Humanities

The Humanities are critical to public life and public education. Humanists define and debate moral and social values; they interpret literary texts and historical documents; they analyze works of art and they explore ideas; and they teach us not only what these things mean, but why they are important. The Humanities cultivate the skills essential to active citizenship—careful reading, informed debate, an awareness of our place in a complex world at a critical moment in time. The Humanities teach us to think and to question, how to read and how to see. The Humanities help us understand what we create and what we believe, what we value and what we fear; they help us map the tangled histories of where we have been and navigate the possibilities of the roads ahead.

Our award-winning researchers, teachers, and students are committed to advancing the public good and public access to knowledge in the classroom, on campus, and in our local, national, and global communities. Professor Evie Shockley, pictured above, is renowned for her student-centered teaching and community-building classroom, as well as for her poetry and scholarship. The author of the critical volume Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (2011), Shockley received the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry for her book the new black and the 2012 Holmes National Poetry Prize. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her poetry collection semiautomatic in 2018.

The Humanities directly addresses issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in research and teaching across the fields of history, literatures, and cultures, philosophy, gender and sexuality, and modern and classical languages.

As a microcosm of America’s linguistic diversity, Rutgers is ideally positioned to make world languages a cornerstone of its education. Studying languages promotes cultural awareness and helps make global connections. The School of Arts and Sciences provides instruction in more than two dozen languages from Arabic and Chinese to Vietnamese and Yoruba.

The Division of Humanities is home to #1-ranked programs in women’s history and African American history and has recently added an Asian American minor and expanded Native and Indigenous studies. There are numerous courses throughout the division allowing students to explore the histories and cultures of underrepresented groups and gain deeper understandings of our nation’s diversity, including “Race and Ethnicity in America,” “History and Culture of Hip Hop,” and “Islam in/and America."

The Division of Humanities offers a wide array of programs and initiatives that foster many forms of diversity, equity, and inclusion in its curricula and across its communities. DEI efforts in departments and centers reveal longstanding commitments in the division that have made RU-NB one of the most intellectually diverse and socially vibrant universities in the country.

Beyond major programming, departments and centers across the humanities offer many lecture series, internships, community outreach, and curricular modules that evidence steady DEI efforts in the division. Recognizing that much work in this area still needs to be done, however, we are making new and even more robust commitments to meet this moment.

Below is a selected list of current programs and initiatives:

Education

Humanities: Strength in Diversity

Many strengths in the Rutgers humanities units address historical lacunas in scholarship and teaching: #1 for women’s history; #1 in African American history; new Asian American minor; and, expansion of Native and Indigenous studies. American Studies classes like Race and Ethnicity in America (050:102); Latino Literature and Culture (050:240); History and Culture of Hip Hop (050:247); Asian American Experience (050:245); Native American Experience (050:248); Islam in/and America (050:344); Race, Culture, and Politics: Blacks and Jews in America (050:359); and numerous others, allow students to explore the histories and cultures of underrepresented groups and gain deeper understandings of our nation’s diversity.

Classics MA Program

More recent programs such as the Department of Classics’s fully funded MA program for students from historically underrepresented groups are equally promising in terms of potential impact on DEI at Rutgers and beyond. This MA program is a bold model for resolving some of the DEI shortcomings that have defined Classics and similar field(s).

Educators

Global Asias

Global Asias is a faculty collaborative for cross-disciplinary and trans-regional scholarship on Asia and its diasporas. Home to two-thirds of the world population, Asia sits at the center of key twenty-first-century challenges, ranging from trade wars to nuclear proliferation, refugee crises to environmental disasters. While the growing policy and academic emphasis on global processes and transnational relations challenges a traditional area studies model of scholarship, recent trends show nationalism and regionalism to be on the rise, due in part to globalization itself. Rutgers is home to a wide diversity of scholars actively engaging in research on Asia and its diasporas. Thus, we are uniquely positioned to take a leading role in reshaping conversations on the region.

Critical Translation Studies

The Critical Translation Studies Initiative fosters intellectual and creative exchange among students and faculty engaged in making, analyzing, and conceptualizing translation at Rutgers, creating a collaborative home for the diverse interdisciplinary work happening now at Rutgers and for promising new dialogues, projects, and theoretical horizons. New undergraduate and graduate curricula, a lecture series, translation workshops, collaborations with university presses to support new publications, and an inaugural spring symposium will launch in 2022-23.

Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy

Professor of Philosophy Howard McGary, founding director of the national award-winning Rutgers Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy, and Graduate Program Administrator Mercedes Diaz, ran the institute together for many years, providing outreach to undergraduates on a nationwide basis to increase the number of underrepresented minority students headed into philosophy graduate programs and faculty positions. “The idea was to get excellent students, bring them to Rutgers, and give them a greater idea of what philosophy is all about,” said McGary, who retired in 2020. "The program is helping to make the discipline more diverse."

Public Humanities in Classics

Emily Allen-Hornblower has been teaching classics to incarcerated populations in New Jersey prisons and received a Whiting Foundation grant to hold public discussions of ancient Greek tragedy and epic with formerly incarcerated men and women, many of whom were her students in prison. “The project harnesses the power of Greek drama and epic to help us understand human emotions through storytelling,” Allen-Hornblower says. “It utilizes that understanding to connect us to each other and the world around us, and to foster a sense of community and belonging for all.”

Community

Spanish for Community Engagement

In “Spanish for Community Engagement,” an undergraduate course first offered in fall 2021, students explore issues such as housing, health, and education while volunteering in organizations such as the New Brunswick Community Food Alliance, the Eric B. Chandler Health Center, and a mentoring program at Middlesex County College.

Divisions

Quick Links