The Humanities

The Humanities Division at Antioch values the diversity of histories and stories, ideas, and questions. We engage globally and locally, interrogating the boundaries of traditional canons, seeking to engage traditions beyond divisions of North and South, East and West. We cross borders and examine boundaries. We believe that the study of History, Literature, and Philosophy opens us to worlds of human experiences and provides us with a better understanding of ourselves and our world, its past and future, and our place within.

The Humanities Division seeks to provide students with a solid grounding in historical knowledge, clear writing, and clear thinking in order to enable students with the means to do the creative and intellectual work they love. Within the Humanities Division, students have done independent research-based and creative projects on a multitude of topics, including Turkish immigrant communities in Dayton; racial discrimination in housing; Chicana feminist literature; rural trans poetry; Books to Prisons projects and the Dayton Correctional Institute; Marxist philosophy; the thought of Walter Benjamin; and a comparative study of Hannah Arendt, Saul Alinsky, and Aristotle.

While the Humanities Division emphasizes texts and contexts, we also seek to conjoin knowledge and action and to connect ideas and experiences. Examples of this include students leading community reading groups at the public library; classes that link the study of the Yoga Sutras to yoga practice at the Wellness Center; activities that integrate the Antioch Farm into the study of philosophy, history, and literature; and participation in the historic 50th Anniversary of the Freedom Summer in Mississippi. Humanities students’ co-op experiences—like studying at the Zen Center in Colorado, teaching at the Arthur Morgan School in North Carolina, or serving as a researcher for ESL and immigrant issues in the Dayton Public Schools—are deeply linked to the academic projects that they choose to undertake; reciprocally, the coursework that Humanities majors engage with at Antioch makes them articulate, informed, and valuable assets for the organizations that they work for.