Message from the Dean, Dr. James Mahon
Welcome to the School of Arts and Humanities. As the School’s Dean, it is a pleasure to work with departments who fulfill Lehman College's mission of offering a strong liberal arts education with vibrant programs in the performing arts, the visual arts, and the humanities. Our undergraduate and graduate degree programs are among the best in the Bronx, and every year we put on numerous art exhibitions, dance recitals, music concerts, plays, multimedia productions, poetry slams, and television shows and radio shows, as well as public lectures and conferences. Our faculty are an incredibly talented group of professors who have been honored with Fulbright Scholarships, Woodrow Wilson Fellowships, Mellon Fellowships, and Franklin Research Grants, as well as with awards for their creative works, including an Oscar, an Emmy, and numerous artist residencies. They are committed to teaching the next generation of teachers, journalists, editors, musicians, artists, performers, lawyers, and professors.
The School of Arts and Humanities offers over thirty majors and forty minors. You can choose from majors in which you create original works, like Art, or Film and TV Studies, or Computer Graphics and Imaging (CGI); majors in which you perform on stage or in front of the camera, like Music, or Theatre, or Dance, or Multimedia Performing Arts; majors in which you develop your skills at writing and conducting your own research, like English, or History, or Journalism, or Philosophy, or Africana Studies; and majors in which you deepen your knowledge of languages and cultures, like Spanish, or French, or Italian, or Linguistics, or Latino Studies. You can also add minors in areas such as Women’s and Gender Studies, Disability Studies, Digital Music Applications, and Professional Writing. We also offer master’s degrees in Art, English, History, Spanish, and Applied Music and Music Teaching, and we contribute to the master’s degree in Liberal Studies. For more information on our undergraduate and graduate programs, click on the links to undergraduate degrees and graduate degrees.
With mentoring from our outstanding faculty, our students have received Fulbright teaching fellowships, Gilman scholarships, and Chancellor’s Global Scholarships to travel abroad. They have won prizes, awards, residencies, and scholarships for continued study. They have gone on to enroll in many different kinds of advanced degree programs, including M.A., M.F.A., M.S., M.P.A., J.D., M.B.A., and Ph.D. programs, started their own businesses, and pursued a variety of careers. For more about their achievements, click on the links to student success.
All of the School’s departments and interdisciplinary programs are active participants in Freshman Year Initiative, General Education, the College Now program, the LEH interdisciplinary courses, the Lehman Scholars Program (founded 1980), and the Macaulay Honors College program. The School collaborates with two local high schools – the High School of American Studies at Lehman College, located directly across the street from the College, and the Celia Cruz Bronx High School of Music, located next door to the college. The School also oversees CUNY's Mexican Studies Institute, CUNY's Institute for Irish American Studies, The City and Humanities program, and The Bronx Journal. It also works with Lehman Stages, the professional arts component of Lehman College, which houses the Dance Lab, the Lovinger Theatre, the Studio Theatre, and the Student Experimental Theatre, and it works with BronxNet, the public cable TV network, which is located on campus in Carman Hall.
The Department of Languages and Literatures participates in the Foreign Language Consortium Program between Lehman College, Manhattan College, and the College of Mount Saint Vincent. Through the consortium, Lehman College students may take courses in Arabic, Chinese, or Filipino at these other colleges, and students from these other colleges can take languages courses at Lehman College, or at Manhattan College with an instructor from Lehman College. Lehman students can now minor in Arabic and Chinese through this consortium, and Manhattan College and the College of Mount Saint Vincent students can minor in Japanese. Lehman College is also one of the testing sites for the Japanese Proficiency Test in the U.S. In addition, the Mexican Studies Institute, located at Lehman College, is a partner in the Indigenous and Diasporic Language Consortium of New York City, along with the Institute for Latin American Studies at Columbia University and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at NYU. This consortium allows students enrolled at each institution to study languages at the other. At Lehman, the languages offered are Mixtec and Nahuatl. Lehman students can also enroll in languages courses in Quechua and Haitian Kreyòl offered by NYU. For more information, contact the Institute.
The School regularly collaborates with the Lehman College Art Gallery, the public-facing and teaching exhibition space at Lehman College, to present faculty-generated public programs, faculty exhibitions, and student thesis exhibitions. Finally, the School puts on community concerts and other events in the Lehman Center for the Performing Arts, which is also located on campus.
You can learn more about what the School of Arts and Humanities has to offer by clicking on the links on this website — or better yet, by seeing a show, attending an art exhibit, or talking with a faculty member.
