Our Centre
Here at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, we aim to:
- encourage and promote collaboration between various study disciplines, and encourage new and unpredictable
cross-disciplinary alliances; and
- offer exciting courses with interests spanning the US, Europe, Latin American and the humanities.
We offer modules from several University schools and departments covering literature, art, philosophy, history,
politics, sociology and law.
Essex founded on the principle of interdisciplinarity
Since its inception, our University has promoted interdisciplinarity. Our compact campus was designed to bring schools, departments
and centres into close physical and intellectual proximity, and so encourage the exchange of ideas. The blueprint for Essex came in a
series of BBC Reith Lectures, A University in the Making, given by our founding Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Albert Sloman, in 1963.
From the start it was intended that the education our University offered would be something more than the “intensive study of a limited
field” and that students should have a “sense of the whole range of human achievement”. You can hear more about Sir Albert Sloman's
vision in our Creating a University podcast series.
“…specialisation should come only after some acquaintance with what the Spanish philosopher, Ortega, has called “the system of vital
ideas which every age possesses and by which it lives”.”
Professor Sir Albert Sloman, founding Vice-Chancellor of the University of Essex
The Enlightenment module
We administer the first-year module, The Enlightenment,
which attempts to trace the common foundation of the human sciences in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It will provide you with the questions, approaches
and methods that are employed across the humanities