Welcome to Humanities & Media & Cultural Studies
Congratulations HMCS Major, Emily Smith
HMCS major Emily Smith has won a fellowship for this summer to work on a media/social change project at the Northwest Institute for Social Change in Portland, Oregon. Each summer, the Northwest Institute for Social Change hosts an academic program that educates and inspires undergraduate students how the media and arts can bring about progressive social change. Visit their website at http://www.nwisc.com/
Humanities and Media and Cultural Studies brings together traditional and contemporary approaches to close analysis of cultural texts and their relation to social power. The department offers an innovative fourteen-course major, including a six-course focus students develop with their advisor, and a five-course minor in media studies. Both include opportunities for students to combine theory and practice.
Humanities and Media and Cultural Studies faculty include media and film studies professors assigned to the department as well as professors in disciplines in the divisions of Humanities and Social Sciences and other interdisciplinary departments who teach cultural studies, film studies, humanities, and media studies. Faculty are engaged in active research programs that may offer opportunities for student assistance or collaboration.
The major is designed to give students familiarity with a cultural heritage with a breadth of geographic and historical experience. It provides a working knowledge of the methods of historians and critics of culture; the ability to explicate a specific body of culture in depth; and opportunities to appreciate culture and to produce original work. The minor concentrates on media studies and offers opportunities for critical research as well as for pre-professional experience in journalism. Students in the department have found opportunities for internships with arts and other nonprofit organizations and with media companies. Graduates have found employment in the media, in government, and in social and cultural institutions as well as opportunities for further study in doctoral programs and professional schools.
Humanities
The Humanities have been traditionally defined by the great texts, themes, and accomplishments of the Western tradition. They have sought to cultivate appreciation of the human enterprise and the genius of human creativity. Humanities courses traditionally look at a particular stream of Western civilization, with a focus on pivotal periods of development the classical world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and on certain themes in the tradition, such as art and architectural forms, myths and narratives, ideas of freedom, virtue, and citizenship, and the encounter of human and divine.
Media Studies
Media Studies examines the forces that shape media texts and those that govern their meanings in global culture and provides students with experience producing digital, print, and video texts that investigate and represent that culture in journalistic and alternative forms, such as newspaper and broadcast reporting, political documentary, and experimental video.
Cultural Studies
Cultural Studies has developed in response to what critics have seen as exclusions and gaps in programs in the traditional humanities. It has broadened categories of cultural analysis to include multiple traditions and has taken a more critical stance towards artifacts by adding concerns such as:
• Attention to systems of meaning and attendant issues of power, particularly in terms of class, gender, nation, race and sexualities.
• Critique of the dominant tradition from perspectives associated with social outsiders, including critique of cultural evaluation connected to social privilege.
• Explicitly political and social analysis of canonized texts.
• Analysis of commercial culture and of its institutional determinants, and of signs and local expressions of culture that traditional humanists do not consider texts of art.