Major Requirements
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Humanities Major Requirements
A total of 54 credit hours is required for the major.
Introduction to Humanities courses* (9 hours): Ìý
Any three of the following:
- HUMN 1001 Forms of Narrative: An Introduction to Humanities (3 hours)
- HUMN 1002 Visualizing Culture: An Introduction to Humanities Ìý(3 hours)
- HUMN 1003 Conflicts in History: An Introduction to Humanities Ìý(3 hours)
- HUMN 1004 Sound and Meaning: An Introduction to Humanities (3 hours)
Flex course: one upper- or lower-division HUMN course (3 hours)
HUMN 2000: Methods/Approaches to Humanities (3 hours)
Upper-division HUMN courses (21 hours):
Seven courses selected from the upper-division offerings taught by Humanities Program faculty (prefix HUMN).Ìý These include courses on different periods, themes, geographical areas, cultural groups, theories, and more.
Outside area of study (18 hours):
To be fulfilled by choosing one of the following courses of study outside of HUMN:
- A major, minor, or certificate in another discipline (additional courses may be necessary to meet the required 18 hours)
- 12 hours in one discipline plus 6 hours in a different discipline
- 18 hours chosen within a preestablished cluster or according to a common theme (to be determined in consultation with and approved by the Director of Undergraduate Studies)--see more information below
Further details:
Examples of Choices for the Outside Course of Study
With the guidance of advising and the HUMN program, you can craft your outside areas of study in a way that is intellectually and personally meaningful to you. For example, you can choose…
- A major, minor, or certificate in another discipline, such as Music, Philosophy, Psychology, Anthropology, Ethnic Studies, Communication, Dance, INVST, EBIO, Mathematics, Cinema Studies, Theatre, Creative Writing, etc. [A total of 18 credit hours in the area is required.]
- 12 hours in one discipline and 6 hours in a different discipline, such as Political Science and Communication, Philosophy and Classics, Women and Gender Studies and History, Creative Technology and Design and Linguistics, etc.
- 18 hours chosen according to a common theme that allows you to explore new combinations of knowledge and contemporary issues. Either construct your own theme or pursue one of the following clusters: Ecocriticism and Sustainability, Medical Humanities, Game and Media Studies, Popular Music and Sounds Studies, Law in Literature and Art, Digital Humanities, and Narrative Studies. See the course lists below for more information.
CoursesÌýselected from the following allow students to focus their second area on music as a cultural practice and aesthetic phenomenon with an emphasis on popular music and diverse disciplinary approaches to understanding sound.
MUEL 2852 - Music in the Rock Era
MUELÌý2051 - Introduction to Songwriting Techniques
WGS 2050 - Gender and Sexuality in Popular Culture
HIST 2316 - History of American Popular Culture
ETHN 3212 - Introduction to Hip Hop Studies
PWR 3020 - Writing About Music
CINE 3422 - The Hollywood Musical
The Humanities Program recommends taking the following Humanities courses to complement courses selected from the Popular Music and Sound Studies cluster. These will count toward your HUMN major requirements.
HUMN 1004 - Sound and Meaning
HUMN 3092 - Capturing Sound
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CoursesÌýselected from the following allow students to focus their second area on the growing field of medical humanities, a field that incorporates numerous different skills and types of knowledge related to medical practice and illness.Ìý
SOCY 1022 - Ethics and Social Issues in U.S. Health and Medicine
PHIL 1160 - Introduction to Medical Ethics
ENGL 1280 - Plague and Pandemic
CLAS 2030/LING 2030/AHUM 2030 - The Ancient Roots of Modern Medicine
IPHY 2692 - Foundations in Public Health
HIST 2830 - Disease and Public Health in Global History
ENGL 3022 - Medical Humanities
WRTG 3030 - Topics in Writing: Medical Discourse and the Body
SOCY 3052 - Medical Sociology
GEOG 3692 - Introduction to Global Public Health
IPHY 4040 - History of Medicine (Study Abroad Course)
ANTH 4610 - Medical Anthropology
GEOG 4852 - Health and Medical Geography
The Humanities Program recommends taking the following Humanities course to complement courses selected from the Medical Humanities cluster. These will count toward your HUMN major requirements.
HUMN 3200 - Fictions of Illness: Modern Medicine and the Literary Imagination
CoursesÌýselected from the following allow students to focus their second area on the growing fields of digital humanities and data humanities.
Course information to come...
CoursesÌýselected from the following allow students to focus their second area on ecocriticism and sustainability with a variety of possible focuses within this broad and ever-changing field.
ENVS 1001 - Introduction to Human Dimensions of Environmental Studies
ENGL 1230 - Environmental Literature
GEOG 1972 - Sustainable Futures, Environment and Society
ASIA 2500 - Catastrophe and Resilience: Asian Experience of Climate Change
ENVS 3034 - Foundations of Environmental Justice
PHIL 3140 - Environmental Ethics
COMM 3380 - Advanced Topics in Storytelling, Culture, & Climate Justice
GEOG 3422 - Political Ecology
JPNS 3881 - Environment, Nature and Disaster in Japanese Literature & Culture
SOCY 4007 - Global Human Ecology
SOCY 4030 - Sociology of Climate Change
ETHN 4233 - Native American and Indigenous Environmental Issues
The Humanities Program recommends taking the following Humanities courses to complement courses selected from the Ecocriticism and Sustainability cluster. These will count toward your HUMN major requirements.
HUMN 3666 - Critical Futures: Theorizing Climate Change
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CoursesÌýselected from the following allow students to focus their second area on the intersections between law and literature and the arts.
Course information to come...
The Humanities Program recommends taking the following Humanities courses to complement courses selected from the Law and Literature and Art cluster. These will count toward your HUMN major requirements.
HUMN 3093 - Topics: Literature and Law
CoursesÌýselected from the following allow students to focus their second area on the interactions between studies in the humanities and the broader public.
Course information to come...
CoursesÌýselected from the following allow students to focus their second area on game and media studies from a variety of different disciplines and contexts.
Course information to come...
The Humanities Program recommends taking the following Humanities courses to complement courses selected from the Game and Media Studies cluster. These will count toward your HUMN major requirements.
HUMN 4006 - Introduction to Game Studies
HUMN 3600 - Avatars: Studies in Contemporary Posthumanism
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CoursesÌýselected from the following allow students to focus their second area on the broad and far reaching field of Narrative Studies, which expands well beyond literature.
WRTG 3020 Topics in Writing: Advanced Creative Nonfiction
WRTG 3020 Topics in Writing: Narrative and the Self
WRTG 3020 Topics in Writing: Ways of Telling the Story
COMM 3380 Advanced Topics in Storytelling, Culture, & Climate Justice
SPAN 4130 The Power of Storytelling: Oral, Textual, and Digital Narratives
MDST 4402 Transmedia Worldbuilding
More course information to come...
The Humanities Program recommends taking the following Humanities courses to complement courses selected from the Narrative Studies cluster. These will count toward your HUMN major requirements.
HUMN 1001 - Forms of Narrative
HUMN 3210 - Narrative
NB: Some disciplines are easier to access than others, due to the difficulty of getting into enough classes. Please see the HUMN advisor before making the final choice of your outside area(s).
Honors
Students who wish to receive honors can elect to write an honors thesis through The Humanities Program or through the Honors Department. More information is posted under theÌýHonors programÌýtab. The Humanities Department Honors Representative is Dr. Annje Wiese, annjeanette.wiese@colorado.edu.
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Course Choice Guidelines
Although the Humanities major allows a breadth of choice, there are a few restrictions on which courses may count for the major. In addition, there are some cross-listed courses that may count although they have been taken in another department. These restrictions and possibilities are in part based on the option for outside areas of study a student chooses. Therefore, frequent consultation with the departmental advisor is required to clarify which courses apply to an individual student’s major plan.
Some of the restrictions are as follows:
Up to 9 hours of lower-division AP and/or IB credits may be applied towards the outside areas of study; however, no more than 6 credits may be used in any one discipline.
Internships may not count as upper-division HUMN but may count in an outside area if appropriate to that area.
No more than three hours of Independent Study or Honors Thesis may count as upper-division HUMN.Ìý
- If more hours are taken, they may count in an outside area with permission of the undergraduate advisor.
- All upper-division Independent Study and Honors Thesis hours count towards the general upper-division hours requirement (45 hours for students in Arts and Sciences).
To clarify which courses count and which do not, see the program advisor.
Updates to the major start fall semester 2020. Students who added the major prior to Fall 2020 can opt to finish their degree according to the previous requirements or they may adopt the new requirements. We strongly recommend that students discuss the options with your advisor as well as Humanities Director of Undergraduate Studies Annjeanette Wiese. For the previous requirements, click here.