Dean's Message
To students, faculty, alumni, and friends of the College
Welcome to H&A!
As we begin this unprecedented Fall 2020 semester, it is an opportunity for us to look back on the amazing work our faculty and students did in Spring as the Coronavirus caused us to move all classes online, as well as forward to the great things faculty are doing to sustain an excellent education for our H&A students. You can review our Summer 2020 issue of Expressions to see the College's "Resilience in the Time of Corona," over the spring and summer, as well as see my opening remarks highlighting much of this work here. Our faculty are continuing to innovate in the arts to keep our students dancing and acting and playing instruments while keeping everyone safe this fall. And our humanities departments are innovating in an online environment, many having trained throughout the summer to do so.
Our new web page for the College will be featuring the successes of our faculty, our students, and the work they do together. This "Showcase" highlights the amazing things we are continuing to do with our students, while our "Pandemic Pandemonium" activities this fall will ask students to engage the world around them within their courses to better understand how the humanities and arts illuminates the challenges that we face every day, as well as helping us find solutions to them.
Our thematic programming in the College continues to leverage the power of the arts and humanities to ask the most important questions of our time. Those themes this year, including "Borderlands" and "Deep Humanities & Arts," explore immigration and migration issues and the challenges of technology through all of the disciplines in our College, from dance to theatre, to philosophy to literature, from music to the visual arts. Our programming is wide-ranging, meant to challenge our students and integrate these ideas with their own classroom experiences. And our own Hammer Theatre Center is a place where many of these extraordinary events take place, even if a number of them will be virtual this year.
To see what our College does across our ten departments and colleges, please view this introductory video or check out individual department webpages.
Our amazing and talented students and our committed and accomplished faculty are the core of our College. Our Faculty Accomplishments page features recent achievements by faculty. You can find out about Virginia San Fratello's recent award from LACMA, and Amy Glazier's new film, Beautiful Dreamer. And you can read about recent or forthcoming faculty work, including recent editorials in venues like The Washington Post.
And our students are frequent winners of competitions in design, journalism, and advertising. This work by students and faculty alike is inspiring. I hope you will engage with their accomplishments.
The beauty and power of the humanities and arts are featured through every part of the education we provide and the scholarly and artistic activities our faculty produce. Our cutting-edge work at the intersection of arts and technology, and our belief that the values of the humanities need to be built into the DNA of technological innovation show why "The Future of California Starts Here," at the College of Humanities and the Arts at San José State University.
Shannon Miller
Dean, College of the Humanities and the Arts
San José State University
