Humanities Foundations

Catalog description

The purpose of this course is to provide students with an introduction to the humanities through opportunities to examine encounters between peoples and cultures and the formation and transformation of dominant and competing worldviews. The humanities, itself an interdisciplinary field, looks at human outputs. It includes literature, history, religious studies, linguistics, the arts, and philosophy. Students will be introduced to these interdisciplinary materials, concerns and skillsets through a series of chronologically organized case studies. The fundamental questions we ask concern how different sociohistorical visions of community interact with equally diverse ideas of the notion of the individual, how these visions are explored by cultures and individuals through different modes of literature, philosophy, religion and the visual arts, and what it means to create something new out of the traditions we are all formed by and grounded in. In addressing these questions through the humanities, students learn to think critically, speak clearly, write convincingly and ask questions, which prepares students for a wide range of contemporary work environments and professions.