Building on Yale’s strength: adding new depth and breadth to the humanities
During Peter Salovey’s presidency, the university’s commitment to the humanities has brought faculty expansion and new spaces and resources. Second in a series.
This story is the second in a series about Yale’s evolution under President Peter Salovey as he prepares to return to the faculty later this year.
A few years ago, Sunil Amrith was a rising star at Harvard. A professor of history and South Asian studies, he’d already published two highly acclaimed books before he was 40, had been awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, and was co-director of the university’s Joint Center for History and Economics.
Yet when, in 2020, he was offered a position at Yale, Amrith didn’t hesitate.
“I was excited by the opportunity to move to a university where the humanities are thriving in a way that is almost unique in the United States, and perhaps the world,” said Amrith, now Yale’s Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History. The strong support that President Peter Salovey and the leadership of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) have shown, he added, “is all too rare these days.”
Indeed, while academic institutions across the country are slashing funding for the humanities and even eliminating whole departments, Yale has doubled down on its investment in these disciplines. Faculty like Amrith find at Yale an environment supportive to authoring groundbreaking, award-winning scholarship.
“Yale has long been recognized for its strength in the humanities,” said Salovey. “By continuing to build on that strength, we affirm the importance of these studies in facing global challenges — to understand the world and human experience in all its complexity, to bring together perspectives from across disciplines, and to explore ways to improve the future by comprehending the past.”