Humanities at Seattle University

To me the humanities empower everyone. It is hard to change what you do not understand. The humanities help us understand ourselves, the world, and how we relate to the world and thus provide us with 

The humanities foster meaning-making and reflection about diverse and universal human experiences. Humanities perspectives and fields aim to understand the human dimension of just about everything, from technology to climate change to globalization. The humanities invite ethical decision-making, critical thinking, communication in its myriad forms, and problem-solving—all essential skills for making sense of who we are in relation to the world around us.

In his famous prayer, Pedro Arrupe, SJ, says, “What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.” I love what I teach and research because the study of literature is, really, a study of how to fall in love. The humanities are central to what we do at SU because it’s the humanities that gives us the gifts that will enable us to understand our full humanity, to see each other as fully human, and to imagine and live out a better, more just, and more equitable world.

The humanities teach us how to read the world! As a history professor, teaching history and material culture is about helping my students feel the heartbeat within an ancient object, turning a cold artifact into a living story of human resilience. We don’t just study the past; we build a bridge to our ancestors, learning to protect the diverse voices that time has often quieted.

I'm very proud of the Race, Racialization and Resistance in the US curricular project (2023-26), funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, which has made important contribution to the revision of the curriculum in the humanities and humanistic social sciences at Seattle University. The associated conference, which drew 60 presenters from around the country, resonated strongly with all the participants and provided connections across a shared community of practice. 

As a historian who does archaeological fieldwork, the importance of the humanities is in showcasing to students and others how we understand our human past. How we create knowledge based on understanding past human behavior.

In my History courses at Seattle University, students may already believe that history repeats itself, but they learn how history is constructed and reconstructed by human agents with different agendas over time, how and why change occurs (or doesn't occur), and how to mobilize different kinds of evidence in arguments about the past, which are always also arguments about the present and future.

The humanities offer so many different things to our students: self-understanding; a toolkit to navigate and change a complex world; and transferable skills not for one job, but for many careers. The humanities place students in a rare academic space where they can ask big questions about identity, purpose, and meaning. They become a training ground for activism, advocacy, community engagement, and public-facing scholarship. And along the way, they teach students to work with people, understand context, communicate clearly, and solve unstructured problems—abilities employers consistently rank as the most needed and hardest to automate.