Bachelor of Journalism and Humanities student Dominique GenĂŠ has won th.

GenĂŠ says the Humanities program armed her with skills that helped structure her journalistic work.

The fellowship program aims to amplify Black voices, improve coverage of Black issues in the news, and cultivate future Black media leaders. Each fellowship provides a unique opportunity for an early-career Black journalist—with one-to-five years’ experience—to be hosted for six months at CBC/Radio-Canada (English and French), The Globe and Mail, a CTV News newsroom or at the IJB at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

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Updated – Spaces are still available.  Apply now!

. .  . The . The .

In May 2018, ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ students will again be traveling to the ‘Holy Land’ and walking through these ancient sites, experiencing them not only as travelers but as young scholars.

The travel course poster touts 5000 years of religion and culture in 20 days.   If that sounds like a marathon, it is!

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Open to undergraduate and graduate students, the course explores religion and culture in the ‘Holy Land’ from the ancient period to the present day. Practically, that means that our traveling classroom will include exploring 14 archeological sites (including a Dig for a Day), walking each of the stations of the Cross along the Via Dolorosa, experiencing the beauty of Al Aqsa, moving through the cool stone interiors of a medieval fort in Akko, meeting contemporary activists such the Women of the Wall.

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This year’s course also brings together ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ students with international scholars and students through a partnership with and Tel Aviv University. Fortified by much falafel and ice cream, students experience the rhythms of life in the ‘Holy Land’ as a culturally and religiously diverse modern country: from each of the traditional four quarters of Jerusalem (Armenian, Christian, Muslim and Jewish), to lunch with the Druze, to an Orthodox home Shabbat in Jerusalem, floating in the Dead Sea, crossing into the West Bank and camel riding in the Judean desert, hearing the call to prayer from Mosques against the chiming of church bells and the loud beats of dance music in the streets.

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FASS is home to several travel courses with good reason; former FASS Dean John Osborn fostered these courses that will stand out as bright memories of their time at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´. For students in FASS, who have studied the texts, architecture, art, history, religion, literature, politics, and culture of what we call the “West”, the travel course experience brings their studies to life. It is one thing to study, for example, the diversity of Christianity from a textbook. It is another to see the infamous ladder that cannot be moved in the because of strict rules about each denomination’s rights in this venerated sacred space.

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Participants are characteristically diverse in their backgrounds and academic interests. The course has no prerequisites and attracts students from all programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels as well as auditors who are interested in traveling with an academic focus and experts in the area.

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Religious difference is part of the history of this land, and part of the appeal of the course for many students – they want to understand what they see in the news. While the focus of the course is not the conflict, participants inevitably come away with a richer, more personal and more nuanced understanding of the history this place and how that history drives contemporary debates.

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This year’s course is again being offered by Professor Deidre Butler, program, College of Humanities.  In the hopes of building a long-term sustainable travel course bi-annual program through university partnerships, Professor Mary Hale (Religious Studies, St-Mary’s University, Halifax) will be joining the course with several of her undergraduate and MA students.

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• Spaces are available for both students and auditors with online applications and a 150$ refundable deposit.
• More info about the course (including fees and deadlines)
• Course travel itinerary

Questions? Contact Deidre Butler.

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Snip, snip, go the scissors of the Fates.

Sometimes, my life lies in pieces around me. Consider my apartment: books everywhere, post-it notes with lists of readings, essays to edit; literal pieces (of literature) splay my education languorously across minimal square footage. There is a papered materiality to studying English that I cannot escape. My schoolwork surrounds me in fragments. Loose paper, all my pens four-fifths out of ink.

I begin to think that this is how life works: perhaps it is that everything of import has been sent through a shredder and then lies around you, waiting for reassembly.

Near the end of reading week, I was standing in the , staring at Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte – you know the painting I mean, the Pointillist one, with the woman on the right side who has a pet monkey. I’ve liked it since I’ve known it, which dates to my art history class in second year. I never thought I would see it in real life. I don’t know what it is about the Met, but it pulls together disparate things. There I am, in 19th century European Paintings, reliving art history. Then, downstairs, to Greek and Roman art, where I find stelae from the Temple of Artemis at Sardis and the gymnasium at Pergamon, places I visited in a study abroad class with the department in Summer 2015. And so the windy day on the Pergamon acropolis is before me.

How do you – suddenly and obliviously, and in a strange city no less – find yourself confronted by the missing pieces? In the case of the stelae, I mean that literally; they were pieces missing from the places I’d gone across the globe to see. Does it happen often that a poetic and cyclical pattern shapes your life? How do you ever find yourself in this position you’d never thought you’d be in, a position of ecstatic recognition and overwhelming privilege, as though the world literally revolves around you, for you?

When I write an essay, I have to wander around the space I occupy and find the scraps of paper on which I’ve written my thoughts – single words, exclamation points, long block quotations. I gather, compile, assess. This is the puzzle I’ve made for myself, whence the thesis emerges. I draw it out slowly, tease meaning, solve the mystery. Somehow, over the course of five years, my life has worked itself into something similarly cohesive, emergent, and true.

I blame my education, the thing that has taught me to un-puzzle the pieces and to puzzle them further; the thing that has inspired in me a desire to see. I’m not sure when I became willing to travel in spite of fear, when I put the desire to know more about the world over the desire to be comfortable and safe in my own home. Perhaps it’s been lying latent, but recently – in the rooms and halls of this university – the careful hands of brilliant teachers, the ideas and adventures bound up in pages and pages that have passed through my eyes/fingers/brain have drawn it out, teased the meaning out of me, begun to solve the endless mystery of my own life.

The post Paige's Blog – On learning, re: my life in pieces appeared first on Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences.

On Friday the 30^th of September, the program welcomed alumni and their families back to ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ to celebrate the program’s 20^th anniversary. Faculty and former students caught up with each other at an informal pub-night and a gala dinner, and seven alumni turned the tables on their former professors by giving a series of TED-style talks on their current experience and expertise from the front of their old lecture-hall. A family picnic and an opportunity for current students to connect with alumni as mentors rounded out the weekend.

In the mid 1990s, a group of professors who were unhappy with the state of Canadian liberal arts education decided to found the College of the Humanities at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´. They followed the elite Great-Books model pioneered by American institutions such as the University of Chicago and St. John’s College, which emphasizes primary texts and small discussion groups.

After extensive discussion at all levels of the , the opened its doors in 1996, under the direction of Professor Peter Emberley, with a mandate to recruit some of the best students in Canada and to give them a deep and comprehensive liberal arts education. The elite model of the Bachelor of Humanities was soon followed by other limited-enrolment programs at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, such as the Arthur Kroeger College of Public Affairs.

“I cannot imagine a more gratifying environment to teach in. The students are really brilliant. They do the reading. They attend the lectures. They speak up in discussion group. What more could you want?” remarks Professor Erik Stephenson, who teaches the Core-Humanities Seminar in Ancient and Medieval philosophy.

Bachelor of Humanities students such as religion, philosophy, literature, history, and political theory, through a series of Core–Humanities Seminars, each taught by two professors, including small discussion groups. But they supplement this core with required courses in Greek and Roman literature, the early history of the Abrahamic religions, the history of art, the history of music, British and European literature, and modern science.

Unlike most liberal arts programs, the Bachelor of Humanities has a significant Eastern component, and its students study the great Hindu texts such as the Bhagavad-Gita and Chinese texts such as the Tao Te Ching with as much excitement as they study Plato’s Republic or Dante’s Divine Comedy. In all of their courses the focus is on reading , and students graduate with first-hand knowledge of Homer, Plato, Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Mary Shelley, Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, Heidegger, and many others.

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At first Humanities students were restricted to only four concentrations, in the liberal arts, philosophy, literature, and history, but very soon the faculty realized their students had a much wider range of interests than they had anticipated.A curriculum change allowed students to pair their Humanities core with the full range of combined honours subjects at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´. of the Humanities program were added — Humanities and Biology, Humanities with a Study-Year Abroad, Journalism and Humanities — allowing students to use the program as an academic home-base while pursuing even wider interests.

“Our students are incredibly diverse,” says Professor Kimberly Stratton. “They are interested in everything. They all read the same core texts, but then they get interested in diverse subjects like graphic-novel versions of the Bible, the neglected writings of Early Modern female philosophers, or creating music for the surviving lyrics of Medieval troubadours.”

In the meantime, the College of the Humanities itself expanded beyond the original Bachelor of Humanities program, adding a B.A. in , a B.A. and M.A. in , and a minor in , which have proven to be very popular choices for the ‘combined’ portion of Bachelor of Humanities students’ degrees. With the broad variety of subjects that Humanities students now combine with the core studies of their degree, from English to Biology, Philosophy to Art History, Human Rights to Nutrition, the Bachelor of Humanities is easily the most interdisciplinary program at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´.

Students still benefit from the small community offered by the program. Seventy keen minds join their ranks each year, becoming close friends with each other and with their professors. Students support each other in their studies, and remain in touch for years after they graduate. “Some of my best friends are former students,” says Professor Gregory MacIsaac. “Erik Stephenson, for example, was one of the smartest students I ever taught, and he is now a dear friend, in addition to being one of my colleagues. It is such a joy for me to teach HUMS 2000 with him, and really to continue a philosophical conversation that we started over fifteen years ago.”

Humanities graduates have proven to be . A large percentage of them have gone on to further study at prestigious graduate schools such as Harvard, Oxford, the University of Chicago, Boston University, Notre Dame, the London School of economics, Sciences Po (Paris), McGill, the University of Toronto, and many others. Many have entered prestigious professional programs in fields such as law, medicine, or journalism. Alumni work in interesting and challenging careers in fields such as the arts, business, education, international development, cultural planning, high-tech, or public policy, and many others. In all cases graduates report that the skills they learned in Humanities—thoughtful reflection, clarity of written and oral expression, a comfort with diverse viewpoints—have been the foundation of their success.

The Bachelor of Humanities program has much to celebrate. Twenty years of reading, writing and thinking has produced a growing body of interesting and accomplished alumni. The celebration weekend was a wonderful opportunity for them to meet old friends, pick up old conversations, and start new ones. With their support, and a continuing commitment to the principles of Great Books education, the program can look forward to another twenty years of success.

Here are a few examples of the successful alumni of the Bachelor of Humanities program…

Amanda Hadi (B.Hum, 2010) is a Toronto-based editor, cultural communications person and social media technocrat who has made a career successfully bridging the gap between a 19th-century impresario and a 21st-century internet meme generator. She is currently a full-time Digital Engagement Producer for the Toronto International Film Festival, and spends her evenings running the editorial and digital media strategy of the renowned Canadian indie opera company Against the Grain Theatre. She has worked for the Canadian Opera Company, the City of Ottawa Public Art Program, several creative branding studios in Toronto, and, most recently, as the Social Media Officer for the Art Gallery of Ontario. She has been profiled in Flare Magazine, NOW Magazine, Metro News and 500px.

Amanda on the College:

Some of Amanda’s related work:

Saleema Nawaz graduated from the College of the Humanities in 2002.

Since then, she has published a short-story collection, , and a novel, , both of which have received critical acclaim: Mother Superior won the 2008 Writers’ Trust / McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize; Bone and Bread won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction (2013) and was a finalist on CBC’s Canada Reads competition (2016).

Saleema discussing her experience with The College of the Humanities:

Jen Carswell graduated from the College of the Humanities in 2006. She went on to receive a master’s degree in journalism from the prestigious Centre de Formation des Journalistes in Paris four years later. After graduating, Jen worked as a production assistant at France 24, the rolling news channel in the French capital, before moving to the economics desk to become the morning business producer. She occupied this role for a year and a half. In 2012, Jen moved to London, England, where, within a few months, she took up a role at the British Broadcasting Corporation as a broadcast journalist for World Television. She has worked as a senior producer for both news and business news over the last three and a half years.

Jen on her experience in the College of the Humanities:

Technically, Francis Bakewell didn’t actually graduate the program, as he was accepted into medical school early, after his 3rd year of Hums. He was in the class of 2010.

Francis is currently in the 5th year of residency in emergency medicine at the University of Ottawa/The Ottawa Hospital. He’s also an MHSc. candidate in Bioethics at the Joint Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto.

Francis on his experience in the College of the Humanities:

Deepro Chowdhury graduated from the program in 2015 and is currently studying medicine at McMaster Medical School in Hamilton, Ontario. In the future he hopes to train as an oncologist.

Deepro on the College:

The post Reflecting on Twenty Years of The Bachelor of Humanities appeared first on Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences.

Professor Paul Keen is Associate Dean of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs.  His current book project, which is forthcoming with Palgrave MacMillan, is entitled The Humanities In A Utilitarian Age: Imagining What We Know, 1800-1850.

Watch two interviews/videos with Professor Keen on TVO’s website:

For more information, read his post Rethinking the PhD in the Humanities and his paper titled .

Also from TVO: .

The post Professor Paul Keen on TVO: Why the Humanities Matter appeared first on Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences.

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

— Plato, Republic 536e

Associate Professor in the College of the Humanities, Gregory MacIsaac must have been aware of these words when he held a very non-traditional course on the fourth-century Greek philosopher, Plato.

Professor MacIsaac ventured outside the confines of the classroom by offering two of his undergraduate students, Joey Baker and Ekaterina Huybregts, course credit to meet for weekly discussion and debate on the final two of three Platonic dialogues, Theaetetus, Parmenides, and Sophist, that MacIsaac had been working on for the better part of a decade.

This learning model was non-traditional in many senses – Huybregts and Baker weren’t required to write exams or hand in papers, and were graded solely on the quality of their discussion; meetings were held once a week in MacIsaac’s office, instead of a classroom; while formally a series of directed studies courses, the three held a continuous meetings for a year and a half, working even through the summer. “I just happened upon this course set-up without really choosing it consciously,” said MacIsaac. “I did choose a discussion format, but once we agreed to make our meetings open-ended we found it possible to have an incredible depth of discussion, because we could take our talks in whichever direction we liked for as long as we liked. Sometimes we’d spend an hour and a half on a single paragraph. We could look at both the forest and the trees.” Early on their plan became to continue reading and discussing until they finished the two dialogues that MacIsaac had left to work on, however long that would take.

MacIsaac knew that Parmenides and Sophist were two of Plato’s most complex dialogues and quickly realized how much his own research would benefit from his students’ two additional perspectives.

“A Platonic dialogue is a philosophical conversation where different ideas are put into the mouths of different speakers,” explained MacIsaac. “So in order to see why particular ideas are expressed, you have to think about the dramatic setting, the characters, and minor details like jokes. Plato doesn’t come right out and tell you what perspective to adopt in reading the dialogues, conveying it instead through his dramatic details, and these require interpretation. Kat and Joey’s insights were invaluable, often leading me in directions I very likely would not have taken on my own.”

MacIsaac gave structure to their conversations by supplying an overarching interpretation of the dialogues. Against most scholars, MacIsaac contends that Plato is presenting his predecessors’ ideas in Theaetetus and Parmenides, in order to show how his own theories are superior, in Sophist. This dialogue, he thinks, is a sort of justification of all of Plato’s philosophy.

“We were continually testing whether my overall interpretation could make sense of each part of the argument. But along the way Plato discusses what knowledge is, how material objects participate in ideal forms, the character of true and false language, and the catalogue of fundamental metaphysical concepts,” said MacIsaac. “By figuring out these dialogues, Joey, Kat and I had to think about all of these topics. So we were also learning how to think about core philosophical ideas.”

In assisting MacIsaac with his reading of the dialogues, the students themselves were learning how to read a rhetorically sophisticated text. “If you have an entire dialogue, like Theaetetus, that tries to figure out what knowledge is, but ends in failure, you have to ask yourself why Plato would write something like that. Are the theories in it Plato’s own or someone else’s? These two possibilities yield completely different philosophical results, so it presents you with demanding interpretive as well as intellectual hurdles,” said MacIsaac.

Although the subject matter was challenging, the three were able to concoct an effective research and learning setting.

“It was very informal and comfortable. I sat on one couch while Joey and Kat sat facing me on the other. Normally, I would begin by giving a recap of what we discussed the previous week. Then we would read the next section of text together. If there were any tricky words or phrases, I would consult the Greek text. Finally, we would discuss what we read,” said MacIsaac.

Their discussion always focused on how the argument of the 200 pages of text worked. The group would often struggle to decipher Plato’s meanings in the paragraph they had most recently read, but more often than not, they were also figuring out how the text fit into Plato’s argument as a whole.

“Plato gives seven different definitions of a sophist in the dialogue Sophist,” explained MacIsaac. “It’s not enough to understand each definition on its own. You have to ask why there are seven of them and why they are given in that particular order. Do the later ones replace the earlier ones or are they complementary? How do the definitions which make up the first half of the dialogue relate to the abstract metaphysical investigation of Being and Non-Being in the second half of the dialogue?”

Everyone who has every urged us to say just how many beings there are and what they are like…appear to me to have been telling us a myth, as if we were children. One tells us that there are three beings, and that sometimes they’re somehow at war with each other, while at other times they become friendly, marry, give birth, and bring up their offspring. Another one says that there are two beings, wet and dry or hot and cold…And our Eleatic tribe…tells us their myth on the assumption that what they call ‘all things’ are just one.

— Plato, Sophist 242c-d

What do you signify when you say the word ‘Being’? Obviously you’ve known for a long time. We thought we did, but now we’re confused about it. So first teach it to us, so we won’t think we understand what you’re saying when just the contrary is the case.

— Plato, Sophist 244a

Considering these dialogues have been grappled with for two millennia, carrying on an exhaustive discussion of them was not a light task. The two students began reading Plato in September of 2014 and kept reading each week, with a few interruptions, until they finished Sophist and Parmenides, in the summer of 2016 – a week after they both had graduated.

“The directed studies experience gave me the opportunity to read and think in a much more focused way than in any other aspect of my degree,” reflected Baker. “Having the study structured by Professor MacIsaac’s own career-length research project provided an especially unique and advanced opportunity to become a better student of Plato in particular, without the years of work and responsibility involved in conceiving and executing such a project.”

“I doubt I could have learned nearly as much about philosophical method or any particular subject matter in a regular course, seminar or tutorial at the undergraduate level.”

Both the students and professor found this non-traditional learning and teaching undertaking to be very rewarding in a variety of capacities. “A big advantage of this way of working was that we were not pressed for time. The dialogues that we read were very complex and contained many obscure passages. Sometimes we spent an entire session on a single paragraph, or even on a few lines. Because the work was open-ended — early on we decided to keep on reading together as long as they were both in town — we could spend the time we needed to get to the nitty-gritty of things,” said MacIsaac.

MacIsaac asserts that they did just that. He believes there was not a single part of their readings that they did not come to fruitful conclusions about. Reading closely together without a timetable made for a truly creative collaboration of three minds.

“In a nutshell, we had the intellectual satisfaction that comes from really getting to the bottom of something,” said MacIsaac, “which of course requires spending as much time as it takes to figure each problem out.”

The students also found this format satisfying. “Participating in such a close directed study of Plato with Professor MacIsaac gave me insight into what research in academic philosophy could be like,” said Huybregts, “Being a part of a project of this size and at this level gave me skills and confidence that I will carry into all of my future projects, regardless of the subject matter.”

The thoroughness of their discussions has paid dividends. MacIsaac recorded every session, fifty hours of slow, methodical work through the dialogues, that he plans to hire a work-study student to transcribe. When added to his already completed efforts on the first of the three dialogues, this will allow him to produce a solid first draft of a book-length commentary on Theaetetus, Parmenides, and Sophist. The transcription won’t yet be a final text, and will have to be cut down quite a bit, but it will provide a thorough philosophical core for his interpretation of Plato’s argument.

Concurrently, he is also working on a final draft of a textbook on how to write a university paper, called The Humanities Writing Guide. This textbook will be based on his work in HUMS 1200 Humanities and Classical Civilization, which is a required writing course in the Bachelor of Humanities program.

With this course now in his rear view mirror, and Huybregts and Baker both pursuing post-undergraduate ventures, MacIsaac maintains that the format he and his two students used could be a more common undergraduate practice given the right circumstances. He believes the key ingredient is highly motivated and engaged students who are interested in pursuing a longer-term scholarly journey.

He has already signed up a few new students and a retired professor of English for a challenge a little further from his own research, Heidegger’s Being and Time, which they plan to begin reading this September.

*The image in the banner is a panoramic view of Professor MacIsaac’s office — the meeting place for MacIsaac, Baker, and Huybregts.

The post Debating Plato: A Non-Traditional Learning Experience appeared first on Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences.

Recent graduate of the , Leonor Vulpe Albari, has just received some very exciting news.

Albari, who graduated from ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ in 2014 and is now in the midst of wrapping up a Master’s of Law (LLM) at , has just learned that she has been accepted to a variety of prominent law schools all across the globe, including admittance to the .

Albari’s story is an inspirational example of what can be accomplished through the liberal arts. This spring, she generously took time out of her busy schedule to discuss life and learning in the Bachelor of Humanities program and what it takes to achieve academic excellence.

Why did you choose ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University’s Bachelor of Humanities program? 

When I was finishing high school, I really didn’t know what to do next.

I knew that I probably wanted to go into the general arts, rather than the maths and sciences, but I wasn’t even sure about that! It was my dad who first told me about the HUMS program. I looked into it, and I thought the courses were interesting. I was also very interested in doing a year abroad, which the HUMS program encourages students to do.

Since I wasn’t sure about what career I wanted, I decided to study something that I liked, and in a program where I could develop skills that would be useful to me later. The HUMS was perfect for me since I could study a mix of philosophy, history, religion, political science, ancient civilizations, and so on, and it was a small program where I could learn to write essays properly, read interesting texts and –well– just think about the world.

Could you describe your general experience of the HUMS program?

I think one of the best aspects of the HUMS program is that in every core class there are two professors and only about 50 students. The professors attend all your discussion groups so they are able to give students a lot of help and guidance. I took a political science class in first-year and there were a couple hundred students for one professor; in those situations, it’s simply not possible to get much help from a professor. Though I know some students do well in big classes, I personally enjoyed the smaller class sizes in HUMS. Most professors were also very willing to meet outside class time with students to discuss the readings, assignments, etc. I took advantage of that a lot, and before I would start writing an essay I would often discuss the outline with my professor and make sure I was on the right track.

As well, in first-year you spend the year slowly learning how to write essays. You start with one-page papers, then two-page papers, and by the end of the year you are finally writing six-page papers, but they are (hopefully!) excellent six-page papers. This first year taught me how to write essays and to organize my ideas, and that skill has been extremely useful for me since I left HUMS.

How did your personality click with the College of the Humanities?

In first-year, I really enjoyed my HUMS classes, but I didn’t attend many HUMS events and my social circle revolved mostly around the varsity water polo team I was playing on. It was not until the middle of second-year that I think I really ‘clicked’ with the program. I loved the texts we were studying, and I started to spend more time in the HUMS lounge and meet more people in the program. I also started attending HUMS events, and even non-HUMS events in Ottawa about philosophy or politics.

Could you discuss some of the “great books” that helped to form your personal perspectives and which may have lead you to study law?

Though of course there were some texts that I preferred over others, I think every book we read has somehow shaped my world view. I don’t think there was one text in particular that pushed me to do law. Rather, I learned a lot from the program as a whole, and after HUMS I wanted to apply that knowledge to the present, and in a more practical way—which I thought I could do with law. You read such a variety of texts in HUMS, from the Old Testament and Plato’s Republic, to Shelley’s Frankenstein and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, that you end the program with a well-rounded view of the world.

One text that I would recommend and which has perhaps influenced me the most is the Epic of Gilgamesh. It is an ancient Mesopotamian epic poem about the king of Uruk, Gilgamesh. For me, Gilgamesh is a man who, through a series of events and realizations, comes to the understanding that there is an insurmountable difference between him and the gods: mortality. This text showed me that despite the fact that people and society have changed drastically throughout time, ultimately we are all human. Gilgamesh, a king from thousands of years B.C. must face the simple fact that he will die, just as we must today.

Did you participate in the mentorship program?

I participated in the mentorship program during my fourth year in HUMS. I needed help deciding what to do next; I had applied to some programs in Canada, including NIPSIA at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, and to programs in the Netherlands. The mentorship program coordinator, Barbara Garner, put me in touch with a graduate of  (NPSIA). Though I ended up choosing the Master’s of Law (LLM) at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, it was helpful to talk to my mentor about his experience at NPSIA. My mentor also gave me information about how a degree from abroad would be received in Canada.

You have some serious decision making and planning to do. Can you speculate on your next steps?

I have decided to go to law school and I am currently trying to decide between McGill and Oxford. At the moment, I’m switching back and forth between these two options, so I am not quite sure what I will do next year. What I do know is that I hope to become a lawyer, and to work in the area of international law.

I think it is in large part thanks to HUMS that I have the luxury of this choice. One of the reasons I did so well during my LLM in the Netherlands is that I have learned to write clearly and precisely, to read, and to think (to put it simply), which my years in HUMS taught me. As well, I know HUMS, and now the LLM, have prepared me well for whichever university I decide on.

Any parting words of wisdom?

I would like to thank my professors! Some of them met with me countless times to help me with my essays, or just to discuss questions I had, and I will always be grateful to them.

If you don’t know what you want to study in university, chose something you enjoy and that will give you tools you can use in many settings. Though the HUMS program did not give me a ‘predestined job’ after graduating, I think it was the best program I could have chosen because I enjoyed it and because I developed important skills, which I am now using in law. I learned to write a proper essay, think critically, analyze and summarize texts, and, more importantly, I learned about the world around me—its past and its present. I carry what I learned in the HUMS program with me, and I don’t think I would have as many opportunities today if I did not have the foundation that the HUMS program gave me.

Read Albari’s classmate Roy Sepgunta’s interview.  Much like Albari, Sepgunta was recently offered admission to an array of prestigious graduate school opportunities, including admittance to Harvard Law School.

The post Accepted to Oxford Law from the Bachelor of Humanities Program appeared first on Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences.

Fourth-year student in the Bachelor of Humanities (HUMS), Roy Sengupta was recently offered admission to an array of prestigious graduate school opportunities (alongside fellow HUMS student, Lulu Vulpe Albari), including admittance to Harvard’s the eminent .

Although an undergraduate education in the liberal arts may not be the most common first post-secondary step in the arduous pursuit of becoming a lawyer, Sengupta believes that the program at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University superbly provided him with all the tools necessary to attain post-graduate excellence.

Sengupta has yet to make any final decisions about where he will be studying next year, but his successful admissions to some of the world’s greatest educational institutions functions as a symbol for what can be achieved through a degree in the arts.

Sengupta was kind enough to have a chat with FASS about his massively impressive accomplishments, and how ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´’s versatile Bachelor of Humanities program helped him to realize them.

Why did you choose ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University’s Bachelor of Humanities program?  

In my senior year of high school, I had many options to choose from for my undergraduate degree, including the University of Toronto, Queen’s University, and the University of Ottawa, as well as the program at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University. In order to make a more informed decision, I toured all of these programs and universities, and it was during the touring process, I would say, that the Bachelor of Humanities program first stood out to me. I was immensely impressed by the tour I received of the Bachelor of Humanities, and by the fact that, during the tour, I was able to substantially engage and interact with professors of the program. The program seemed to offer a much more personal, broad, and intellectual education than what was offered at some of the other universities.

Even more importantly, I felt that, at the Bachelor of Humanities program, I was more than just a number. I believed, and have been proven correct, that I would be able to develop meaningful relationships with knowledgeable faculty through the Bachelor of Humanities program. As I began to explore the curriculum of the Humanities program, I was also very impressed. I liked the fact that the Bachelor of Humanities stressed a broad-based education, such that a student would come away from the program having learned about religion, philosophy, literature, politics, music, art, and so much more. I felt that this broad-based, and yet cohesive, approach compared positively to other undergraduate programs. I also noted, with favour, that the Bachelor of Humanities program emphasised discussion groups and primary source readings. I was glad that my educational experience in the Bachelor of Humanities program would not consist merely of reading out of textbooks, but that I would rather gain access to some of the most meaningful texts of human history, from the Iliad to Don Quixote.

My experience with ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University during the admission and registration processes was also very positive. I found that the admissions material for ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University was cleanly organised, well laid out, and seemed to indicate an extra degree of effort on the part of the admissions office. ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ seemed to be, and is, a university dedicated towards the success of every individual student. From the generous financial aid offered by ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ to the numerous supplementary academic programs offered by the university, ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ seemed serious about ensuring and enabling the academic success of all students. Whereas I worried that I would have an impersonal educational experience at other large universities, I never felt this fear with ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University. For these reasons, the choice to attend ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University and the Bachelor of Humanities program was clear.

Could you describe your general experience of the Bachelor of Humanities program? 

Overall, I have found the Bachelor of Humanities to be a very intellectual program, and to be a program which supports intellectual development and growth through close student-faculty interaction. I am constantly amazed at the amount of meaningful contact I am able to have with professors on a day to day basis in this program, and I absolutely feel that the conversations I have had with my professors have contributed immensely to my own academic development. Not only this, but I have found that the culture of the Bachelor of Humanities program is also very intellectual. Students in the Bachelor of Humanities love what they do and love what they study. You don’t see the same kind of cynicism among students as you may in other places, rather, student are genuinely engaged with the material of the program. I feel that this culture among the student body creates an environment of academic success and critical thinking, and I certainly do feel that the intellectual passion of my peers has helped to spur and encourage my own intellectual passions.

The distinctive features of the Bachelor of Humanities program have also played a major role in my success. I feel like I was better able to engage with and understand the challenging material in the Humanities program thanks to the weekly discussion groups hosted by professors. Not only this, but I found the discussion groups to be a fantastic way of learning about academic and formal discourse. What the discussion groups encourage you to do is to speak before your peers in small settings. I have found these discussion groups to be immensely helpful in improving my public speaking. By forcing me to elaborate upon complex thoughts to both my professors and my peers, the discussion groups served to improve my diction and confidence in public speaking. After all, if I was able to speak meaningfully and cogently on a topic like the Iliad, I ought to be able to speak on any topic. I found, in particular, that the discussion groups were helpful in allowing me to succeed during the law school interview process. Having already had regular experience in organizing and expressing complex thoughts in a disciplined manner, law school interviews proved to be far less intimidating.

Finally, I believe that the strong emphasis placed on writing in the Bachelor of Humanities also played an important role in my achievements. Almost all of the exams in the Bachelor of Humanities program are primarily essay based, and intensive attention is given to the essay writing abilities of students in the program. I feel that the strong writing abilities which I garnered from the program were immensely helpful in allowing me to craft a meaningful personal statement for my law school applications. The ability to express oneself in written form is an invaluable skill, and the small class size of the Bachelor of Humanities program allows the faculty to give individualized attention to the writing of every student. The faculty makes a great effort to ensure that each student’s writing abilities improve gradually over the course of the four-year program, such that one is able to leave a substantially more articulate writer by the time one leaves the program.

How did your personality ‘click’ with the Bachelor of the Humanities program? Could you discuss some of the reading that helped to shape your perspective?  

I feel that I was successful in the program in large part thanks to my open-minded and inquisitive personality. I definitely think that, at least to some extent, you need to be someone who enjoys reading in order to gain the most success possible out of this program. Being open-minded to different points of view, and to different ways of seeing the world, is also crucial. In the Humanities program, you are exposed to so many different systems of thought, and you need to be as open-minded and curious about ideas you disagree with, as about ideas that you agree with. I think that this also happens to be one of the important skills of a lawyer. I also feel that I was successful in the program thanks to a certain versatility of mind. In the program, you study a wide diversity of different subjects, from music, to philosophy, to art, to religion, and you therefore need to have the ability to engage with different kinds of material, and to bring different sorts of material together into a cohesive understanding. I absolutely believe that any open-minded and inquisitive person can succeed in this program, as you will be given the support and the guidance to understand and engage with different kinds of thinking, as long as you are willing to do so.

This may be a somewhat surprising pick, in terms of a book that sparked my interest in the law, but the three books of Dante’s Divine Comedy, in particular Inferno and Purgatorio (in English, Hell, and Purgatory respectively), played a major role in developing my interest in the law. Dante’s Inferno is probably one of my favourite books of all time, because of its rational and logical portrayal of the idea of divine justice. Dante creates, in his Divine Comedy, a well-planned, logical system by which each person is assigned a just outcome in the afterlife for their actions during life. So, for example, a wrathful person in Hell is condemned to an afterlife of fighting and anger, whereas a thief is condemned to have his identity stolen from him in Hell. Dante goes to great lengths to ensure that the punishment for each kind of sinner fits the sin which they have committed. In short, he tries to envision an afterlife where everyone is dealt a just outcome. I also particularly like Dante’s Purgatorio for the fact that it suggests that there is a possibility for sinners to be rehabilitated in their afterlife, as long as they indicate their desire to change through repentance. Dante creates a sort of justice system in the afterlife, and this led me to greatly ponder what justice truly means, and how those who commit crimes ought to be punished. 

Another work that greatly influenced my interest in the law was Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. In this play, Shakespeare considers what the appropriate parameters of the justice system ought to be, how a judge ought to act in enforcing the law, and how one holds a judge accountable for unjust rulings. I would say that the main message of Measure for Measure is that, without mercy and compassion, justice quickly turns to tyranny. One of the main characters in the play is Angelo, an extremely harsh judge who imprisons a citizen of the realm, Claudio, for a sexual misdemeanor. When Claudio’s sister intercedes on his behalf to Angelo, Angelo attempts to exploit the situation to secure inappropriate sexual favours from the sister. The play then becomes a story of how someone in a position of power, Angelo, can be brought to justice for misuse of that power. For this reason I believe this is a powerful and timeless story. It asks questions regarding the boundaries between justice and cruelty, and about how we can hold the powerful to account when they stray from what is right.

In terms of the shaping of my general worldview, I am a very avid reader of historical non-fiction. I am firm believer in learning from the mistakes and successes of the past. I believe that the best works of historical non-fiction not only recall events, but provide effective explanations as to why the events of that historical era occurred. In this way, great works of historical non-fiction are able to provide timeless lessons that continue to apply to the present day. Two of the great works of historical non-fiction that I feel do this very effectively are The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer, and Nixonland by Rick Perlstein. Both of these books are historical non-fiction par excellence, and the reader will come away from them not only with a working knowledge of the historical events of those eras, but also of what can cause political and social change, and how human behaviour influences politics and the law. Both books provide clear explanations as to why things changed in the way they changed, and why politics, institutions, and ideas evolved in the way they did during their respective eras.

Did you participate in the mentorship program?  If so, can you tell us about that experience?

I, unfortunately, did not participate extensively in the mentorship program, however, I do believe that ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University as a whole provided excellent resources for exploration into a legal career path. In particular, I was extensively involved in the (CLLSS), and in the moot team associated with the Society. Both the events of the CLLSS, and the networking opportunities made available at such mooting competitions like the Capital Cup, hosted at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University each year in the autumn, provided excellent opportunities to learn more about the legal profession and to interact with legal professionals in varied fields. For example, the CLLSS Moot Team is privileged to have, in many cases, professional lawyers judging the practice panels of the team. As you might imagine, these professional panels provide excellent opportunities for one to hone skills of legal reasoning, and to meet with and interact with legal professionals.

I also felt that ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University provided great opportunities for undergraduate students to become involved in research, and these opportunities also helped to shape my interests in the law. For example, I have developed a significant interest in infrastructure law as a result of research work done at the university, and so I would definitely encourage students to pursue research opportunities at the university, as these opportunities can lead to in-depth exposure to a variety of different fields. Overall, I am very pleased with the resources which ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University offered to me, in order to allow my exploration into the legal profession.

You have some serious decision making and planning to do! Can you speculate on what might be your next steps?

Of course, I am grateful to have many generous law school offers on the table, including offers of admission from schools such as Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School, and the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. As well, I have received many generous scholarship offers from schools such as the Queen’s University Faculty of Law, The University of Pennsylvania Law School, and the University of Chicago Law School. I would say that nothing has been finalized yet, but I am certainly flattered to have attracted such generous offers from so many well-regarded law schools. I imagine I will be touring each of these law schools in the near future, and making a decision based on those tours and other factors.

Anything you’d like to add or people you’d like to thank or parting words of wisdom?

I really would just like to thank the entire ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ community, the faculty in the program, all the professors who generously made time to write letters of recommendation for me, and all the individuals inside and outside the university who I have worked with in various capacities, be it as a research assistant, volunteer, intern, or in any other capacity. As well, I of course would also like to thank my family and friends for their support during this process. Thank you to all of those who have given me the opportunity to succeed in this way. ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University and the Bachelor of Humanities has been a fantastic place to spend four years, and, as I have spoken to earlier, it has provided an excellent foundation for my present and future success. I really do believe that this is one of the best universities in Canada. From the excellent support offered to students, to the myriad extra-curricular opportunities, to the well-functioning administration and unique programs, such as the Bachelor of Humanities, ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University offers so many different tools to ensure the success of each of its students.

I would say if I was to give any words of advice, it would be that people should take chances. I certainly could not have anticipated four years ago that I would be accepted to Harvard Law School, but a big part of why I was offered admission was simply because I was willing to take the chance and apply there in the first place. And I think that’s important, that people think big, dream big, and strive to do significant things in whatever field they are passionate about. And I absolutely believe that, while it may be clichĂŠ, it is true that hard work is the enabler of success. At the end of the day, you have to be willing to work harder and put in more time than the competition in order to succeed, in whatever endeavour you hope to succeed at. So think big, and work hard to achieve your dreams.

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College of the Humanities alumna, (BHum/’03), has been named as a Canada Reads finalist for her debut novel .

Each of the finalists will be represented by a famous Canadian in a series of debates hosted by Gill Deacon which take place March 21-24, 2016.

The panelists have selected Canadian books they believe most markedly depict the joy and suffering of trying to start life anew. Bone and Bread will be defended by prominent activist .

Set in Montreal and Ottawa, Bone and Bread is the story of a young woman who is struggling to cope with and understand the recent death of her sister, who appears to have died from complications related to anorexia.

On Friday, 11 March 2016 from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM, for a live discussion about her book Bone and Bread and about the “Starting Over” theme. Farah Mohamed founder and CEO of G(irls)20 CEO will also be on hand.

ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ Saleema Nawaz:

Saleema Nawaz’s first book of short stories, Mother Superior, won the prestigious Writers’ Trust of Canada / McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. Her stories brim with exotic and challenging characters, facing harsh realities often of their own creation. She received her Bachelor of Humanities from ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University in 2003.

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For those of us working in the humanities it is, as Charles Dickens once said, the best of times and the worst of times. The digital revolution has unleashed a range of cultural changes that are in many ways far more radical than the ones generated by the invention of the printing press over five hundred years ago, and they have made their presence felt far more swiftly. The advent of new technologies and the new forms of textual community they enable have, in turn, cast earlier technologies of writing in a new light by helping to expose many of the assumptions that had, until the last couple of decades, been so thoroughly naturalized that they resisted analysis. But if these changes have shaken up our most entrenched assumptions in critically exciting ways, it is equally true that it is hard to think of a time when the humanities were so badly besieged on any number of levels, the most serious of which has been a jarring shift in student numbers and research-funding priorities towards market-driven forms of applied knowledge. At times, the discussion can get pretty gloomy. As one former President of the MLA, Marjorie Perloff, put it in an article entitled “Crisis in the Humanities,” “one of our most common genres today is the epitaph for the humanities.” Google the phrase “crisis in the humanities” and (.27 seconds later) the search generates “about 339,000 results.”

Fortunately, in the past couple of years talk of “crisis” seems to have begun to give way to more constructive discussions about how best to respond to the pressures that face humanities teaching and research. It’s not that the picture has gotten sunnier. Numbers are still down and research funding remains at an all-time low. But a crisis mentality is rarely conducive to the sort of genuinely creative thinking that these kinds of problems demand. Samuel Johnson may have overrated the tendency of imminent execution to clarify the mind. The humanities aren’t facing execution any time soon. Even with sagging enrolments, the number of humanities majors around the world is at a level that would have been unthinkable not that many decades ago. But it is also true that these pressures have intensified the need to re-imagine our answers to questions about the nature and role of the humanities, about their potential benefits to contemporary life, and about how our programs can best to structured in order to meet these challenges. The good news is that in many ways, this self-reflexive challenge is precisely what the humanities have always done best: highlight the nature and the force of the narratives that have helped to define how we understand our society – its various pasts and its possible futures – and to suggest the larger contexts within which these issues must be situated.

A conference on The Future of the PhD in the Humanities that took place at McGill University last May offered a compelling example of precisely this sort of discussion. One thing that immediately became clear to those of us who attended was just how high the enthusiasm level was. We had gathered there from across the country because we felt an urgent need to ask hard questions about PhD programs in the humanities and to try to tackle problems that people were raising, but the atmosphere was buoyant. And because most of us who attended were wearing two hats, being both academics and administrators of one kind or another, there was an unusual combination of “big ideas” thinking and practical concerns about the nuts-and bolts side of how to get to where we need to be.

Most of us left Montreal feeling like we had been part of the beginning of something important rather than having brought anything to a close. People felt that a follow-up conference one year later would be crucial in order to keep our feet to the fire and to sustain the momentum that we had generated there. We didn’t want it to be another feel-good occasion whose potential for real change quickly dissipates as we fanned back out across the country and buried ourselves in the e-mails that had been accumulating in our in-boxes.

This follow-up conference will be held here at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University on May 17-18. Four of us are organizing it (John Osborne, Susan Whitney, Dominique Marshall, and myself), but it has also been developed in collaboration with the organizers of the McGill event, as well as with related organizations such as SSHRC, CAGS, and the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. It will feature many of the leading voices in these debates from across the country, though like last year, the real emphasis will be on the larger discussions these presentations generate.

We have organized the program around the three main issues that emerged at the McGill conference. The first is the practical question of the structure of doctoral programs. Given that the bulk of most students’ funding packages run out after their third year, are there better ways to design them? Does it make sense to front-load programs with so much course work and comprehensive exams that students have no realistic hope of getting close to tackling their thesis until the point when their funding is about to expire? But at the same time, what are the trade-offs to any changes?

A related issue is the challenge of preparing our students for the wide range of non-academic career paths that the vast majority of them will pursue. This task involves two changes. One is training. We know that humanities students develop skills that are highly valued outside of the academy but we do a poor job of preparing them to convey these strengths in ways that potential employers appreciate. But the more difficult challenge may lie in changing the culture within universities so that non-academic career paths do not seem like an inferior option.

Then there is the larger question of how we might do a more effective job of articulating the public value of the humanities to audiences within and outside of the university. Given the emphasis on applied knowledge these days, it is more important than ever that we manage to communicate why the kind of work we do matters within the broader context of larger social issues.

One of the key factors that helped to make last year’s conference such a success was the active participation of a strong group of graduate students from across the country. Like last year, we will be hosting a one-day mini-conference for grad students only on the day before (May 16th), which will lead into the main conference on the two following days. We would love to have any and all interested doctoral students participate.

For more information, visit the conference website at (/phdhums/) for links that will enable you to register and see the program. There is no charge but we’re asking people to register so that we have a sense of numbers. We hope that you can join us in May!

Paul Keen is Associate Dean of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs.  His current book project, which is forthcoming with Palgrave MacMillan, is entitled The Humanities In A Utilitarian Age: Imagining What We Know, 1800-1850.

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