Welcome

Founded in 1993, the Humanities Center provides an intellectual home for Wayne State faculty, students, and staff working in the humanities, the arts, and the humanistic social sciences. Through its fellowships and events, the Center encourages multidisciplinary conversations and collaborations while also supporting cutting-edge research in the humanities and adjacent disciplines. As an incubator of humanistic thought at Wayne State, the Humanities Center works to create interdisciplinary community and to showcase the vitality of the humanities on campus. 

Defining the Humanities

Humanities is an umbrella term describing the work of scholars from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds who seek to understand the human experience by analyzing human culture as expressed by individuals, peoples, or societies. Their research foregrounds methodologies that are comparative, creative, historical, interpretative, and qualitative.

Traditionally, humanities disciplines include anthropology, art history, classical and modern languages, communication and media studies, ethics, history, jurisprudence, literature, linguistics, philosophy, political science, religious studies, rhetoric, and criticism and theory of the fine and performing arts. Yet the humanities may also be found throughout the arts and the social sciences, wherever scholars in these disciplines address topics in the humanities or utilize research methods based in the humanities. Moreover, the humanities are essential to interdisciplinary fields such as African American studies, cultural studies, digital humanities, environmental humanities, gender and sexuality studies, and medical humanities.

Ultimately, the credo of the humanities may be summed up by the words of Terence, a Roman playwright and ex-slave with African roots: “I am human—I think nothing human is alien to me” (homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto). Nothing in the human experience is alien to the humanities since the humanities are about all of us and for all of us.