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The Humanities

"The true college will ever have one goal -- not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes."    W.E.B. DuBois

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WHY THE HUMANITIES?

Studying the humanities enables us to learn how to think critically and creatively and how to pose questions that often do not have set answers. The humanities foster a critical perspective on human culture, human artifacts and various records of human experience (verbal, visual, aural). The signature trait of humanistic study is that it relies on an explicit combination of interpretative and analytical research rather than posing questions that can be answered with data.

WHAT ARE THE HUMANITIES?

The humanities are a rich and interdisciplinary collection of fields and endeavors, each of which studies and interprets human thought and culture. The humanities include the study of literature, philosophy, law, history, art, and music, as well as other cultural forms and practices such as film, dance, theater, television, media, and religion.

WHERE ARE THE HUMANITIES?

In departments and programs across the University such as: Philosophy, Classics, Art History, French & Italian, English, History, Spanish & Portuguese, Religious Studies, German, RTVF (Radio/TV/Film), Theatre, Performance Studies, Rhetoric and Public Culture, American Studies, Music, Gender Studies, Screen Cultures. Some social sciences feature humanistic study -- in Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science, and Psychology. The Kaplan Institute houses an interdisciplinary humanities curriculum, a humanities minor and the Kaplan Humanities Scholars Program.