The Department of Classics, Humanities and Italian Studies (CHI) unites three interdisciplinary programs and leverages the knowledge, research and teaching of additional faculty from around the College of Liberal Arts to provide a uniquely comprehensive curriculum in the humanities. Our courses allow students to explore fundamental questions of human life and discover how these have been answered by thinkers, artists and writers from the ancient world to the present day. The Classics and Italian Studies Programs concentrate on the Mediterranean world and its cultures, while the Humanities Program broadens the focus with critical inquiry into not only the reception of ancient Greek and Roman civilizations but also the ways in which comparative studies across time, space and cultures can illuminate the human condition. We offer an explicitly comparative and interdisciplinary training that nourishes expertise across arts, cultures, geographies, and languages, and develops cultural fluency and critical thinking skills that form the basis for lifelong learning.
The faculty of CHI is committed to combining these theoretical considerations with practical concerns, in order to help the University’s students become productive, responsible and involved citizens and leaders of our communities, businesses, and political institutions. Students thus gain both fundamental disciplinary knowledge, such as competency in a foreign language, and also explore perspectives that allow them to appreciate and critique the values, ideals, and intellectual and artistic accomplishments of individuals and societies both present and past.
The Department offers three different undergraduate majors (in Classics, Humanities, and Italian Studies), and five minors (three in Classics, one in Humanities, and one in Italian Studies). Our curriculum includes a variety of courses in English in interdisciplinary Humanities, Classical civilization, and Italian Studies and also provides extensive language coursework in Ancient and Modern Greek, Italian, and Latin, as well as additional offerings in Hittite and Sanskrit.
For those students who wish to study abroad, the Department is also home to three programs. Students of any major can take part in our January term program in Rome (UNH-in-Rome) or our spring semester program in Budapest (Humanities Spring Budapest Program) and our summer program in Greece.
