Humanities Honors GE

The Humanities Honors program is an interdisciplinary, globally focused series of courses that interrogate knowledge production throughout human history. In these team-taught courses, students integrate modes of knowledge production, literature, philosophy, art, culture, performance, ecology, and social institutions. Founded in 1954, Humanities Honors has a rich history on campus and has been a model for honors programs at other colleges and universities. 

NOTE: For AY 2023-2024, Humanities Honors will not offer the first-year courses (HUM 1A and HUM 1B). During this time, the Humanities Honors faculty will be redesigning the curriculum for all courses in the program. The new course offerings and curriculum will launch in the Fall of 2024. The second-year courses (HUM 2A and HUM 2B) and Advanced Honors courses (HUM 177A and 177B) will be offered.

The Humanities Honors program comprises a two-year lower and one-year upper division program. Students complete nine of the fifteen required lower division general education requirements in the two-year program over four semesters. In the upper-division program, students complete three of the four-upper division SJSU Studies General Education requirements over two semesters.

These general education-based honors programs provide students with a solid foundation of awareness and understanding from the perspectives of multiple world cultures and fields of study. This multi-faceted perspective makes the foundational experiences of university life supportive and nurturing.

Regardless of a student’s educational path at San José State University or their career path, studying world cultures and scientific ideas will benefit them. Becoming an individual who has global cultural awareness, is well-read, is proficient in critical thinking, writing, and verbal skills, and demonstrates the ability to learn with integrity is greatly beneficial to them in their future endeavors. A teaching team of several professors teaches the lower-division and upper-division programs. Each professor brings expertise in specific fields of study to help students see the connections of human intellectual inquiry.

The Humanities Honors program is designed to consider world cultures through an interdisciplinary lens. The teaching teams bring together different academic disciplines, including music, art history, rhetoric, philosophy, political theory, literature, history, and theatre. Presenting these diverse subjects to students in an integrated manner promotes excellence, builds knowledge, and enables students to see connections among disciplines and ideas.

Participation in the Humanities Honors program is not only about completing general education requirements. Throughout the two-year and one-year programs, students develop lifelong friendships with peers and build relationships with professors that endure long after students complete the program.

Kerri J. Malloy
Assistant Professor, Coordinator (Humanities Honors Program)
408-924-4461
humanities-honors-program@sjsu.edu
Clark Hall 414J