• Our program engages contemporary questions in response to current developments in the transnational world of art, culture, and religion. At the same time, the curriculum offers students a historical background in the humanities and the study of culture in light of which present-day cultural artifacts and modes of reading acquire their shape.
  • Humanities and Cultural Studies faculty and students understand their objects of study as elements of current and historical formations of culture and society. We engage diverse analytical methodologies to investigate how objects, texts, images, sounds, spaces, and performances come by their meanings, readings, and effects. Shakespeare sides with Edwidge Danticat, Ancient Greek literature is studied alongside Buddhism.
  • Students combine critical readings of opera with those of contemporary sound art and electronic dance music, Spinoza and Kant with Judith Butler and Homi Bhabha, labor history with poetry, art and architectural history with theories of perception; Frankfurt School style cultural criticism with critical studies of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.