The Department of Humanities brings together the study of history, philosophy, religion, language, linguistics, and literature. These are the disciplines that examine what and how people have thought, believed, said, and created throughout history and across cultures, with particular attention given to Central Asia and the wider Eurasian world. Our coursework in disciplinary methods is combined with a robust emphasis on language learning, with current offerings including German, French, Spanish, Polish, Chinese, Korean, and Persian.

The Department of Humanities is built on a set of common practices: reading closely, arguing carefully, and taking seriously the texts, traditions and languages through which people have made sense of their world. The scholars in our department work on a range of different materials but ask compatible questions of them: how does this text or utterance work? What does it assume? Whom does it persuade, and why? What larger discourse is it part of? In learning to answer these questions, students are taught to use methods that range from close reading to statistical and computational analysis. Our students examine language and communication as dynamic human phenomena, and complete coursework in everything from creative writing to the history of religion in Central Asia to morphosyntactic analysis and digital humanities. What unites our fields is the conviction that understanding human societies requires more than facts about them. Our students learn to weigh evidence, interrogate arguments, and write with clarity and force. We teach skills that outlast any particular body of knowledge and that prepare students to succeed in a wide range of future careers and fields of graduate study.