The Florida State University Humanities Center is grounded in the broad commitment to the humanities that informed the university’s genesis and that has defined its 175-year history. It focuses the power of the humanities in driving exploration of the human: who we are, how we live, how we make meaning, and how we can shape a future in which humans flourish. The FSU Humanities Center is a laboratory for invention in which faculty, students, and the public together respond to urgent questions involving citizenship, social life, technology and human enterprise.
The mission of the Humanities Center accordingly is broad and its projects and activities multifarious. It aims to advance research and teaching in the various fields of the humanities; build public understanding of the humanities as a visionary project about how humans can thrive; enrich the teaching of the humanities at FSU and in other partnered educational institutions and settings; foster collaborations among FSU and cultural, social, and governmental organizations; promote interdisciplinary partnerships and synergy across the humanities; pursue a digital humanities; enrich undergraduate study of the humanities; increase the national and international visibility of the humanities at FSU; and open possibilities for alliances between the humanities and other areas of knowledge and research. The Humanities Center is a member organization of the international Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes.
The Humanities Center community of scholars, teachers, artists, government and non-government organizations, and the public reaches beyond Tallahassee. The core of the community is FSU faculty, together with graduate and undergraduate students and postdoctoral visitors, who collectively undertake biennial projects. Every two years, the center announces a topic and solicits applications from those at FSU and from aspiring postdoctoral scholars from other institutions. Together they pursue an investigation of that topic. This research activity, which rests upon energetic interdisciplinary exchanges among the fellows, aims to deliver at the end of each year a book volume, exhibit, report, extended article, project website, or other expression of the progress made by the fellows over the course of the year. The center remains partnered with fellows as they continue to create knowledge arising from their fellowship tenures.
The center awards two-year postdoctoral fellowships to scholars in the following areas: philosophy, religion, history, English, classics, modern languages and linguistics, musicology, and art history. Annually, it also awards fellowships to FSU faculty, all but dissertation writers, and undergraduates. The center in some instances designates academic visitors in residence as Visiting Fellows. The details of the competitions for fellowships, including deadlines, are available elsewhere on this website.
Each year, the center sponsors a conference, typically held in late February. It also mounts a nine-month lecture series featuring scholars from the U.S. and other countries. During the academic year it sponsors workshops, professionalization and employment seminars, teaching mentorships, box lunch colloquia and social events.
The Humanities Center Steering Committee, appointed by the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, is comprised of faculty from humanities departments at FSU. It advises the director of the Humanities Center and creates and manages initiatives promoting the humanities at FSU, collaborating with the dean of the Arts and Sciences and the university provost to foster interdisciplinary inquiry, undertake project funding and build public outreach. Learn more about the director and current Steering Committee members, with terms ending in 2029.
A member of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes