Department of Humanities
You can turn your love of language, literature, and writing into a profitable and rewarding career.
Humanities Department Mission Statement
The Humanities Department encourages students to explore the lifelong question of what it means to be human. We inspire intellectual curiosity and inquiry as well as creative expression through the interdisciplinary study of language, literature, and philosophy. By educating students in the foundational skills of critical reading, thinking, and analysis, oral and written communication, and creative problem-solving, we prepare students across the university to adapt to changing professional, social, and cultural environments.
Student Learning Objectives
Throughout their courses in the Humanities, students will
- demonstrate close reading practices by accurately referencing, paraphrasing, and analyzing key formal elements, details and patterns in texts, and explaining how they inform the meaning of a text.
- construct analytical arguments that move from observation of textual detail to interpretation using course-specific critical frameworks, thereby demonstrating the ability to synthesize textual evidence into coherent critical claims.
- produce clear, persuasive, and stylistically effective written work that communicates complex ideas with nuance and demonstrates command of language, organization, and the recursive nature of the writing process.
- create multimodal presentations that demonstrate rhetorical and digital literacy.
- locate, evaluate, and ethically incorporate outside sources to support informed, original arguments or creative works.
- demonstrate an awareness of how cultural, historical, and aesthetic contexts affect interpretation and meaning.
Humanities Department Goals
- We will form a committee to devise a faculty mentoring model which includes observation for the department.
- Faculty members will pilot programs with innovative designs and assess their effectiveness and share their results with the department.
- Faculty will engage in service learning in their classes and will provide information regarding their service learning if asked.
- Faculty who teach Gen Ed classes will collect assessment data and make our data available to the CAS Dean.
Key Features
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