What does it mean to study the Humanities at Goucher College?
To study the humanities is to study the human condition across time and space; it is to grasp both the diversity - and the unity - of human cultures. The advancement of technology and global communication at different moments in our history have revolutionized the humanistic endeavor, and yet our need to understand, relate to, and explain our role as individuals in relationship with the natural world and the cosmos remains the same. Students of the humanities explore multiple perspectives and interpretations of the human experience and the human spirit over time. They learn to identify, discuss, and evaluate different ways of explaining our place in the universe, as expressed through ideas, visual culture, and historical and literary narratives.
The Humanities at Goucher includes four majors - Philosophy, History of Art and Visual Culture, Literatures in English, and History - and two minors: Book Studies and Historic Preservation. Common themes we explore include the formulation and imposition of identity, the creation, use, and misuse of memory, the process of storytelling and the evolution of narrative over time, and the history of ideas. Humanities students explore a complex web of human records, including texts, ideas, images, and material artifacts. We learn to “read” these verbal, theoretical, and visual records with a critical and informed eye. Many of our courses engage primary materials, including those housed at Goucher College’s Library and Special Collections or in Goucher’s Art & Artifact Collection, giving students first-hand experience of verbal and visual documents that are grounded in history, and which “make” history.
