Bryn Mawr College

Bryn Mawr College is a private women's college in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, on Philadelphia's Main Line. Quaker physician Joseph W. Taylor founded it in 1885 so that women could pursue both undergraduate and graduate degrees. It was among the first American colleges for women to offer the Ph.D. The college belongs to the Tri-College Consortium with Haverford College and Swarthmore College and to the Quaker Consortium with the University of Pennsylvania, which lets students cross-register and share libraries.

Undergraduate teaching is organized as a liberal arts college. Graduate work sits in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, with doctoral study in chemistry, mathematics, physics, psychology, classical and Near Eastern archaeology, Greek, Latin, and history of art, and in the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research. Graduate students use campus laboratories and archaeological collections and, in social work, field agencies across the Philadelphia region.

Enrollment is about 1,400 undergraduates and several hundred graduate students, with a faculty of a few hundred. The residential campus is small. Alumni include actress Katharine Hepburn, historian Drew Gilpin Faust, and poet Marianne Moore.

The college is known for the Ph.D. in the arts and sciences and for graduate degrees in social work. Supervision is close, with seminars and consortium coursework. The calendar is two semesters. Graduate students live and work on a suburban campus linked by regional rail to Center City Philadelphia.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, Bryn Mawr College lists 3 graduate programs in literature and art, all of them doctoral programs.