About Us
Application Period is now open for the 2020-2021 academic year.
Director's Message
This is an exciting and important time for the most forward-thinking university students to be engaged in humanities scholarship, and community-based and global change-making. As the Director of the School for Advanced Studies in the Arts and Humanities at Western, I know it's vital that we understand our increasingly diversified and interconnected world and we develop skills and knowledges that enable us to forge significant responses to complex issues.
Our program's Mission is a bold one:
To educate citizens who thrive and lead in a time of transformative change. Through an interdisciplinary issues-based education, SASAH prepares graduates with new competencies for the jobs, the leadership roles, and the studies that the future requires.
How would I describe a SASAH student?One who:
- Thrives on an interdisciplinary, issues-based education
- Sees the benefits and outcomes of their learning in relation to dramatically changing social, cultural, and environmental situations
- Understands and thrives in a teamwork environment, while being strongly self-actualized, personally motivated, and hard working
- Adapts successfully to the etiquette and protocols of the university classroom, the workplace, the public sphere, and within technologically mediated contexts.
On our website you'll read the new headline, Learning with Humanity. At SASAH we're committed to engaged, ongoing education alongside other in the university and the wider community. What does that look like? We know that the environment; gender, race relationships and decolonial initiatives; and the community - including as it relates to mental health - require our urgent attention. So, our program offers opportunities to engage directly and creatively with those matters so that our work truly matters in the real-world.
At SASAH, we probe the histories and strategies of humanities practices to find innovative ways to confirm the world as a place of possibility. Our students do this by forging creative paths that lead to renewed ideas about leadership. This is an ambious agenda. Guided by SASAH Faculty Research Fellows, our students are doing very important work! As Director of SASAH, I'm honoured to execute my role amidst the big challenge of the world of today. I hope you'll join me: whether as a student, a colleague, or a participant in the activities outreach initiatives you'll read about on this website. Together, let's learn with humanity.
Professor Patrick Mahon, SASAH Director
