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Humanities · Encyclopedia

The humanities are the academic disciplines centred on the study of human culture, language, history, philosophy, religion, and the arts as objects of inquiry rather than as creative production. The field includes literature, history, philosophy, religious studies, classical studies, linguistics, languages and literatures of specific traditions (English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, Persian and dozens more), art history, musicology, theatre and performance studies (the analytical-historical wing), film studies, archaeology (which sits between humanities and social sciences depending on tradition), and the cross-cutting fields of cultural studies, gender studies, area studies, and digital humanities. The humanities have been under sustained funding-and-enrollment pressure across most Anglophone universities for the past two decades, but remain the principal site for the study of cultural heritage, philosophical inquiry, and the historical-textual analytical traditions that other disciplines rely on.\n\nThe global humanities-research landscape clusters around old-research-universities. In the US: the humanities at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, Chicago, Stanford, Columbia, Penn, Brown, Cornell, plus the strong humanities at smaller liberal-arts colleges (Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Pomona, Wellesley). In the UK: Oxford and Cambridge dominate the humanities globally for English-language scholarship; UCL, Edinburgh, KCL, SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies, with distinctive depth in Asian and African humanities). In Continental Europe: the Sorbonne and Collège de France in Paris, École Normale Supérieure (ENS), the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Heidelberg (the oldest German university, with deep humanities traditions), Humboldt University Berlin, Leiden, Utrecht, Bologna, Pisa Scuola Normale Superiore, Madrid Complutense. In Asia: the University of Tokyo for humanities and area studies; Kyoto University; Peking and Tsinghua for Chinese-and-Asian humanities; National Taiwan University; the University of Delhi (Department of English, History, Philosophy), JNU (especially for area studies and historical research), Jadavpur University, Presidency University Calcutta, Visva-Bharati Santiniketan, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences for cultural-studies-adjacent humanities, the Indian Institute of Advanced Study Shimla, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS Delhi), the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta.\n\nIndia's humanities-academic infrastructure is among the world's most institutionally extensive but funding-constrained. The University Grants Commission and the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), the Indian Council of Philosophical Research (ICPR), the Sahitya Akademi (the National Academy of Letters), the Lalit Kala Akademi (visual arts), the Sangeet Natak Akademi (music, dance, drama) form the central institutional architecture. The post-2010 emergence of dedicated humanities-and-liberal-arts universities (Ashoka University, Krea University, Azim Premji University, Shiv Nadar University, Plaksha which is more STEM-leaning) has expanded the private-philanthropic humanities ecosystem. Indian-origin scholars have shaped global humanities through Edward Said's adjacent post-colonial framework, Gayatri Spivak's subaltern studies tradition, Homi Bhabha's post-colonial theory, the Subaltern Studies collective, Romila Thapar in history, Amartya Sen at the philosophy-economics interface.\n\nMajor humanities subdisciplines: literature and literary studies (with the post-1990s expansion through cultural studies, post-colonial theory, world literature, eco-criticism); history (general history plus area-specific specialisations — ancient, medieval, early modern, modern, contemporary, plus regional concentrations); philosophy (analytic, continental, history of philosophy, ethics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, political philosophy, applied ethics); religious studies (comparative religion, theology, religious history); classical studies (Greek and Latin philology, ancient history); linguistics (historical, theoretical, applied, sociolinguistic); art history; musicology and ethnomusicology; theatre and performance studies; film and screen studies; archaeology; cultural studies and media studies; gender studies and women's studies; area studies (East Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Latin American, Slavic, Jewish, Islamic, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu studies); the rapidly-growing digital humanities specialty that uses computational methods on humanities-text-and-image corpora.\n\nFor a globally-mobile professional, the humanities-PhD-pathway is the principal route into research-and-academic-faculty roles in humanities. The MA degree in specific humanities fields. The substantial post-2010 growth of "alternative-academic" career destinations for humanities PhDs — museum and archive professional positions, university-press editing, library-and-information-science roles, public-history-and-heritage positions, NGO and policy think-tank research, the cultural-criticism-and-arts-journalism ecosystem, the increasingly substantial humanities-consulting work in branding-and-corporate-narrative. The structural humanities-job-market pressure means most humanities PhDs work outside research-faculty roles by mid-career.