The university is a place charged with imagining our collective future. We turn to the humanities to craft the values that will shape that future, and to guide us as we face the challenges ahead.

Anna Mae Duane, Director, UConn Humanities Institute
A large group of faculty members and students gathered in the UCHI conference room to participate in a public event. One group sits around a conference table, while other participants sit in chairs lining the wall.A photograph of a tin robot toy.A room full of multi-colored chairs arranged theater-style.

How do we know what we know? What does the truth look like? Consider these questions and more at our exhibition

Seeing Truth: Art, Science, Museums, and Making Knowledge

William Benton Museum of Art

January 17–March 10, 2023

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This exhibition is supported by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Image: Blazing the Trail to the Distant Past by Arthur A. Jansson, used with permission from the American Museum of Natural History.

Support Undergraduate innovation this UConn Gives with a gift to the UConn Humanities Institute.

What does it mean to be human?

UConn Humanities

We turn to the humanities to craft the values that will shape our future, and to guide us as we face the challenges ahead. What will it mean to be human in the face of technological and ecological upheaval? How does art and culture enable us to anticipate trends we want to embrace, and help us to avoid ancient pitfalls?

The mission of the UConn Humanities Institute (UCHI) is to catalyze, facilitate, and promote research on these questions, and advocate for that research on local and global stages. By hosting annual fellowships to support scholarship here at UConn and across the world, by supporting humanities-focused programming, and by facilitating an interdisciplinary space for scholars to think, collaborate, and create, UCHI serves as a creative laboratory for scholars and students dedicated to foregrounding human values.

Humanities Institute Success

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Established, with the help of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the first-ever New England Humanities Consortium, bringing together both ivy-league and state-sponsored institutions.

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Chosen to be an affiliate partner with the Yale Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. UCHI Director Anna Mae Duane will co-direct a two-year seminar convening an international group of leading scholars of the history of slavery.

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Awarded a two-year grant of $140,000 by the National Endowment for the Humanities to investigate how legacies of slavery are shaping the perception and reception of conversational artificial intelligence.

Latest News and Events

2024–25 Fellow's Talk. Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Religion, and the Search for Grace. Heather Ostman (Professor of English, Director of the Humanities Institute, and Humanities Curriculum Chair at SUNY Westchester Community College) with a response by Julia Wold. February 19, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room.

Fellow’s Talk: Heather Ostman on Literature and the Search for Grace

February 3, 2025

Heather Ostman will explore the links between the representations of religion and selected texts from America’s nineteenth-century, a time in the nation’s history when it sought to assert a distinctive culture and national identity—attempts challenged particularly by the Civil War. February 19, 3:30pm.

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The UConnPopCast, hosted by Professors Stephen Dyson and Jeff Dudas, features scholarly analyses of popular culture and interviews with prominent scholars.

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Why We Argue features conversations with scholars, artists, and scientists about topics related to truth, science, art, political conviction, and more.

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