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
Multicoloured patchwork weaving.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.Archival document with handwritten Arabic text.A room full of multi-colored chairs arranged theater-style.An aerial view of people gathered at the Seeing Truth exhibition at the Benton Museum. Art is hanging on blue walls and in the middle of the room a table covered in a black table cloth holds silver objects.

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 Faculty Talk. "The Horror of Orientalism: Plutarch's Artaxerxes meets the internet." with Sara Raup Johnson, Associate Professor, Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies. October 30, 12:30pm, UCHI Conference Room.

Faculty Talk: Sara Johnson on the Horror of Orientalism

October 23, 2024

Sara Raup Johnson (UConn LCL) explores the unexpected afterlife of scaphism—also called “the torture of the boats” from its origins in Ctesias and Plutarch, through the 12th-century Byzantine historian Zonaras, by way of nineteenth-century encyclopedias of torture, to its present-day vogue on the internet and in the death metal music community. October 30, 12:30pm.

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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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