1879 Award Competition

The 1879 Award competition is now open.  Awards are given to the best Humanities Requirement Projects. The award is open to students who completed their inquiry seminar or practicum in 2019.   Entry form.

https://www.wpi.edu/about/awards/class-1879-prize-outstanding-projects-humanities     

Integral to the WPI Plan, the university’s signature approach to undergraduate education, the Humanities & Arts Department 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

Degrees & Certificates

Area of Study Bachelor Minor Certificate Master PhD
{{department.departmentName}}
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

The Showcase

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.”

Read More about The Showcase

Where Creativity and Expression Meet

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.

Learn More about Where Creativity and Expression Meet

Humanities & Arts Requirement

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.

Learn More about Humanities & Arts Requirement
Joel J. Brattin

Joel J. Brattin

Professor of English
Humanities and 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.

[...]
View Profile
Joseph Cullon

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 found 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.

[...]
View Profile

News & Stories

Kathleen Markees and Joel Brattin alt
Kathleen Markees, Special Collections curator, Gordon Library, and Joel Brattin, professor of literature, near an exhibit case in the library’s Gladwin Gallery, which houses the exhibition, “Illustrating Every-Day Life: Dickens and His Artists.”
Daily Herd
Charles Dickens’s Ghosts: How the Author of A Christmas Carol Included Halloween Symbols Throughout His Works
October 30, 2019
WPI researchers (from left) Soussan Djamasbi, Jeanine Skorinko, Winston Soboyejo, Cagdas Onal (principal investigator), Yunus Telliel, Jing Xiao, Pratap Rao and Jane Li with the Baxter research robot. alt
WPI researchers (from left) Soussan Djamasbi, Jeanine Skorinko, Winston Soboyejo, Cagdas Onal (principal investigator), Yunus Telliel, Jing Xiao, Pratap Rao and Jane Li with the Baxter research robot.
Press Release Research
WPI Secures $3M NSF Grant to Study Human-Robot Interaction
October 24, 2019
Artificially intelligent musical robot
Daily Herd
WPI Professor and Students Create Robot-Human Sound Fusion Concert
October 14, 2019
Campus Shot
Daily Herd
University Appoints Four Program Leaders
October 08, 2019
See More News

A Short Comic History of the WPI Plan

Cornelius Malone: A Poem for WPI's Sesquicentennial

Music, Technology, and Robotics

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

Explore Music Technology at WPI

Career Opportunities

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.

Calendar

See More Events

Announcements

October 22, 2019
Roger Gottlieb, Is Extinction Rebellion the answer to our Prayers?
October 22, 2019
Geoff Pfeifer, From state-bound subjects to global subjects: notes toward an Althusserian theory of globalized subjectivity
October 17, 2019
Aarti Smith Madan, Lines of Geography in Latin American Narrative, Book Review
October 15, 2019
Kent Ljungquist, Emeritus Professor, publication "Poe's Landscapes, Picturesque and Ideal."
October 15, 2019
Kent Ljungquist, Emeritus Professor, "'First Connections with /Stagecraft': S. N. Behram Finds His Vocation."
September 26, 2019
Roger Gottlieb, Morality, Politics and the Climate Crisis - Conference
September 23, 2019
Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, So Much More Than a Word, Telegram & Gazette
SEE MORE ANNOUNCEMENTS

Facts & Figures

100%

of undergraduates 

complete the equivalent of a minor in Humanities & Arts
1 of 50

Colleges that Create Futures 

The Princeton Review (2016)

Media Coverage

Jazz History Database

WBZ radio aired a segment last night and this morning about WPI’s Jazz History Database. Rich Falco, director of Jazz Studies and assistant teaching professor of music, discussed the unique collection. WPI has compiled hundreds of CDs, cassettes, and other materials from jazz artists, families, and musical societies. Students digitize the analog versions of the jazz performances and enter them into the database.   

WBZ News Radio
Man, machine and music: WPI robots and live musicians to share stage at Mechanics Hall

The Telegram & Gazette interviewed Scott Barton, associate professor of music, about his producing a first-of-its-kind concert at Mechanics Hall, pairing human musicians with artificially intelligent musical robotics.

telegram.com logo
See More Articles