Welcome to the Graduate School of Humanities, School of Letters

The Kyushu University School of Letters was established in 1924,when the Faculty of Law and Letters was created at Kyushu Imperial University. Afterwards, the two schools were separated in 1949 and the Graduate School of Letters was established in 1953. In this way, Kyushu University developed into one of western Japan's foremost centers of education and research.
In 2000, along with greater importance placed on graduate school education and the introduction of the Graduate School/Faculty system, the three institutions that exist today came into being. These are the School of Letters and Graduate School of Humanities for students and the Faculty of Humanities for teaching staff. Last year (2009) marked sixty years since the inception of the School of Letters and eighty-five years since the establishment of the School of Law and Letters. This occasion was named the “Hagoromo Project” and celebrated with anniversary festivals and other events.

In the School of Letters, students do more than study and research literature. The current School of Letters is divided up into four courses (Philosophy, History, Literature, and Human Sciences), each of which contains different major fields of study for a total of twenty-one major fields. The Graduate School of Humanities has three departments (Philosophy, History and Geography, and Linguistics and Literature), with a total of eighteen specialties.
What is common to each of these specialized fields is the use of words to examine the behavior and essence of humanity. What is a human? What is our society and culture? Such questions are truly the foundation of the humanities. I hope that high school students and students from other universities who are considering learning about different points of view regarding humanity explore our website and then take the entrance examination for the Graduate School of Humanities, School of Letters.

As I mentioned previously, the school is celebrating its sixtieth birthday and facing the start of a brand new cycle. At the same time, national universities have ended the six-year medium-term goal period in the process of becoming “national university corporations,” which is the beginning for a new medium-term goal period. Based on the spirit of the Hagoromo Project, we are setting out on a new cycle. This new journey includes a variety of planned reforms, such as establishing new courses at the Graduate School of Humanities. However, we plan to retain all of the core elements of the humanities that we have cultivated up until now, and to carry out education and research just as before.

In addition, we are also making efforts to further expand cooperative social activities, such as the cooperative lectures we began holding with the Asahi Culture Center last year. We offer many public lectures for alumni and people unrelated with the school, as well as special admissions quotas for working adults at the Graduate School of Humanities. Why not come and attend one of our programs ?

In light of this brand new start, we are also updating the content of our website. Kyushu University's School of Letters, Graduate School of Humanities, and Faculty of Humanities have made efforts for thorough public relations up until now, and have successively updated and redesigned their website. This time, along with making various data concerning education and research activities publicly available on the website as the “School of Letters Archives,” substantial information will also be made available in foreign languages. It will surely be useful to foreign students who are hoping to enter this Graduate School or Faculty.