Close up of an ancient text and a magnifying glass.

Humanities disciplines help students become globally competent interpreters, critics, and translators of all kinds of cultural information, past and present.

In this respect, Humanities fields are essential for helping produce responsible, well-informed, and intellectually resourceful global citizens. They provide crucial contexts and ethical models for understanding and combating racism, classism, ableism, and many other social ills embedded in our histories and cultural practices.

The Axinn Center for the Humanities aims to promote the study of the Humanities as critical to the College’s goals of fostering public engagement, civic responsibility, and global awareness through its undergraduate curriculum. In support of this core mission, the center actively promotes faculty and student research through lecture series and research seminars. Drawing on the depth and breadth of Middlebury’s humanities offerings at home and abroad, the Center also supports and develops programming that integrates experiential, experimental, public-facing, and/or community-oriented learning opportunities, including through its new Public Humanities Labs Initiative, beginning spring 2021.

Why Middlebury?

The Center for Humanities at Middlebury draws on a range of academic resources both on and off campus to support these vital areas of humanistic inquiry and exploration.

Middlebury’s libraries, Midd Data, and the Middlebury College Museum of Art all help to generate dynamic interdisciplinary opportunities for research.

In addition, the Center encourages a globally oriented approach to humanistic study through the range of Middlebury partners outside the main campus:

2020 Humanities Report Cover

Our 2020 Report

Download our recent report on the State of the Humanities at Middlebury.