The General Humanities program explores the dialogues among various forms of cultural production, including art, music, and literature. Students select from courses in classics, art history, and music history.

There are three levels of courses, with specific skills targeted to these levels. 100-level courses emphasize core skills that enable students to analyze cultural products according to three rubrics:

Genre/type: students should (a) know the traditional aims and conventions of the major types or genres of work produced in the historical and regional contexts covered by the course; and (b) be able to articulate how a given work sustains, transforms, or breaks those conventions in the pursuit of its particular aims.

Form/style: students should (a) thoroughly and accurately perceive the techniques and formal elements of a given work; (b) use appropriate technical vocabulary for describing those media, techniques, and formal elements; and (c) relate those formal/stylistic elements to the contextual meaning/purpose and expressive content of the work.

Context: students should (a) relate works to the ideas and practices of their original contexts (social, cultural, political, religious, etc.); and (b) account for how a given work sought to affect or influence the ideas and practices of the context in which it was produced.

Courses at the 200 and 300 level usually address a narrower time period and/or cultural area, and allow for deeper consideration of context and more thorough analysis of individual works of art, literature, music, cinema, or drama. Primary sources and scholarly secondary sources are typically introduced into the curriculum. Assignments may require research and/or critical thinking skills. A higher level of achievement in the core skills introduced in 100-level courses is expected, perhaps especially in the area of contextual analysis.

Courses at the 400 and 500 level continue to develop the core skills and add:

Research skills: students should (a) be able to use a variety of research resources, including libraries, online scholarly databases (such as JSTOR), and online image databases (such as ARTstor); and (b) be conversant with any of the major citation formats (MLA, Chicago, etc).

Critical thinking: the student should be able to (a) distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources of information; (b) summarize differing arguments about and/or approaches to the material; and (c) evaluate those arguments/approaches based on evidence and/or instrumentality.