Humanities Minor

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Students design the minor through specific interest tracks that allow them to explore different current areas of the humanities that align with other emphases within the Furman curriculum.

Fine arts/humanities: incorporating the academic aspects of the disciplines of music, theater arts, and visual art to be included in a student’s thesis, and performance or visual based aspects of those subject matters.
Environmental humanities: emphasizing concepts of nature and on the relationship between nature and culture, students combine quantitative studies of natural phenomena and address their effects on the nature and quality of human existence.
Digital humanities: a student can create some assessable content (data analysis, game design, digitizing paper archives for analysis), and write a paper showing the results of the research that went into that project and its application.
Global humanities: a comparative humanities research projects that study one issue or event from different/multiple hemispheric perspectives, from more than one continent’s perspective, or from at least one understudied culture or region.
Students may also design their own topic for the minor combining various areas of humanistic study.

Students must propose a topic area to the oversight committee for approval to declare the major. Interested students should contact Dr. Margaret Oakes, the minor chair.

To fulfill interdisciplinary minor requirements, students must successfully complete

Sixteen credits selected from at least three relevant humanities disciplines from a range of departments, depending on the student’s topic choice; at least 4 credits per discipline.
Relevant disciplines could include Art History, Asian Studies, Classics, Communication Studies, English, History, Modern Languages and Literatures, Music History, Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Religion, or Theatre Studies. Some Anthropology courses approved by the Humanities Minor Chair and the Anthropology Major Chair may apply. Courses must not be “skills” courses such as language instruction or studio art.
If a student has taken the two-course Studies in the Humanities freshman sequence that fulfill two GERs (HUM-101 and HUM-102 ), those two courses may be counted as one of the four for the minor.
HUM-450 Humanities Capstone Symposium

Further considerations

No more than two courses used to meet minor requirements can be completed through the same academic department, while only one course may also contribute to a student’s major. Courses contributing to requirements of the minor cannot be completed using the pass/no pass grading option.