Modes of Knowing, Sites of Encounter: Exploring the Human through Text, Image, and Performance

Students in the Humanities Program will seek to understand the complex connections between vision, performance/experience, knowledge, and truth and the ways in which people have used texts, images, and performance to encounter new and different ideas and realities. We will see how human beings have used drama, history, literary fiction, and the visual and scientific arts to understand, control, and challenge their world. Students will learn to use techniques of research, interpretation, and presentation that are essential to achieve the goals of humanistic research: to understand with depth and complexity the nature of human thought, action, and expression and to convey this understanding to others. The program culminates with a research symposium where students share the results of their work with each other and the broader community.