The Humanities Institute

Photo of Candy Chang and Christina Milletti seated in arm chairs, in conversation on stage at the 2023 Buffalo Humanities Festival.

The University at Buffalo Humanities Institute (HI), founded in 2005 as a unit of the College of Arts and Sciences, exists to support three fundamental functions: cultivating interdisciplinarity, fostering research, and promoting public engagement with the humanities. Through our programs and opportunities, HI develops pathways for humanities-based examinations of our world and our times. Among these pathways is a commitment to our community to create open forums for collaboration and conversation.

Focus Areas

Interdisciplinarity

Because humanities disciplines – literature, history, languages, anthropology, and more – seek to answer similar questions using different methods, humanists flourish when they engage with scholars from other fields.  Every program HI sponsors is interdisciplinary by design and free and open to the public.  Conferences and symposia bring internationally renowned scholars to Buffalo to discuss crucial topics – religion, madness, the future of the humanities – from multiple perspectives.

Research

Through internal fellowships, research funding, publication support, and writing groups, as well as forums to present works in progress, HI fosters a vibrant research culture across the humanities at UB, which is vital for a research university.  By giving faculty teaching-release time to work on books and articles, HI plays a crucial role in enabling faculty to compete successfully for national fellowships and to raise their scholarly reputations.

Public Humanities

Throughout the year, HI hosts free and open-to-the-public events, on- and off-campus. Three programs are specifically featured as community-forward:

  • Acknowledgements
    9/16/24
    Honoring The Dish with One Spoon Treaty of Peace and Friendship
  • History
    9/16/24
    "The UB Humanities Institute is unique in its focus on original, theoretically informed thinking across disciplines, and on the critical analysis of experimental art, both of which are among the university's historical academic strengths." - Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, "UB Reporter," Sept. 22, 2005

Supported by

The Humanities Institute is generously supported, in part, by the UB Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development.

Additional resources dedicated to advancing HI's mission include the Robert & Carol Morris Fund for the Humanities and the support of individual donors for which we are grateful.