The humanities focus on the study of human culture in all its diverse aspects. They traditionally include academic disciplines such as classical studies, history, language, literature, philosophy, and religion studies; they also include the history, theory and criticism of the visual and performing arts. Unlike the quantifiable, empirical approach of the natural and social sciences, the humanities use analytic, critical, interpretive and evaluative methods. In doing so they offer ways to address ambiguity and paradox, morality and value, feeling and artistry, passion and rationality. "Through the humanities," the Rockefeller Commission has noted, "we reflect on the fundamental question: What does it mean to be human? The humanities offer clues but never a complete answer. They reveal how people have tried to make moral, spiritual, and intellectual sense of a world in which irrationality, despair, loneliness, and death are as conspicuous as birth, friendship, hope, and reason."

TLKY: New Voices, New Visions (Photo by: K. Jones)

Courses in the humanities explore such fundamental questions as how we use language, how our ideas and thoughts on the human experience are expressed and interpreted, how we determine value and meaning, how we understand the human past and envisage its future, how we articulate and work for equity and social justice, how we define ideas such as "truth", "beauty", and "art". In humanities courses students consider ideas about the meaning of life, the reasons for our thoughts and actions, and the values and principles that inform our laws and customs, those both written and unwritten. They probe the subjective constructions of the world around us and how our understandings of that world and ourselves are inflected by cultural issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, life stage, and nationality. As a broad and diverse collection of academic disciplines, the humanities examine how we construct our aesthetic, intellectual, religious, social, and political worlds, and they look comparatively at the differences in such constructions in different times and places, and for different people.

At U of T Scarborough, the programs of the Department of Humanities are organized into distinct disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas of study. Students may concentrate in African Studies; Art History; Arts Management; Classical Studies; French; Global Asia Studies; History; Humanities and Humanities Co-Op; Intersections, Exchanges, Encounters in the Humanities; Journalism; Linguistics; Media Studies; Music and Culture; New Media Studies; Religion; Studio and Media Arts; Theatre and Performance Studies; Visual and Performing Arts; and Women's and Gender Studies. The Humanities Department also offers HUM designated courses that establish an intellectual context for academic study in the humanities that also help students develop their written and oral communication skills. All humanities students are strongly encouraged to take HUMA01H (Exploring Key Questions in the Humanities) during their first year.