The Humanities are often considered the cornerstone of the liberal arts, and at New College our Humanities AOC features both the breadth and depth you would expect in this rich field of interdisciplinary study. Through advanced coursework in fields ranging from art and art history to literature, music, philosophy, religion and languages that include Classical Greek and Latin, Chinese, French, German, Russian and Spanish, you will learn to integrate and critically analyze different forms of knowledge. You will also strengthen your written and oral communication skills. All will prepare you well for future graduate school study and employment.
If you are fascinated by world cultures and religions, have read your favorite novel dozens of times, and are drawn to music, philosophy and the arts, then you may find that our Humanities Area of Concentration (AOC) is just the right fit for you. Combining study within a variety of disciplines, you will engage in critical and analytical study of primary works such as literature, historical documents, philosophical analysis and speculation, cultural artifacts and documentation, as well as critical engagement with secondary or scholarly approaches to these subjects and their fields.
You can declare Humanities itself as your AOC or you can pursue any of the AOCs listed below that fall within the Division of Humanities. However, graduation requirements will vary depending on your choice. Your faculty advisor can help you determine the program that best matches your interests. Areas included within the Humanities at New College include:
As you can imagine in a program as far-reaching as the Humanities, the career paths chosen by our graduates are boundless. Many pursue graduate school to earn master’s degrees, Ph.D.’s, J.D.’s and other advanced and professional degrees. And they go on to become teachers, writers, librarians, researchers, museum curators, international aid workers, photographers, web developers, consultants, entrepreneurs and lawyers. In short, they excel in any field where critical thinking, creativity, and advanced communication and analytic skills are valued.
Since many students who pursue our Humanities AOC eventually go on to graduate school, it is important to mention that New College’s graduate placement record with nationally-ranked programs is excellent. Why? Because at New College, you will complete an individualized academic program designed by you and your faculty advisor. You will read and write extensively, do original (and often hands-on) research, and complete a senior thesis or project based on your own research or creative work. As a result, you will have already taken on challenges that most students don’t experience until they get to graduate school.
These same qualities of being able to think on your feet, critically analyze and adapt to new situations, and independently complete major projects on time make our graduates attractive to future employers as well. And both graduate schools and employers love the detailed recommendations our faculty can write because they know their students so well and have spent time with them, inside and outside of the classroom.
In addition to the general requirement that all New College students must complete seven contracts, three Independent Study Projects and a senior thesis project in order to graduate, students pursuing a Humanities AOC should meet the following requirements:
The student should demonstrate the ability to read, think, communicate, create and perform in the humanities through successful completion of one or more undertakings in each of the following fields: the arts, literature(s), philosophy or religion.
For detailed requirements, check out our General Catalog.
Recent course offerings in Humanities:
Due to the flexible and interdisciplinary nature of our Humanities AOC, it is difficult to list “typical” courses that students pursue. Instead, you will work with your faculty advisor to design a plan of study and coursework that matches your particular interests and goals.
Sample courses available within each of the disciplines of the Humanities can be found on the disciplinary AOC pages (e.g., Literature). You may also view a list of all New College courses by semester by clicking here.
Carol Flint ’76 is a Hollywood scriptwriter and producer. Over the last two decades, she has regularly written and produced episodes for such acclaimed and successful television shows as China Beach, L.A. Law, ER and The West Wing, all shows for which she received Emmy nominations. After sharing in ER’s Emmy win for “Outstanding Drama Series,” Flint both wrote and produced the long-running TV drama’s 1997 season premiere. The much-publicized episode was broadcast live — a TV genre thought to be extinct. More recently, she has produced and written for Royal Pains, Six Degrees and The Unit.
“My New College experience helped me professionally, because as a writer and producer, everyone counts on you to be an independent thinker. Writing for TV is creative work with a lot of exciting people. It’s hard work, with long hours of writing and rewriting, staring at notes trying to solve problems or being locked up in a room with eight or 10 other writers.”
New College is proud of the many Humanities graduates who have contributed to the field. Here’s a sampling of some of our graduates:
Sample of Graduate Schools Attended by NCF Students in Humanities
Each academic experience builds toward your senior thesis project. It’s required for graduation, and our students tell us that while it’s demanding, it’s also one of the most rewarding experiences of their lives. Here are some thesis projects in Humanities:
“Matter’-ing’ the Body Strategies of Resistance in Contemporary Art” by Aria Alamalhodaei
“Deleuze’s Cinematic Imperative: An Ethico-Politics of Belief in this World” by Jonathan Amos
“In Site Out: Placing Emancipatory Practice in Installation and Site-Specific Work” by Katelyn Bobek
“The Modernization of Buddhism In Taiwan: A Case Study of Tzu Chi and Fo Guang Shan” by Rafaela Calatchi
“Another Verse: An Experiment in Interactive/Digital Poetics” by Michael Floering
“A Semiotic Analysis of Ritual, Place, & Costume in the Performance Art of Nate Hill” by Juliana Hardesty
“Stone Cold Women: The Tomb Monument of Princess Charlotte of Wales” by Sara Elizabeth Hogan
“Embodied Gesture, Luce Irigaray and Woman’s Political Imaginary in Digital Music Production: Seven Compositions and Feminist Inquiry” by Joohyun Kim
“Practice Makes Perfect: The Theory and Praxis of Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed” by Ashlyn King
“The Rastafari Movement and Reggae” by Carlos Larrauri
“Peaking In Paradise: An Exploration of the Television Series Twin Peaks” by Megan Lyons
“You Are About To Begin Reading: Accessibility and Postmodernist Performance in Italo Calvino’s if on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Christian Jankowski’s Telemistica, the Holy Artwork, Talk Athens, Art Market Tv, and Francis Alÿs’s The Modern Procession” by Emile Mausner
“Making and Breaking Public Space: Narrative Interventions as a Form of Contemporary Public Art Practice” by Madelyn Ringold-Brown
“Bowing Down To All Human Suffering: Schillerian Ideals in the Robbers and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and the Role of Female Characters as Carriers of True Moral Value” by Daniela Rizzo
“And Then She Said; an exploration of Somali Diasporic cultural identity through auto/ethnography, personal narratives, and dance performance” by Megan Amal Rogers
“Autonomous and Bound: The Zine as Social, Political and Cultural Mediator” by Analeah Rosen
“Documentary Theater and the Irony of History” by Aaron Amram
“Play, Expressivity, and the Elemental: Marrying Speech, Movement, and Music Through Improvisation in Orff’s Schulwerk” by Allison Dotts
“Translating and Reimagining: Recovering Pizarnik in Her Late Prose Works” by Juliana Nalerio
“”The Woman’s Work”: Constructions of the Domestic in the Works of Four Prose Poets” by Joslyn Persh
“”Feminist Fairy Tales”: Female Agency and Subversive Message in Fairy Tales of the Traditional European Canon” by Marisa Reichert
“Approaching the Abortion Issue” by Matthew Deihl
“Challenging Stereotypes, Testing Hypotheses, and Presenting Truths About Santeria” by Christina Goldstein
“Back Issues: A History and Study of the Comics Form” by Ian James Gray
“The Art of Considering Beauty: Cinderella’s Legacy” by Marisol Guerrero
“Play it by Ear: Towards a Definition of Audio Documentary” by Anna O. Hamilton
“Tapeheads” by Nicholas Lucas
“Jazz Poetry: The American Idiom” by Isabel Maioriello-Gallus
“Cross-Dressing in the Movies” by Rebecca Marshall
“Di Amerikaner-Geboren: Transformations of Yiddishkeyt in Jewish American Fiction” by Lane Silberstein
“Gender, Race, Identity and the Practice of Writing: A Feminist Project” by Jacqueline Wang
“No (Wo)man is an Island: Protecting Children, a Cause for Concern” by Jessica M.Yocum
“Death in Germany: Original Artwork and Historic Texts in Conversation” by Lidia Cara
“A Historical and Algorithmic Study of Fux’s Approach to Counterpoint” by John Ewing
“Development and Decline: Perspectives on Oratory in Early Imperial Rome” by John Falter
“WAVES: An Exploration of Sound and Light” by Erica Gressman
“Ludic Transformations: Game and Play in Julio Cortazar’s 62 MODELO PARA ARMAR and Georges Perec’s LA VIE MODE D’EMPLOI.” by Alba Jaramillo
“Reflections of Cultural Voices in the Magic Mirror of “Snow White”” by Ashley Rose Johnson
“Confronting Japan’s Past: Nostalgia and Abandonment in Hayao Miyazaki’s SPIRITED AWAY” by Laura Mohai
“Enriching Music with the Sound of Life, Enriching Life with the Music of Sound: Synthesizers, Nature and Listening” by Jimmy Schaus
“Food Literacy: All Organic Food Is (Not) Created Equal” by Lauren Shulman
“An American Idol: Marilyn Monroe in Pop Art” by Shannon Kelsey Strischek
“What’s Love Got to do with It?: A Short Transatlantic Tour from Modernismo in Latin America to Victorian England through Poetry” by Lindsay Alvarez Gavrilis
“A Citrus Place: Oranges as Florida Identity” by John Leo Costello
“Form or Fascism?: Exploring Genre and Innovation in Three Nontraditional Sonnet Sequences” by Kathleen DeBolt
“”As You Look Closer You Notice”: Ekphrasis in Three Ancient Greek Novels” by Annie E. Frazier
“Graciliano Ramos’ Vidas Secas: Language: An Existential Struggle” by AnandaMartins
“Conceiving and Antirepresentational Politics of Narrative” by Chrissie Bishop
“Alfred Hitchcock and the Eye of the Beholder: Voyeurism & Metacinema in Rear Window, Vertigo, and Psycho” by Alice Lee Dutton
“SHHH…It’s Not Really an Icon: Examining the Faith Art Movement in Calvinist Churches” by Bethany DuVall-Francisco
“An Adaptation of The Philadelphia” by Candace Farnstrand
“Diasporic Voices: Exile Consciousness in the Works of Melinda Lopez, Arturo Rodriguez, and Ana Mendieta” by Elsie Morales
“Mutual Regard: The Relatonship of Gustave Moreau and Edgar Degas” by Lea Rosen
“Unamuno: A Hegelian, a Quixotist, and a Humanist” by Monica Cano
“Another Place and Time” by Jelena Cvetkova
“Fiction Writing: Trying & Teaching” by Gabriel Michael DeFazio
“The Corridors of Metaphor An Unconventional Art History of the Alhambra” by Eva Gutiérrez
“Creative Project in Sequential Narrative: Robots and Squid” by Michelle Josette aka Crashette Krasowski
“Venus in Her Various Guises: A Close Look at the Reclining Female Nude in the Western Tradition” by James Murga
“Inside Out: Collaborative Authorship and Narrative Distribution in Public New Media Artworks and Contemporary Technocultural Developments” by Heather E. Rasley
“The Human Condition in Kurosawa’s Rashomon” by Ryan Francis White
“Building a Girl: Using Comix to Re-Create a Life, Story” by Jeanine Ashforth
“Creation of a Character Installation” by Veronica Fannin
“Immediate Attention: An Experiment in Quantum Theatre” by Dru Herring
“Composure” by Meagan Mika
“Gender Perspectives in a Female Authored Buddhist Autohagiography” by Meghan Jo Rimelspach
“Hegemonic Rearticulation: A Politics of the Particular” by Cassandra Schmutz
“Translation to English from Japanese, Spanish, and German” by Gina Torgersen
“I Am Not An Indian: Combating Contrived American Indian Identities” by Ena Backus
“Denying Significance: The Subversion of Conventional Representation as Seen in the Works of René Magritte and Claude Cahun” by Amanda Bell
“As We Like Him or, Bardolatry in the Twenty-First Century: A Creative Exploration of Shakespeare, Culture, and the Theatre” by Bo Daniel Bentele
“Eve-olution Reimagining the Mother of Knowledge” by Jaclyn Bergamino
“A Knight at New College A Modern Medieval Romance” by Natan Gold
“Eunierophrenia” by A. Page Laubheimer
“The Evolution of the Structure of the Episotalry Novel from the Eighteenth Century to the Twentieth Century” by Laurel McAllister
“Don’t Forget to Write: Caribbean Poets Building Communities through Literature” by Nicholas H. Vagnoni
“Turn of the Century Dialogues: An Exercise in Cross-Cultural Play Production” by Arianna Bailey
“The Children of Aum: A Case Study of Aum Shinrikyo and Youth in Japan” by Danielle Fischer
“Exploring Neh-Kor in Nepal: An Application of Toni Huber’s Theory of Tibetan Pilgrimage” by Kathryn L. Grady
“Body/Language in the Works of Jenny Saville, Mira Schor, Lesley Dill and Katie Helms” by Katie Helms
“TYPEFACE: An Exploration of Text in Art” by Sarah Jane Kemp
“By Virtue of the Absurd: One Last Movement” by Megan Mook
“Subjective Contrast” by Colleen Powell
“Teach the Children Well” by Jamie Seerman
“Photographs and Fiction: A Theoretical Discourse and a Creative Response” by John Stein
“Meals and Melodrama: Commensality in Contemporary International Cinema” by Anneliese Tolbert
“The Female Experience of Adolescence: A Journalistic and Creative Approach” by Abby Weingarten
“PhysicalEphemeral: Designing Literary Magazines for Print and Web Publications” by Kathryn R. Dow
“Merce Cunningham’s Dance of the Camera” by Andrea M. Garrod
“Kandinsky’s Apocalyptic Vision and the New Synaesthetic Art” by David Johansen
“The Communist Subversion of Culture in Milan Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere and The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Jane Kleven
“Breaking the Back of Words’: An Experiment in Creating a Material Discourse Using Julia Kristeva’s ‘Stabat Mater’, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Original Creative Nonfiction” by Melissa Renee
“Cirque du Soleil: A Failure in Success” by Shane Riley
“Denunciation as Deliberation: The Takeoff of Multiculturalism within the Context of the Rushdie Affair” by Andrew Stawar
“Creating An Online Writing Community” by Rebecca Block
“Constructing Subjecthood in Theory and Fiction” by Elizabeth Elia
“Stealing Junk: Rescuing Addiction From the Prison of Medicalization” by Jennifer Fedor
“Searching for Justiss: An Analysis, A Visual Installation and a Performance of Some Poetry by Alan Justiss” by Nestor Gil, Jr.
“Last Knight’ A Play by Jason Grimste” by Jason Grimste
“Underwater Fashion Show and the Sublime” by Anna Montana Hilmer-Cirell
“Rhythm Dancing: Female Bodies in Conversation” by Monique LaCour
“Fishily on Love & Poetry: Power Structures and Misogyny in Gunter Grass’s The Flounder” by Alicia Marini-Reed
“Living Rooms” by James Powell
“Coffeehouse Culture: Half a Millennium of Caffeine, Sedition and Tradition” by Lauren Sue Rathvon
“Harry Potter and the Quest of the Hero” by Leah Schnelbach
“Heidegger, Moods and His Times” by Jeffrey Tonn
“Bad Elk” by Matt Wexler
“Independent Filmmaking: The Making of Another Day Gone By and Standards of Decency” by Matthew Aldrich
“The Holy Grail in Modern Literature: An Examination of Grail Motifs in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland” by Tamara Baldwin
“Film and the Masquerade: Gender Performance and Problems of Essentialism” by Anne Doten
“Meaning/Mask” by Sara Elizabeth Foley
“Creating Art: An Analytical and Experiential Compendium” by Kellie Fortner-Atkins
“More Ways Than One: Themtic, Stylistic and Linguistic Transmission of Message in The Works of Juan Rulfo” by Kathryn Griess
“Punk Zines: Literary Monsters” by Pumakawa Navarro
Our newest facility, the Academic Center and Koski Plaza incorporates sustainable features and includes 10 classrooms, 36 faculty offices and a state-of-the-art computer lab. In the center of the courtyard is the Four Winds Sculpture by renowned artist Bruce White. Located adjacent to the library, this 36,000-square-foot Academic Center and Koski Plaza is a hub for learning and social interaction. Offices for the Division of Humanities and many of its faculty are housed here.
The Jane Bancroft Cook Library at New College is home to a broad assortment of books, scholarly journals, national and international databases, and other print and electronic media related to the study of humanities and is available to students throughout the year. It is also a place for conversation, meetings and other forms of social interaction.
The hotspot of the library is the Academic Resource Center (ARC) with café-style seating and every modern technological amenity in the book. It houses the Writing Resource Center, Quantitative Resource Center, Language Resource Center, Educational Technology Services and an open-use computer lab. The ARC provides state-of-the-art technology and plenty of room for library patrons to study and collaborate. Around the corner is the Dr. Helen N. Fagin Holocaust Collection, a contemplative place for in-depth research about the Holocaust and genocide. The library offers electronic linkage to libraries worldwide and a web-based system that delivers state-of-the-art information with the personal guidance of a small college, print and electronic-reserve materials, and ready access to material throughout the State University System of Florida. The library is a shared resource with USF Sarasota-Manatee.
Built around a central courtyard, the Caples Fine Arts Complex is the heart of music, sculpture and the fine arts on campus. The 257-seat Sainer Auditorium is used for music, theater and dance performances by students and visiting artists, including the contemporary music series New Music New College and lecture series New Topics New College. Both programs are free for students. The art and sculpture buildings include a printmaking studio arts lab with Mac computers and peripherals, plus woodworking and welding shops. Music students have access to the latest computer technology and software.
The Black Box Theater is a flexible space that seats approximately 75 people and has its own control booth for sound and lighting. Movable stage platforms make it possible to adapt the space in a number of configurations, from seating in the round to conventional theater-style. True to its name, the windowless space offers the opportunity to present works in near-total darkness. Intended first and foremost as a creative space for students, the theater is used selectively for public events, including New Music New College. The theater lobby incorporates a new art gallery space in-the-round for displaying student work.
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