School of Letters, Graduate school of Humanities, Faculty of Humanities, Kyushu University

About the Graduate School of Humanities, School of Letters

HOMEAbout the Graduate School of Humanities, School of Letters

With the introduction of the new Graduate School/Graduate Faculty system in 2000, all faculty members belonging to the former Faculty of Letters have been transferred into the Graduate Faculty of Humanities from which they are assigned to teach in both the Graduate School of Humanities and the School of Letters.

The original Faculty of Letters was founded in 1924 by an imperial decree as an adjunct curriculum of the Faculty of Law and Literature of Kyushu Imperial University. It then came into being as an independent faculty in 1949. The Graduate School was later established in 1953.

The School of Letters now offers 21 subjects of study within four disciplinary fields: Philosophy, History, Literature, and Human Sciences. The Graduate School consists of a two-year master’s course and a three-year-plus doctorate course in 10 specialized fields including: Philosophy & Ethics, Oriental Ideas, Art Studies, Japanese History, Asian History, History of Wide Area Civilization, Geography, Japanese & Chinese Literature, Western Literature, and Linguistics.

Undergraduate and master’s course students are expected to study not only in their major fields but also over a wide range of cross curricular humanities subjects offered by other fields. Programs of study seek to familiarize students with a broad range of fields in the belief that this will contribute positively to the development of individual character.

Our Faculty/Schools have a strong desire to promote international exchange and have recently accepted, mostly into the Graduate School, a larger number of students from Europe, North and South America, Asia and the Pacific regions.

Approximately 10,000 students have now graduated from the Undergraduate and Graduate schools. Most of them are currently, or have been, actively engaged in education, research work, the civil service, business, journalism and various other fields.