Stanford Humanities Center
The Stanford Humanities Core was an undergraduate teaching initiative in the late 2010s and early 2020s that intervened in the "Western Civ" debate by including European and North American history in a global conversation. This post is a 2026 archive of the text on the university website page for the Core. In a separate post in this Colloquy, we provide a review of an earlier Stanford initiative that ran in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
History of the Stanford Humanities Core
What does it mean to teach a "humanities core" (HumCore) at Stanford today? Over the last few decades, our fields of study have witnessed a growing discomfort with the Western canon. It is no longer tenable to associate humanistic study in California solely with that famous story which starts in Ancient Greece and ends in the United States, stopping along the way in the European Renaissance and Enlightenment. Stanford faculty have been taking part in these field-defining conversations for many years.
The unique structure of HumCore achieves a long-standing research goal in the humanities: to conceive of the diversity of human endeavor without privileging a single narrative or reading a particular history in a vacuum. It is twenty-one years since Dipesh Chakrabarty wrote Provincializing Europe, and twenty-seven years since Richard Roberts told the history of the “Western Civ” debate at Stanford. HumCore intervenes in these conversations and shows how the European narrative of classic and canonical texts that starts with Homer can be studied and taught while taking its place in the same epistemological position as indigenous ontologies from Oceania or philosophical categories in Classical Chinese. The organizational principle that creates this outcome is: only one course dealing with Europe in each cluster. The work—and undergraduate frosh-friendly teaching thereof—is more important now than ever.
The Humanities Core has a unique collaborative structure: courses meet twice a week, and the second meeting each week is a plenary session that brings together students and faculty across the Core. Each quarter, this structure gives students a seminar-based exploration into ten of the most important texts or cultural objects from a given tradition—alongside weekly conversations that draw comparisons and discuss connections between different parts of the world.
HumCore Structure 2020 Onwards:
Monday class session: student explores a single history or tradition with their professor.
Wednesday class session: student goes to a plenary “collaborative conversation” with their professor and classmates—and all the other professors teaching in the HumCore that quarter.
HumCore is designed to give Stanford undergraduates in any school and with any major plan an accessible and structured introduction to culture, art, literature, politics, religion, and history. It is an arrangement of elective courses that give students entryways into humanities research. The unique collaborative structure of the courses gives students a global humanities exploration from whichever starting point they choose.
HumCore courses are listed as electives in the academic department of the primary instructor. For example, “The Renaissance in Europe” in Winter 2021 belongs to the Department of English as ENGLISH 112C and is cross listed as HUMCORE 122. In Spring 2021, “Freedom Fighters, Terrorists, and Social Justice Warriors in South Asia” belongs to the Department of Religious Studies as RELIGST 118 and is cross listed as HUMCORE 134. The home department of the HumCore director coordinates the cross-listings.
HumCore is an integrated set of humanities courses. There are no prerequisites, and no required order in which they should be taken. On the contrary, the structure of HumCore courses, with the weekly collaborative conversations, ensures that whatever course a student selects they always get a global and comparative humanities exploration. No single tradition can be studied in a vacuum.
HumCore is also designed to be taken as a set of courses, providing a broad chronological sweep from 2000 BC to the present day. The fall courses deal with the ancient world across Africa, Asia, and Europe. The winter courses address middle periods: Renaissance Europe, Classical Islam, and medieval Japan. The spring courses deal with global modernity up to the present day.
When humanities professors at Stanford and elsewhere engage in research, it looks very much like a HumCore class: we read primary texts and discuss them with our colleagues. HumCore students in every single course develop their ideas alongside faculty and have access to mentors who can help guide them into majors, minors, and honors programs.
A typical HumCore student is frosh, interested in humanities work but unsure of which time period, language, or culture in which to start. HumCore helps orient such a student and introduce them to the academic departments where humanities research takes place. Another typical HumCore student might be engaged in STEM research but looking for guidance as to which humanities courses will offer them broad exploratory introductions to global ideas. Alumni of HumCore courses have gone on to major and minor in humanities departments, some have minored in the HumCore itself, and others have joined projects like the Humanities Research Intensive.
Global Humanities International Workshop Series
Archives of the workshops and analyses are housed on Arcade within the Comparing Literatures colloquy and are individually linked out below.
- HumCore Workshop #1: Between Karachi and California
- HumCore Workshop #2: Pedagogy or Catastrophe
- HumCore Workshop #3: Great Books and Global Brutalities
- HumCore Workshop #4: How International Histories Connect
- HumCore Workshop #5: Western Civ, Values, and Beliefs
- HumCore Workshop #6: Beyond Cartography, Beyond Arabic
Sample Syllabi from Stanford Humanities Core
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Comparing Literatures: Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Turkish, Urdu
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One answer is that we would simply know more. We would have more information, more data, to answer the questions with which the discipline is concerned. Some of those questions are older: What is literature and what does it do? and some are newer: What happens after/beside humans? A representative selection of questions can be found in the 2014-15 Report on the State of the Discipline from the American Comparative Literature Association. Doubtless, information from outside the Anglo-European sphere is improving this conversation.
Is it enough to know more and ask the same questions? What happens if there are different questions? It is hardly a surprising observation that literatures outside Europe have different constitutions and concerns. Trying to render them in a vocabulary intelligible to European or Anglophone audiences is a translation problem, and it becomes sharper when the ideas being translated are themselves self-conscious theories, attempts to carve reality at different joints from those at which Comparative Literature is accustomed to cut.
These observations push us to realize that the direction of travel is critical: do we build theories in European languages and then test them on the world, or vice versa, or neither?
This goal of this Colloquy is to ask and start to answer these questions: what should it mean for Comparative Literature to engage outside Europe? Where is the field now, and what could change? What does Comparative Literature look like when thought through the literatures of Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, or Urdu?
The languages of this Colloquy broadly reflect the interests of the participants, many of whom come from a constellation of literatures with roots in a part of the world given various names: the Middle East, the Near East, the Islamic world, the Islamicate world, West Asia, and so on ad nauseam. The nausea comes from the inevitable problems of power and agency: the East was only Near or Middle for European colonialism, and academic neologisms such as Islamicate or West Asia scarcely have the power to hold sway within the ivory tower, let alone outside where the words people use have their own genealogies. Our aim in this Colloquy is not to readjust all the names and labels but rather to start with the literatures we know, and ask questions of our disciplines (literature, anthropology, translation) in the hope that some answers may prove useful when we think of other literatures around the world.
The Colloquy includes conversations that took place in recent years, book chapters and articles, and current think pieces—in addition to original scholarship, translation, and performance. It is open to new submissions.
