Welcome to Humanities

UNC Asheville’s Humanities Program explores what it means to be human. We examine the human experience by looking at what we’ve achieved in our several thousand years of recorded history, including our diverse values and beliefs, and how these concerns and passions influence our time. Humanities courses aren’t just about history; they draw together faculty and subject matter across subjects including history, literature, philosophy, religion, natural science, social science, and fine arts. Humanities helps us make educated and ethical decisions as we strive to solve problems and make progress as a civilization.

To view upcoming events in the Humanities Program and Humanities-related events, please see the “events” tab.

The Humanities Program encourages and equips students to engage the complexity of the world that we live in, and this has value not only personally, but also for their profession and civic lives.  (To see this in action, take a look at this video from Sonia Kapur’s LA 478 class, in Spring 2022)

Students take three Humanities courses, usually one each year, and choose between two senior capstone experiences:

• HUM 124: The Ancient World
• HUM 214: Global Humanities: Premodern Worlds (300-1700)
• HUM 324: Global Modernities
• HUM 414: Critical Perspectives on Contemporaneity
• LA 378: Race, Identity, Belonging and Cultures in the Americas
• LA 478: Cultivating Global Citizenship

A Hallmark of UNC Asheville

For 50 years, the Humanities Program has been the cornerstone of UNC Asheville’s liberal arts curriculum. The program has achieved nationwide recognition by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, Fiske Guide to Colleges, The Princeton Review and U.S. News and World Report.

BIRT:  Bias Incident Response Team (BIRT) was created to assist students who report bias incidents on the UNC Asheville campus.  Read more about this here.