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Carolina Public Humanities (formerly the Program in the Humanities and Human Values), a unit of the UNC College of Arts and Sciences, offers engaging and innovative public seminars and lectures on a variety of topics and themes throughout the year. Our programs draw upon the humanities to nurture a deeper understanding of history and culture, enrich the life of the mind, and contribute to the development of a more humane world. Seminars feature speakers from faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as from other educational and cultural institutions in the Triangle and throughout the state.

Since its inception in 1979, Carolina Public Humanities has sponsored over 900 seminars, workshops and conferences, drawing over 57,000 community members to the University to discuss, engage with and learn about a wide range of moral, social, and cultural issues.

View our At-A-Glance page to learn about upcoming events.

Carolina Public Humanities integrated Carolina K-12 (formerly the NC Civic Education Consortium) into its programs in April 2012. Carolina K-12 works to extend the seminars offered by Carolina Public Humanities and the resources available throughout UNC-Chapel Hill to North Carolina’s K-12 educators. Carolina K-12 offers quality professional development programs which include access to scholars on key topics, innovative lesson plans, and interactive pedagogical training. To learn more about them and to access their online Database of K-12 Resources, click here.


Our Favorite Humanities, from the Carolina Public Humanities Team

Vicki is fascinated by artists whose work is made to be used rather than solely to be admired. She loves art that is handled, worn, and lived with as part of people’s lives.  In museums she gets stuck in front of displays of Ghanaian gold jewelry, ancient Peruvian hats, Roman glass bottles, or hook rugs and quilts from mid-20th century North Carolina.  A quilt can be so profound!   
I love ideas, objects, and texts that make me think about life for people with different experiences. History is the quickest and easiest way to engage with this difference and learn from it. I also love artistic and humanistic activities that can get whole communities lost in the moment of creation. This explains my passion for musical performance. The artists and audiences are creating something together in real time.
extzminger_brian_006_mBrian loves history (primarily 18th—20th century) and most genres of music.
Beth’s a sucker for a good story, well told. If forced to pick just one storyteller to label “favorite,” Shakespeare comes to mind. His complex, 400-year-old characters that can speak to our lived experiences today, his soaring rhetoric juxtaposed with very human turns-of-phrase, and his revolutionary approach to storytelling—honoring the stories of all types of people—all make for a deep well of narrative that encourages looking at the human condition with fresh eyes.
Joanna is a secret poetry nerd. She can track her love for the genre back to a “poetry day” in kindergarten, when each student got to dictate their own poem to a parent chaperone. (Incidentally, that day also marked Joanna’s first clash with an editor – the parent chaperone who suggested she cut some of her best lines!) Three decades later, she still can’t stop reading and writing poetry. It shifts her attentional frequency, forcing her to slow down and observe in a different way.
Humanity’s greatest achievement: the Simpsons!
TJ appreciates art that conveys personal truths and messages that words can’t express. For them, art is more impactful when it reveals what is unable to verbalized adequately or is left unseen. When it reflects the artist’s full self it enhances the significance and makes the messages more powerful. 
As an art and architectural historian of 19th-century Paris, it would probably be cheating for Kylie to name any of the objects that she’s spent so much of her life studying and that continue to fascinate her. Instead, she’ll pay homage to her formative years in Pittsburgh and at Pitt (H2P!), and say Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater (for both its architecture and the artworks it contains). It is truly a magical respite from the hustle and bustle of the world.
While the easiest answer for Katherine would be “literature” (especially nineteenth-century novels; historical fiction; and, more recently, long, winding “romantasy” sagas), she has also been a long-time lover of musical theatre.  Growing up as a dancer, Katherine has always been captivated by the story-telling potential of performance, and for her there is something truly special about stories told live onstage.  Add some song, some dance, some drama, some costumes, and (ideally) some tap-dancing, and she can’t get enough!  Katherine still blames an early encounter with Oliver! the musical for her love of all things Charles Dickens.