Humanities

Welcome to the Humanities Program

We have suspended all admission to the MA program indefinitely.

Our Mission

The Humanities Program represents the humanities, collectively, to the university community, through its opportunity for advanced interdisciplinary study and through fostering an appreciation of the capacity of the humanities to lend meaning, coherence, and beauty to our lives—in short, to make us more fully human.

General Education
Our general education offerings represent a broad spectrum of topics and approaches that meet the objectives of the humanities as defined by the university: historical knowledge, cultural knowledge, aesthetic training, creativity, knowledge of disciplinary critical canons, and synthesizing ability. In addition, these courses reinforce basic skills in reading, writing, and critical thinking.

Minor in Humanities
We offer a 12-unit undergraduate Minor in Humanities. Use it to balance a professional major, extend a liberal arts major, or prepare for further study. You will explore significant themes and issues through the disciplines of the humanities: art, music, literature, philosophy, and history. The master’s degree program in the humanities enables students to pursue studies for professional advancement and personal enrichment, and provides experience in the application of contemporary theory as well as in research methods in the humanities.

In all of its components, the program consciously fosters a pluralistic perspective, showing how, in the words of the Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities, “the individual is autonomous and at the same time bound in the ligatures of language and history, to humankind across time and throughout the world.”

Testimonials 

Tim Trevathan, a Humanities Minor student, calls the Minor "the most useful, philosophical, and practical 'connecting of the dots' that has ever happened in my life."