Programs and seven certificates of concentration. For details, please visit Combined Programs & Certificates.

The combined PhD programs are with Black Studies, Early Modern Studies, and Film and Media Studies. 

To recognize competency in a related field gained while pursuing your PhD in French, Yale offers several graduate certificates of concentration, including: African Studies, Environmental Humanities; Film & Media Studies; Ethnicity, Race, & Migration; Material Histories of the Human Record; Translation Studies; and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. After consulting with the Director of Graduate Studies, graduate students may decide complete one of these certificates alongside their work in the French department.

Our graduate faculty are also very actively involved in programs and centers beyond the department, including African Studies, Black Studies, The Yale Translation Initiative, Middle East Studies, Jewish Studies, Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, Early Modern Studies, Comparative Literature, Film and Media Studies, and the Whitney Humanities Center. These affiliations create interdisciplinary networks across Yale for our PhD students in French.

Strong candidates for our PhD program will have a thorough command of French and robust academic preparation in French and Francophone literary studies.  

You should prepare the following materials to include with your application for admission: 

• A statement of academic purpose that creates a vivid picture of your research profile. 
• A list of all the colleges or universities you have attended, accompanied by unofficial transcripts from each school. 
• Three letters of recommendation from mentors and professors who know your academic work. 
• $105 application fee or fee waiver
• A 20-page writing sample in French. This can consist of one twenty-page paper or several shorter papers that total twenty pages, and should represent your most polished and compelling academic writing.

We no longer consider the GRE as part of the application to our doctoral program. There is no need to take the GRE or to submit scores with your application. 

TOEFL or IELTS are necessary for most non-native English speakers, except for applicants who have earned a degree in an English-language institution. 

• More information about the Yale GSAS application process
• Application portal

The financial support packages that PhD students at Yale receive are among the most generous in the world. In addition to a fellowship that pays the full cost of tuition and health coverage, all Yale PhD students receive a stipend to cover the basic cost of living in New Haven. The minimum annual stipends for the 2025-2026 academic year are $50,777 for PhD students in the humanities. See GSAS Tuition, Funding, & Living Costs for more details.

Our program is a PhD course only. We do not offer a free-standing MA program, and we do not offer postdoctoral fellowships.

It is neither required nor necessary to contact a potential supervisor.  We review all applications with close attention, and communicating with a faculty member will not give your application an advantage. We do not expect our incoming graduate students to have a supervisor until later in their graduate work, once they have gotten to know faculty through coursework and exam preparation.  

We consider the six-year PhD process to be standard and do not shorten our program based on existing degrees; coursework is a vital part of the doctoral process, during which students explore their interests and get to know the faculty. However, on a case-by-case basis, we will consider granting credit for up to two graduate seminars in a petition process called “acceleration.” This is decided during the second year of study and is not a factor in the admissions process. 

You do not need to have already earned an MA to apply to our program.  Students in the PhD program will earn an MPhil after completing certain requirements on the path toward the doctoral degree. (Again, note that we do not offer a free-standing MA.)

No. We do not require applicants to take the GRE or to submit GRE scores.
 

January 2. For more information, visit GSAS Dates & Deadlines. 

Some PhD applicants may be eligible for an application fee waiver. The eligibility requirements and process to request a waiver are listed here. Note: fee waiver requests are submitted separately from the application for admission and usually take 2-3 business days to process. Please plan to submit your fee waiver request in well advance of your application deadline whenever possible. The final deadline to submit a fee waiver request is January 2.