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Books on display in the Geballe fellows' library

STANFORD HUMANITIES CENTER faqs

What is the Stanford Humanities Center?
The Stanford Humanities Center is a premier research center at the heart of the Stanford campus dedicated to the advanced study of human history and culture. Humanities Center programs stress work of a multidisciplinary and collaborative nature. They also seek to support the professional development of graduate students and engage with the public.

What is the mission of the Stanford Humanities Center?
The Stanford Humanities Center sponsors advanced research into the historical, philosophical, and cultural dimensions of human experience. The Center’s research workshops, fellowships, and public programs strengthen the intellectual and creative life of the University, foster innovative scholarship and teaching, and enrich the community’s understanding of our common humanity.

When and why was the Humanities Center founded?
The Stanford Humanities Center was founded in 1980 by then-President Donald Kennedy to spearhead new initiatives in humanities research at Stanford.

The Humanities Center’s early goals remain central to its mission today. These include: providing state-of-the-art research and writing facilities for scholars; contributing to the intellectual life of the Stanford community as a whole (through lectures, seminars, conferences, and, since 1995, research workshops); initiating studies aimed at redefining the nature and function of the humanities; and focusing on issues of an interdisciplinary nature.

Ian Watt was named the first director in 1980 and in 1982-83 the Humanities Center welcomed its first thirteen fellows. Now one of the most dynamic humanities centers in the country, the Stanford Humanities Center offers up to thirty-five fellowships every year, supports fifteen to twenty year-long research workshops, stages numerous public events, and has launched several exciting new digital initiatives.

What are the humanities?
Originally, the humanities referred to those branches of knowledge (classics, rhetoric, grammar, poetry) that aimed to humanize or cultivate the mind. Over time, the term has come to encompass a much wider scope of disciplines.

According to the Act that established the National Endowment for the Humanities, the humanities include, but are not limited to, the following fields: history, philosophy, languages, literature, linguistics, archeology, jurisprudence, history and criticism of the arts, ethics, comparative religion, and those aspects of the social sciences employing historical or philosophical approaches. This last category includes cultural anthropology, sociology, political theory, international relations and other subjects concerned with questions of value.

More broadly, the humanities examine the cultural, historical, philosophical, and creative dimensions of human experience in order to understand better the diversity and complexity of our world.

What are the Humanities Center’s programs?
The Humanities Center pursues its mission through a variety of programs, which advance intellectual inquiry and cross-disciplinary interaction:

Who comes to the Humanities Center as a fellow?
The Stanford Humanities Center offers up to thirty-five year-long fellowships to Stanford faculty, faculty from other universities, Stanford graduate students, and Stanford undergraduates. Scholars come from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds, including the humanistically oriented social sciences, and are chosen competitively by selection committees.

How is the Humanities Center affiliated with Stanford?
The Humanities Center is a research center operating under the auspices of the Dean of Research at Stanford University. The Center works closely with the School of Humanities and Sciences and collaborates frequently with other departments and institutes on campus.

From its central location on Santa Teresa Street, the Stanford Humanities Center serves as an energizing national site for advanced humanistic research at Stanford and beyond. Its success helps ensure that Stanford is one of the great universities of the world, dedicated to advancing the full range of human understanding.