The mission of Integrative Studies in the Arts and Humanities is to empower students to more deeply reflect on, understand, inquire about, and transform the world around them, and to invite all students into lifelong engagement with the arts and humanities. 

More specifically, IAH enhances students’ capabilities to:

  • Reflect with intellectual curiosity on their own lives, knowledge, values, needs and desires, experiences, and/or professional or other communities
  • Understand and engage with diverse cultures, communities, identities, experiences, interpretive frameworks, and histories
  • Explore challenging questions about culture, artistic expression, systems of power, the nature of information and knowledge, or other topics that are essential to understanding what it means to be a human being and a global citizen in the 21st century
  • Interact with the wider world in creative, critical, and socially responsible ways

Program Goals for IAH

In IAH courses, students will:

  • Interpret or contextualize artistic expression and humanistic knowledge from diverse communities, cultures, and frameworks  
  • Apply methods from multiple arts and humanities fields to complex questions about ethics, justice, society, or culture 
  • Explain how artistic expression, humanities inquiry, or cultural representations contribute to understanding or producing systems of power, identities, or difference
  • Communicate effectively and responsibly to a range of audiences 
  • Identify ways to use arts and humanities thinking to positively affect their own lives, their local and global communities, other disciplines, and/or their career fields


IAH’s learning goals align with MSU’s Undergraduate Learning Goals: https://undergrad.msu.edu/programs/learninggoals