he Humanities Center in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts was founded in 1999 with the mission of stimulating the life of the mind first and foremost among the faculty of the College, but also in the university and community at large. It seeks to create and nuture a genuine, interdisciplinary intellectual culture of ideas. Towards that end it chooses each year a theme to explore and invites prominent outside scholars to speak on topics related to this theme. In the past six years it has been successful in bringing six Presidential Scholars to campus, including philosophers Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, Pulitzer-Prize winning historians Edward J. Larson and James McPherson, novelist Richard Powers, and architect and writer Witold Rybczynski. It has also brought to campus for talks and seminars dozens of other well known literary critics, writers, poets, historians, and philosophers. In addition the Humanities Center sponsors a Friday Symposia series for faculty members to present their research as well as a Thursday Tertulia series for more informal talks, debates, and panel discussions. Although designed primarily for HFA faculty and supported by the HFA College, the Humanities Center has reached out occasionally to faculty in other colleges in the University when the theme allowed it, as, for example, in academic year 2003-2004 when the members of the College of Natural Science participated in the Science and the Aesthetic Imagination theme. Due to community interest in its activities, the Humanities Center has also raised more than $27,500 in outside funding.

Many of these events take place in the pleasant atmostphere of Trinity 126, which the College remodelled as an elegant library/seminar room . No mention of the Humanities Center would be complete without adding that it also shelters and supports the Humanities Center Gallery, which has become one of the premier venues for art in the North State, and the University Film Series where faculty, students, and members of the community can see the rare and interesting films that would never be screened in commercial theaters.

In the past eight years the Humanities Center, which is the only one of its kind in the entire CSU system, has become an important and indispensable part of the intellectual life on this campus.

Current Events Calendar in pdf format: Mar/Apr 2008 | May/Aug 2008