The Interdisciplinary Humanities Program at Memorial University is a place where engaged, entrepreneurial and activist thinkers come together. The Humanities Program is a place for building new outlooks, new insights and new friendships. It is a place that will expose you to the most challenging questions and ideas from across the humanities and social sciences. It is a place that gives you the intellectual freedom to take these new tools and begin building your own personal style of thinking, making intellectual activism a way of life while engaging with new opportunities and challenges.

During your time with the Humanities Program, you will be part of a community of students from around the world. Together you will engage with a constellation of humanist and humanitarian challenges that are defining the twenty-first century, including: migration, global inequality, climate change, post-truth and authoritarian populism. These are demanding issues with nuanced histories that pose complex questions. They intersect with new and unfamiliar forms of collective action and engagement like artificial intelligence, social media and new modes of digitalization.

Over two years in the Humanities Program, students like yourself rethink and confront these issues by drawing on the best ideas from across the humanities and social sciences. You will be challenged by unfamiliar and difficult questions. What is the phenomenology of race? Did colonialism ever really end? What would real gender equality begin to look like? How is collective action and assembly performed? What is neoliberalism and how does it promote precarious living? Who gets to imagine the future? How is the past remembered? What is the Anthropocene and does it matter? Can other living things be part of our politics, not just our economy?  What is moral and political agency in a post-human future?

To help build the skills to engage with these issues in intellectually sophisticated ways, you are given expert help.  You will work closely with the Program Director.  You will have a research mentor.  In course work, you will engage with more than thirty researchers from across the Memorial academic community.  With these supports, your program will culminate in a multidisciplinary capstone research project that will bring together your research analysis, critical capacities and new ways of conceiving and questioning your world.

After the Humanities Program, you and your new colleagues and friends have an ocean of opportunities. Some go on to doctoral research. Past program participants with a passion for research have moved on to interdisciplinary research or moved back to mainline disciplines.  Their areas have included social and political theory, international history, science and technology studies, art history, political philosophy and disability studies.  People from the program now work in government policy, corporate management, museum curation, legal practice as well as post-secondary and university education. Others have embraced their entrepreneurial spirit and gone on to build successful small businesses.

 

Areas of Specialization and Excellence:

Ways of Knowing: Human, Animal, AI

Difference, Identity and Migration in Human Experience

Future Imaginaries and Cultural Aesthetics

Climate Change as Cultural Change

Green Humanities

Academic Program Highlights:

Two academic year program

Eight courses and major research project

Full-time program with flexible study

Summers free for research, travel and work

Gender diverse and family aware

Application Essentials:

Open to all undergraduate backgrounds

Holistic evaluation of applications

September program entry point

Late applications considered until end of June