Search Results

The comparative & digital humanities program approaches global traditions of ideas, history, literature, music and art in an interdisciplinary fashion. Designed to reflect contemporary trends in humanistic scholarship, it teaches students how to compare, analyze and integrate materials from different cultures, media and/or historical periods; these are vital skills for the 21st century world that conventional undergraduate disciplinary boundaries often exclude. These include the various ways in which, for example, digital technology has changed our relations to knowledge; how the categories “Asia” and the “West” have been constructed and represented; how translation works in a globalized world; how science and the humanities interact; and the historical and cultural shifts in the way knowledge has been classified. Our courses, taught by faculty from comparative & digital humanities and other humanities departments, are designed to help students develop a set of intellectual tools that can be applied in any professional or academic context. Classes are limited in size so that students may share through discussion their reactions to the works studied, relate them to their own lives and attempt to judge their relevance to the contemporary “globalized” world. Inasmuch as language and culture are central to this interdisciplinary project, students who declare a major in the comparative humanities are required to satisfy a language requirement.