Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon

Carnegie Mellon University

The Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University supports and augments the distinctive vision of the humanities practiced at this institution in research and teaching. The humanities provide reflexive analysis of humankind and its artifacts: from poems, through mathematical theorems and scientific theories, to technology and social organizations. Such analyses incorporate hermeneutic, historical, formal, ethnographic, critical, and quantitative methods. This broad vision has yielded some research themes that provide the basis for interdisciplinary inquiry: historical and global perspectives on culture; science and technology; languages, literature, and discourse; cognition and rational decision making; race, gender, and human identity; ethics and public policy. The Center will support this vision by: 1) strengthening research and teaching in the humanities; 2) fostering interdisciplinary collaboration among the humanities faculty and between humanities faculty and faculty in other disciplines; 3) urging a greater role for the humanities, nationally and internationally, in an increasingly technological and global society.