About the Humanities (program and minor)

Jim Hala, Director
NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor of the Humanities

The Humanities Program is an innovative interdisciplinary course of study designed especially for College students. The Humanities Program curriculum gives students the opportunity to explore pivotal events and ideas in Western and world history, and to engage with cultural issues relevant to the present across academic disciplines. The Humanities Program offers a minor. Students have found the breadth and depth of the Humanities Program to be invaluable to contextualizing and complementing their major. The Humanities Program is the place to GET THE WHOLE PICTURE.

Each semester-length course is taught by two professors who put their fields together on a thematic basis. There is the opportunity for rich discussion, interdisciplinary thinking. and the astonishing experience of original works. Fields that have contributed to the program's semester-long courses in Western Humanities and Comparative Humanities include Asian studies, classics, English, history, Latin American studies, Middle-Eastern studies, Music, Pan-African studies, religion, and Spanish. The program's half-semester courses (Issues, Exchange) engage the humanities with the social sciences, performing arts, and sciences. Fields that have contributed to these courses include those already listed plus anthropology, biology, economics, philosophy, political science, physics, sociology, theatre, and women's studies.

Humanities Program courses are open to everyone, including first-year students. They proffer options for majors and minors and for life’s undertakings. Equally as interesting---they can be used to fulfill language in context and general education requirements for Divisions 2, 3, or 4. For the Humanities minor take at least one Western and one Comparative humanities class in the first two years.

Western Humanities
A series of four interdisciplinary introductions to the life of the humanities in the West. Each course presents its historical and cultural period through representative works from among the fields of art, architecture, classics, history, literature, music, and philosophy. Surveying major ideas, forms, and forces in their historical and aesthetic contexts, the courses ask new questions of established works and broaden traditional canons. Team-taught by faculty from two or more humanities disciplines. You need to take three Western Humanities courses for the minor.

Comparative Humanities
Each of these courses places two or more humanities disciplines in cross-cultural perspective. By examining humanities fields in a comparative, global manner, each team-taught course seeks further understanding of the contributions of world cultures to global history, as well as elements of Western, especially North American, cultural practices within the context of world cultural practices. Literature, music, religion, history, anthropology, art, and other fields provide the material and the issues for this comparative study of the humanities. You need to take two Comparative Humanities courses for the minor.

Issues in the Humanities
A multi disciplinary introduction to ideas, forms, values, and forces that affect our lives from fields across the humanities, social sciences, performing arts, and sciences. Each half-semester offering of the course presents a topic on contemporary cultures as represented in materials from a variety of disciplines. Topics have included: “What Is/Was Postmodernism,” “Globalism and the Humanities,” “Searching for the Good Life,” “Modern Science and the Humanities,” "The Body," "Freedom," and "The Family." Offered first half of spring semester annually. This course is required for the minor.

The new Culture and Exchange course is offered in the second half of the spring semester in even numbered years. This course introduces students to exchange as the basis for all human interaction by comparing ideas about and principles of exchange through different disciplinary lenses, including the arts, economics, anthropology, religion, and linguistics, among others.

Contact information

Contact: Jim Hala, Director of the Humanities Program
N.E.H. Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities
Professor of English Languages and Literatures
Sitterly House 205
Phone: 973/ 408-3297
E-mail: jhala@drew.edu