To each species of creatures has been allotted a peculiar and instinctive gift. To horses galloping, to birds flying, comes naturally. To man only is given the desire to learn. Hence what the Greeks called paideia we call studia humanitatis.
In her series The Humanistic Tradition, Gloria Fiero calls this tradition "humankind's cultural legacy--the sum total of the significant ideas and achievements handed down from generation to generation." More specifically, the term "humanities" has come to refer to the traditional disciplines of literature, drama, philosophy, religion, and the arts--visual, musical, dance, architecture--in historical context.
Typically, "humanities" subjects are distinguished from the "sciences" and the "social sciences"--even though these disciplines help us to understand human life and expression at particular times and places.
Mission Statement
The mission of the Humanities Program in the Department of Religion and Culture is to stimulate humanities research, teaching, and service that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. Faculty in the Humanities Program work together to develop coherent course offerings that are both cross-cultural and interdisciplinary in their design. The Humanities Program sponsors conferences and symposia to stimulate the creation of new knowledge in the humanities and to disseminate that knowledge.
Historically, the humanities have included those fields of study that rely extensively upon the methods of philosophical argument and its rules of inference to interpret, conceptualize, define, or describe historical, literary, linguistic, expressive, or sociological events. These methods remain central to all fields of human inquiry, especially literature, foreign languages, philosophy, religious studies, history, linguistics, theatre, art and art history, music, geography, certain sub-fields of cultural anthropology, and archaeology. Along with the methodologies used by these disciplines, the Humanities Program embraces methods of inquiry developed in other fields to address the diverse cross-cultural, gendered, and global scope of contemporary humanities concerns.
Support for Scholarship
The Humanities Program administers the annual Virginia Tech Humanities Summer Stipend and the Humanities Symposium competition (PDF). It also sponsors humanities conferences, the annual Hummel Lecture in Classical Studies, and the annual Commonwealth Humanities Endowment Week, which brings outstanding humanistic lectures and performances to campus.
The Humanities Program began in 1978 as the Center for Program in the Humanities, which was funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Today, it is a member of the Consortium for Humanities Centers and Institutes, the Virginia Humanities Conference, and the Southern Atlantic States Association for Asian and African Studies. The Humanities Program works in partnership with the University of Virginia and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, to form the NEH-sponsored South Atlantic Humanities Center.
Students who want more information or who wish to pursue minors in the Humanities program should consult with Program Director, Prof. Elizabeth Fine.