Humanities & Arts

Integral to the WPI Plan, the university’s signature approach to undergraduate education, the Humanities & Arts plays a considerable role in each student’s journey here.

The aim is to educate well-rounded, globally aware graduates with exceptional analytical skills and sensitivity to culture and context. The way is to offer a major, minors, concentrations, courses, and a required immersive experience. The result is that all WPI undergraduates get a chance to embrace their inner musician, thespian, poet, artist, linguist, or philosopher.

Contact

Location:

Salisbury Laboratories

Phone:

508-831-5246

Fax:

508-831-5932

huaweb@wpi.edu

Competition Open for Class of 1879 Awards

The Class of 1879 Prize is awarded by the Humanities & Arts department yearly for excellent work in the culminating project for the Humanities & Arts Requirement. These projects must demonstrate exceptional creativity and skill in conceiving, developing, and expressing a theme within any discipline in the humanities and arts. This competition recognizes exceptional work in Humanities & Arts by awarding prizes of cash and certificates for an outstanding Inquiry Seminar or Practicum completed in any term during 2018. Interested students should submit their final Seminar/Practicum paper and an entry form. The deadline is Thursday, January 25, 2019. Learn more about the past winners.

Area of Study	Bachelor	Minor	Certificate	Master	PhD
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Why study the humanities when there is work to be done? Because this is where the nuance is, and maybe this is where the real information is.

Professor Frederick W. Bianchi

The humanities and arts gives you the reassurance that other people have asked the same questions in various ways since human beings first appeared on the Earth.

Professor Wesley T. Mott

I do believe that the study of music of other cultures does help give us insights into the culture. Music can transcend barriers between cultures, between governments, between different backgrounds.

Teaching Professor Douglas G. Weeks

One of the wonderful things about art is that it can create things that don’t exist in the real world, and that maybe don’t exist yet – it has a visionary quality that in some ways can lay the groundwork for things to come.

Associate Professor Joshua Rosenstock

Poetry teaches us how to ask questions about ourselves, our lives, about other lives. How have other people loved, hoped, dreamed, struggled; how they met their obligations or failed to; what legacy have they left.

Associate Professor James Cocola

Sometimes it’s just a matter of learning that we are not alone.

Professor Kristin Boudreau, Department Head

A recent production from Masque, WPI's main theatre group, combined over 20 excerpts of plays with LGBTQ+ themes that were performed at past New Voices festivals into The Showcase, which celebrated the inclusivity of WPI's campus. According to co-dramaturg Katelyne Sibley, the play is "trying to normalize being different instead of thinking about normal as meaning everyone is the same.”

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New Voices is the nation’s longest continuously running collegiate new and original play festival. Since 1982 the festival has featured performances of original, unpublished scripts from the WPI community. In 2006, New Voices became established in the Little Theatre, the university’s first dedicated theatrical space—an intimate 99-seat black-box-style facility.

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All WPI students complete the Humanities & Arts requirement. The goal is for every student to graduate with a broader perspective than that provided solely by the study of science and technology. Students will be exposed to art, theatre, music, and other forms of creative expression by completing six courses—including a seminar or practicum requirement—of their choice.

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Joel J. Brattin

Professor of English

Humanities & Arts

Born in Michigan in 1956, I graduated from the University of Michigan in 1978, earning my PhD at Stanford University in 1985. I have enjoyed teaching British literature at WPI since 1990. I like the intelligence and good work ethic of WPI students; I especially enjoy the opportunity to meet and interact with students in small groups and on an individual basis. The bulk of my scholarly work falls into three principal areas.

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Joseph F. Cullon

Associate Teaching Professor

Humanities & Arts

One of Professor Cullon's students recently called him "strangely fascinating." He knew that he was strange but he was happy to learn that a student founding his approach to teaching fascinating. He likes to encourage students to see history not as a mass of dead facts but as a vital mode of inquiry and a moral project that has the potential to inform the present as much as illuminate the past.

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December 04, 2018

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WPI students and faculty go behind the boards and combine robotics with music for impressive results.

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The skills that students acquire in the Humanities & Arts (HUA) program provide them with a distinct advantage in their chosen fields, which range from careers in environmental studies and public health to writing and performing. For more information on how students put their talents to use after graduation, see the career outlook for HUA graduates.