The Master’s Degree in Engaged & Public Humanities

Georgetown’s MA Program in Engaged and Public Humanities offers students the opportunity to dive deeper into a humanities discipline like literature, history, philosophy, or art history, or interdisciplinary fields like museum, performance, theater, cultural, media and language studies, while providing a robust grounding in the theories and methods of the engaged and public humanities.

Working together with our faculty and a carefully selected cohort of graduate peers, students explore chosen disciplines (or interdisciplines), relating them to issues involving the public humanities in the changing ecosystems of higher education, private industry, non-profits, and the public sphere. Students have access to the rich array of internships available in the Washington DC area and beyond, from think tanks to museums, from research libraries to government departments, from consulting and communications agencies to community service organizations.

Humanities disciplines cultivate our ability to absorb a body of complex knowledge and then put it to work to develop alternative, imagined futures. Advanced humanities students develop their talents as critical thinkers, skillful communicators, careful researchers, and rigorous interpreters of complex systems in order to address practical challenges facing our world (from our planet, to our species and others, to our democracy, our communities, and our cultures).

Georgetown’s MA Program in Engaged & Public Humanities deepens habits of mind relevant to its students’ education, strengthening their ability to apply their humanistic skills, and to communicate the humanities’ worth, in service to the common good, a commitment inspired directly by Georgetown’s core Jesuit values of cura personalis, community in diversity, and forming people for others.