Department of Humanities

Office: Clark Hall 419
Telephone: 408-924-4463
Email: humanities@sjsu.edu
Website: www.sjsu.edu/hum

Professors
J. Todd Ormsbee, Chair
Shannon Rose Riley
Susan Verducci-Sandford

Associate Professors
Funie Hsu
Kim Brillante Knight
Cynthia Rostankowski

Assistant Professors
Erica Eva Colmenares
Eleni Duret
Daniel Lanza Rivers
Arthur Zárate

Welcome to the Humanities Department

The Home of Creative and Transdisciplinary Studies!

The mission of the Humanities Department is to cultivate global citizens who are sensitive to difference, complication, change, conflict, and injustice. Students in the department learn to practice and integrate multiple approaches to creating and critiquing knowledge as they seek to understand what people value and why. They continue to shape their own intentional engagement with the world, and are prepared to work across many professional fields.

The Humanities Department at SJSU is a prominent center for innovative and interdisciplinary study and research. We offer three different BA Programs for our students: the Liberal Studies Teacher Preparation BA; the Creative Arts BA; and the Humanities BA, in which students pursue a concentration in American Studies, Liberal Arts, or Comparative Religious Studies.

The Liberal Studies Teacher Prep BA offers several pathways toward becoming a teacher in the State of California. In the last few years, we have opened up new pathways that allow eligible students to complete the credential in ways that reduce barriers to becoming a teacher. The SJSU Liberal Studies program offers a traditional BA pathway, a BA with an Integrated Teacher Education Program (ITEP) focus, and four Spartan Accelerated Graduate Education (SAGE) pathways. SAGE pathways combine a Liberal Studies BA with a credential (Multiple Subject or Education Specialist) and a Master’s Degree (MAT). The ITEP and SAGE pathways reduce the number of units to earn these degrees, and provide students with a seamless road to a graduate career. All Liberal Studies programs with a credential include an option to earn a Critical Spanish Bilingual Authorization.

The Creative Arts BA is a cutting-edge program in the interdisciplinary arts in which students pay close attention to the creative process and the use of the arts for social justice. (Consider the role of murals in the #BLM Movement, for example.)

Our Humanities majors embrace a global view of human meaning-making and relationships across cultures, geographies, ecosystems, and species. Our inquiry extends across issues of human and non-human species rights, social justice, global migration, technology, the arts, culture, society, education, and communication. We are currently expanding our view to include the Digital Humanities, Environmental Humanities, Global Humanities, and Human-Animal curricula to provide students with additional toolkits needed to address some of the most important questions of our time.

Our faculty are teacher-scholars who are experts at the use of high-impact practices and who are able to inspire our students. To continually enrich our work with students, as a faculty, we are committed to serious scholarship and creative work, as well as to forms of public scholarship and the scholarship of engagement, which often reach a wider audience.

The Humanities Department is also home to many minor programs in Humanities, American Studies, Religious Studies, and Creative Arts. And we are home to the Humanities Honors program for lower division students.

Advisors

Creative Arts, majors and minors

Shannon Rose Riley

Humanities, all majors and minors

J. Todd Ormsbee
Funie Hsu
Kim B. Knight

Liberal Studies Teacher Preparation, all majors

Erica Colmenares, Liberal Studies
Eleni Duret, Liberal Studies
Rebecca Kling, Liberal Studies (Fall Semesters)
Susan Verducci, Liberal Studies (Spring Semesters)

General Education Curriculum

Humanities Honors

The Humanities Honors program is open to all students looking for a challenging yet rewarding and supportive experience. Courses in the Humanities Honors program introduce students to major events, sites, texts, and artworks of world history with an emphasis on points of contact between global cultures including cultural exchange, borrowing, inheritance, and appropriation. The Honors curriculum prioritizes learning community, cohort experiences, and discovering connections between material taught in different courses. Honors courses are team-taught by faculty with expertise in different disciplines. Each course explores its topic through 3 to 4 cultural units that examine cultural connections along three axes: East-West; Global North-Global South; and past-present. Students in the program complete 12 units of GE requirements: oral communication (A1), arts (C1), critical thinking and writing (A3), and humanities (C2). In addition, the Humanities Honors program offers a two-course upper-division sequence of Advanced Honors (HUM 177A/HUM 177B), which meets the earth, environment, and sustainability (R); self, society, and equality in the U.S. (S),; and culture and global understanding (V) SJSU Studies requirements.

Programs

Undergraduate Major(s)

Undergraduate Minor(s)

Spartan Accelerated Graduate Education (SAGE) Scholars

Spartan Accelerated Graduate Education (SAGE) Programs programs are combined bachelor’s and master’s programs at SJSU (per University Policy F19-1). Sometimes they may also satisfy the requirements for a credential. Students in these programs pursue a bachelor’s and master’s degree simultaneously. These program allow students to earn graduate credit while in their junior and/or senior year, reducing the number of semesters required for completion of a master’s degree.

Courses

American Studies

Asian Studies

Creative Arts

Humanities

Liberal Studies Teacher Prep

Middle East Studies

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