University of California, Irvine School of Humanities

The School of Humanities is one of the academic units of the University of California, Irvine. Upon the school's opening in 1965, the Division of Humanities was one of the five liberal arts divisions that the campus had to offer. Samuel McCulloch was appointed as UC Irvine's founding dean of Humanities 1953. The School hosts the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and the University of California Humanities Research Institute.

The division of humanities is one of the five liberal arts divisions that opened with the campus in 1965. In 1963, Samuel McCulloch was appointed as the founding dean of UC Irvine Division of Humanities and laid its foundation. Upon the campus' opening day, he created four departments within the divion with a total of thirty-one faculty members. The four departments were: English and Comparative Literature, Foreign Languages and Literature, History, and Philosophy. By 1967, the governing body of UC Irvine turned the five liberal arts divisions into individual schools and the Division of Humanities had become the School of Humanities. In 1970 the Humanities Core Course was implemented and there was a focus on strengthening existing Humanities departments for the rest of the 1970s. The school also launched a doctorate in Critical Theory, making UC Irvine to be the only university in the country to offer a doctorate in the field. In the 1980s, Dean Ken Bailes founded the Organized Research Unit in Critical Theory and brought the system wide University of California Humanities Research Institute to UC Irvine. The School of Humanities started gaining national recognition and it expanded and grew throughout the 1990s and 2000s. The Humanities Instructional Building and Humanities Gateway were built and completed the Humanities Quad. The school today continues to expand by adding special programs and by creating cross collaboration with different schools on campus. The school has a total of 13 departments and over 20 majors and several interdisciplinary programs.

The University of California, Irvine School of Humanities has various programs that are offered to the undergraduate and graduate students. Each program has their own faculty, classes, and events that are aimed to help students develop further into each respective field. Programs in the School of Humanities are among the highest-ranked in the country, contributing to UCI’s reputation as one of the very best public universities.

African American Studies is an interdisciplinary program which offers undergraduate students an opportunity to study those societies and cultures established by the people of the African diaspora. The program focuses and encourages students to explore the African American experience from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and theoretical approaches. Some topics explored in this program is the process of colonization and the forced migration of African people, the position of African people in the western hemisphere, the rhetoric produced by and about African people, and the cultural and aesthetic values associated with "blackness" and "Africanness." This program offers a B.A. degree program in African American studies and a minor.