Faculty of Humanities, Charles University

Originally founded as the Institute for Liberal Education of Charles University in 1994, the Charles University Faculty of Humanities gained full academic autonomy in 2000. It was established to provide study programmes at the Bachelor’s, Masters and PhD levels that were previously not available at the university.

Under the leadership of Dean Professor Jan Sokol, Ph.D., the former education minister, and candidate for the presidency of the Czech Republic in 2003, the school developed several progressive programmes that responded to important transitional needs.

The foundation of its work is the Bachelor’s Programme in Liberal Arts and Humanities, offering students unprecedented individual choice in course selection in both theoretical and applied arts of philosophy, history, the social sciences, and languages.

Special features, research, interesting projects:

There are three chief areas of academic research at Faculty of Humanities: philosophy, anthropology, and the applied social sciences. Research in philosophy is focused on two areas: Phenomenology and Semiotics. Associated fields of research include the mutual relations of action, creativity, and rhetoric in areas such as ethics or politics, but also in the philosophy of art and aesthetics.

The field of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences includes the sociology of knowledge, of institutions and of organisations, gender studies, studies of civil society and the civil sector, studies of management and supervision in care-providing organisations.

The research area of anthropology consists of Cultural, Social and Historical Anthropology. The core of this field of academic research is forms of human behaviour and (social) action and cognition, not only in terms of their typological determinations (in the sense of the hominisation process) but also in terms of their historical, cultural, social, generational and group contingency and variability.

The Faculty of Humanities has recently been involved in 5 international research and development projects, namely Education for Democratic Intercultural Citizenship+ (EDIC+) (Erasmus+: KA2, Cooperation and Innovation for Good Practices 2016-2019), the Czech-Norwegian Research Programme, Norway Grants, 2015-2017), New Communities of Interpretation: Contexts, Strategies and Processes of Religious Transformation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Action COST, 2013-2017), Strengthening Europeans’ capabilities by establishing the Eu-ropean literacy network (Action COST, 2014-2018) and New Materialism: Net-working European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter (Action COST, 2014-2018).

The Association of Students of Faculty of Humanities has organised many interesting activities: the “Buddy” programme for international students, a film club, the Festival of Humanity and Solidarity, and the Encyklopedy of Migration.