The Center serves to foster creativity, critical thinking, and cultural understanding, and it celebrates the arts, humanities, and humanistic social sciences across colleges at ¶¶Òõ̽̽. The humanities are as vital to our public and private lives as oxygen—and the Center provides resources for faculty, students, and staff to engage in research, conversation, exhibitions, workshops, forums, and performances designed to foster humanistic inquiry. As a research hub on campus, the Center sponsors a wide range of initiatives, programs, grants, and events that range from multi-year research collaborative projects to pedagogy-centered seed grants to international conferences; these disparate and diverse fora promote active dialogue on the most challenging questions facing humanities scholars.
The Humanities Center works across disciplines and colleges at ¶¶Òõ̽̽ and in recent years has prioritized pressing questions in its programming and grants. Of special interest are the environmental humanities, medical/health humanities, confronting histories and realities of discrimination and bias, and digital humanities. Similarly, the Center is uniquely and prominently invested in public humanities—the translation of necessarily specialized research into accessible formats, language, and programming.
The Center is a founding member of the New England Humanities Consortium, a network of universities and colleges across New England dedicated to intellectual collaboration, interdisciplinary exchange, and regional humanities programming.
Beginning in 2024-2025, the Humanities Center organizes its grants, awards, and programming around a theme. In 2024-2025, the theme is justice/injustice.