Frequently Asked Questions

This structure and the questions themselves emerged from the work of the Designing UR Humanities Faculty Learning Community, 2021-2023, which included faculty from all five Schools and the Digital Scholarship Lab.  

We set ​​some pragmatic constraints: we had to be able to imagine professors and students recognizing these, in whatever vocabulary and focus, in our traditional humanities departments, as well as in our interdisciplinary programs, and even outside of traditional “humanities” courses in the sciences and more career-oriented programs.

They must work across geographical, historical, linguistic, technological or media specificities, and (ultimately) disciplinary lines, and we sought questions that don’t presume a specific “object” or archive.

The theme offers students support if they wish to craft a highly interdisciplinary and intensive study plan by taking mostly (or all) courses tied to the theme in a given semester or given year. Some of those courses might meet general education requirements (especially FYS, the Areas of Inquiry, PEIC, and Written and Embodied Communication requirements), and some might be major-specific, allowing students to take clusters of theme courses in very different ways. 

Students would be able to craft a degree plan that allows substantial engagement with a different theme every year. It would also be possible for a student to continue a focus on one specific theme throughout their time at UR, if they chose to do so. Students would be able to do this with a wide variety of majors and minors.

Beyond course selection and events, the theme will offer students a variety of opportunities for additional engagement in programs across the university. Sophomores can apply to participate in the Humanities Fellows Program, and any students working on sustained humanistic research projects can apply to participate in Humanities Connect. 

The theme gives faculty an opportunity to participate in a networked conversation stretching across the campus, where we engage each other intellectually directly and indirectly. It is an opportunity for us to talk with each other as thinkers, as teachers, as researchers. Most importantly, we hope that the themes will significantly enhance our awareness of how we participate in intellectual community with our peers.

The recurring theme offers us a structure to plan our course offerings to engage that intellectual fellowship as intensely as we wish. We believe that having courses where students are also engaging similar questions in other disciplines with other people will lead to unexpected connections, experiences, and opportunities. While we want our theme questions to primarily rely on courses that are taught regularly across the university, we also hope faculty will (with some regularity) use the theme as an occasion to experiment with new courses, topics, pedagogical strategies, and research practices (and we hope to partner with the Faculty Hub to support these experiments).

In most cases, yes. There is no presumption that the theme question is explicitly part of the content/topic of your course, or that you ask it in any specific terms, so it’s a matter of whether or not you feel like a theme question resonates in your course in ways that matter. We hope that listing the course gives you opportunity to amplify the question when it is asked in your class and we hope that you’d want to attend, with your classes, one or more events hosted by the Center. 

For each Inactive theme, we will host a list of catalog courses that might address the question. While there may be courses that always align with a single theme, we also imagine courses might be configured to fit multiple themes. The Humanities Fellows Seminar, for instance, will always be aligned with the Center theme, and will appear on all lists.

For the active theme year, we will list courses actually being offered, which will include catalog courses as well as new or one-time course (for instance, “special topics” courses). 

We will preserve an archive of all courses ever taught that align with the theme, but these special topics classes will not appear in the regular catalog lists. However, any newly approved classes, or iterations of existing catalog courses, that are listed in an active year will automatically be placed on the catalog list. 

Just tell us your name (or the name of likely faculty), the course designation and number (e.g., PHIL236), the course name(s), and theme questions(s) you want to list the class under. Please also tell us if the class is open to anyone or if it has some prerequisites or restrictions, and if the course will count toward any of the new General Education requirements. 

You may include as may classes as you wish under as many themes as you wish. 

We understand the humanities to be a cluster of practices, not a set of majors or departments. In the broadest way, we could say that these practices include thinking historically, philosophically, and aesthetically, with attention to how interpretation and translation construct meaning. We don’t think it’s important to draw sharp lines between “arts” and “letters,” welcoming classes that engage in all kinds of creative making. And we actively welcome classes in the natural and social sciences to link to the theme when the question feels resonant. 

Absolutely not. The Center is guided by Arturo Escobar’s claim that “every community practices the design of itself.” The theme is what people who want to participate make it each year. We hope that a lot of people tune in, intensively or from time to time, but it is not meant to limit or even capture the scope of campus humanities study. The theme highlights some but not all of what’s happening, and the Humanities Center itself will support humanities efforts outside the theme (for instance in the Initiatives). Everything is always purely voluntary.