Welcome to the Faculty of Humanities!

With ten departments and 150 regular faculty, we are the largest faculty on campus. The Faculty's programs include undergraduate and graduate programs as well as diploma programs. Annually, the Faculty awards approximately 450 undergraduate and graduate degrees and there are over 10,000 alumni worldwide.

The Faculty of Humanities is committed to a dual mission within the context of liberal arts education: offering students undergraduate degrees with the opportunity for broad exposure to an outstanding education in the traditional humanities and social science disciplines through its diverse and internationally-oriented programmatic offerings; and offering students graduate degrees in disciplines in which our researchers excel. Our special contribution to a broad liberal arts education is manifested by our going well beyond traditional definitions of humanities disciplines and incorporating many social science aspects within our programs. This is not a static notion: in our disciplines we are constantly adjusting our focus of interest and our intellectual bases. We therefore define our strength and focus in this broad definition of the liberal arts and we see the continued strengthening of our offerings through gradual growth fairly distributed across the departments as the key to our continued success and our future ability to attract students.

Women's Studies at UVic

UVic students Brodie Metcalfe and Gab Laurence produced this lib dub as a portion of their final project in WS490: Selling Feminism. With help from their Women's Studies' colleagues, Gab and Brodie produced a successful lip dub - the filming of several sudents "pretend singing" to a feminist rap sung by a single student, Hayley Lench. Both Brodie and Gab continue working on this project, one they hope upon completion can be used to showcase the energy and collegiality of the students and the robust character of the Women's Studies department at UVic.

(If you are having problems viewing the video, it is also available on Youtube in HD.)

Humanities Faculty Fellow 2010-2011

Dr. Magdalena Kay is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, with a specialization in twentieth-century poetry. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley (2007). Her current project stems from her long-standing interest in comparative poetics and her conviction that there are strong links between poets writing from the Western and Eastern margins of Europe, namely Ireland (particularly Northern Ireland) and Poland. 

Dr. Kay’s current project analyzes the influence of Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert upon Seamus Heaney. The complexity of this influence helps to explain, yet not to justify, why it has been virtually unstudied until now.  Its strength compels us to recognize the necessity of tracing these important patterns of encounter. Seamus Heaney and Eastern Europe elucidates the way in which Heaney’s poems enter into cross-cultural dialogue with the work of Eastern European poets.

Dr. Magdalena Kay, Department of English

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