College of Arts & Humanities

The College of Arts and Humanities believes that funding its Global Artist and Scholar Program will provide transformational funding for the College as a whole and for any of its eight academic units.

The program will recruit top scholars and artists from around the world to spend a semester at Minnesota State Mankato as a visiting scholar. Each Global Artist and Scholar will teach one course, provide master classes throughout her/his visit and deliver at least one major public lecture. He or she will be an important resource for the hosting department's students and faculty, as well as the University community and region.

Gifts coming to the Global Artist and Scholar Program as a whole will be rotated among the departments so each could plan to recruit a top scholar and artist in advance of the semester in residence. A gift to an individual department will allow that department to host guest artists and scholars on an annual basis.

The ability of the College of Arts and Humanities to bring in top scholars and artists will provide broader perspectives, refresh our understanding of the disciplines represented in the College and draw top students to our campus because of the opportunity to study with Global Artists and Scholars.

What your donation will do: Bring the world to students and faculty.

Supporting student scholarships is one of the most important gifts anyone can make to the University. Scholarships will be used to recruit talented students to Minnesota State Mankato and to offer support for years of hard work by our current students.

For the College of Arts and Humanities, these awards will be used to support a talented musician, actor, writer or future journalist, for example. The College is made up of eight departments (Art, Communication Studies, English, Mass Media, Music, Philosophy, Theatre, World Languages and Cultures), plus two programs (Humanities, Open Studies).

Scholarships give us the opportunity to recruit the most talented students with big ideas they want to make real. But they also provide students with financial need the opportunity to earn their degrees while helping defray the costs of their education.

What your donation will do: Attract and support students with big ideas.

The Humanities Program at Minnesota State Mankato has been in place since the 1970s and currently offers an undergraduate minor. Now, faculty members in the College of Arts and Humanities are working to move the program in a new direction.

Today there is an increased interest in the environment and in those who "engage" the environment for their writing, thinking and art. A new Environmental Humanities Program will examine how our engagement with the natural environment is reflected in forms of human expression, including literature, philosophy, the arts and more.

Students in this program can bring a humanities perspective to what has been a traditionally narrow scientific study of the environment. Such a perspective can be used for grant writing, public policy and environmental activism in the public and private sectors. Gifts can help establish the Environmental Humanities Program at Minnesota State Mankato through student scholarships or financial support for the program itself.

What your donation will do: Bring the humanities to the environment.

In 1981, the Good Thunder Reading Series—operating on no budget and only the promises of a handful of Minnesota writers willing to read for free—launched its first year-long program of visiting-writer residencies. Since then, the series has grown in scope and ambition and has welcomed more than 350 visitors, including National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winners, to our south central Minnesota community.

About eight times per year, visiting writers engage in one-on-one meetings with faculty and students, discuss the craft of writing before live public audiences and in radio interviews, and present their work during evening performances. Good Thunder's web archive makes manyseries events available to listeners as a continuing resource.

Gifts to the Good Thunder Reading Series will help Minnesota State Mankato showcase the best new authors we can find, along with more established figures who have changed literature in a profound way. Donors can know they are helping the south central Minnesota community take advantage of a literary resource the Minnesota Humanities Commission has called "the premier small-town reading series in the country."

What your donation will do: Help students gain entrance into the world of writing.