Director's Note

Welcome to the website of the Humanities Institute at The University of Texas at Austin. I hope you will be a regular virtual visitor, as well as an actual participant in some of our many public forums, cultural events, and educational initiatives. Both our site and our public humanities and community partnership programs are meant to bring people together across whatever boundaries divide them—including the walls of the University—to explore issues and ideas that matter to us all as thinking people in an ever more interdependent 21st century world.

The word "humanities" is rarely used outside of an academic context. But the academic subjects or departments—literature, history, philosophy, religion, and the study of various languages and cultures—that are often grouped under the heading "The Humanities" don't adequately define what the humanities are, where they happen, or who is involved with them. Most deeply and broadly, the humanities are our common and infinitely variable ways of being human—of exploring, expressing, and celebrating our humanness. The work of the humanities, then, is not just schoolwork, but mind-work, heart-work, and communal work that life itself offers to and requires of everyone. This is the idea that has guided the Humanities Institute since its founding in 2001, and this is the work that we are dedicated to inspiring and enabling the largest and most diverse array of Central Texans to do.

"Thinking in community" is the motto that you will find attached to our logo on the home page of this site and printed above our name on Humanities Institute letterhead. It sounds simple, but in fact it's a challenging mission that we hope you'll help us accomplish. Pull up a chair.

—Evan Carton