The Humanities Department at SJSU is at the crossroads of academic study and practice. Our faculty and students engage with each other through coursework, scholarship, teacher training, and creative endeavor. Together, we use a full range of humanities, critical, creative, and social scientific tools to unravel the problems and seek answer to our biggest questions. We work to understand and explain a variety societies, regions, and cultures; religions and philosophies; the full range of human arts and literatures; looking across past and present; seeking strengths and weaknesses, problems and successes. Our graduates go on to be K-8 teachers, public servants, journalists, political actors, arts and museum administrators, and more.
To fulfill our educational, creative, and academic missions, we are raising money to continue our speaker and events series Humanities Spotlight, wherein we as a department sponsor and organize 3-4 events per school year to enrich the educational experience of our students, support faculty scholarship and creative work, and connect what we do as a department with the larger SJSU community. With last year’s generous donations, this 2025-26 school year, we have been able to sponsor three events so far.
- In October, Dr. Liz Linden presented her archival and interview research exploring the 1970s art scene and the unexpected friendship of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Andy Warhol.
- In November, we had an enriching experience with performance artist and techno-critic Praba Pilar, whose art and philosophy provokes us to seek human wonder engaged in the world, and to question our reliance on techno-mediation of human experience.
- And this March, Dr. Arthur Zárate is presenting his research on the origins of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and asking the specific questions of how politics and Islam combined historically in significant ways that scholars have failed to fully explain.
Prof. Eleni Duret (right) introduces a panel of expert educators to discuss the role, impact, and experience of Black educators in the U.S. (Feb 2026)
With your donation this year, we hope to continue this tradition and, with adequate funds, to bring more scholars and artists into SJSU to expand student and faculty engagement, while also continuing to support our own faculty’s scholarly and artistic work so that student can engage with their professors in meaningful ways outside of the classroom.
Professor Jennifer Rycengay presents her historical research about the first academy established for young African American women in the 1830s (Feb 2025)