The Humanities Council advances the humanities, broadly conceived, in the College of Arts and Sciences and at Syracuse University at large. The mission of the Council is to foster a campus climate that ensures the continuation of a vibrant role for engaging in intellectual discovery and exchange and for teaching in the humanities. The Council supports the production, preservation, critique, and dissemination of knowledges in and across the Humanities disciplines broadly conceived. The Council also aids the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in the selection of the Ray Smith Symposium series and the William P. Tolley Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities.

The Council is comprised of voting and non-voting members. Voting members of the Council include departments that are part of the Humanities Division in the College of Arts and Sciences; and of directors of humanistic academic programs offering undergraduate and graduate degrees in the College of Arts and Sciences and in the Maxwell School. Non-voting members include members of the College of Arts and Sciences administration who support and promote the work of humanists.

Ray Smith Symposia in the Humanities

• Indigenous Resilience, Climate Change, and the Environmental Humanities (2023-24)
• Rematriating Well-Being: Indigenous (2022-23)
• Our Own Foods as Healing: rights, resilience and restoring health and well-being (forthcoming 2022-23)
• Edges and Borders: Shifting Boundaries and Belonging in South Asia (2021)
• Self-Transformation and Poetic Justice: Dante on the 700th Anniversary of his Death (2020-2021)
• Stories We Are Told, Stories We Tell: Explorations in Ethnographic (February 2019)
• Embodied Belongings: Exploring the politics of ‘queer’ in South Asia (2017-2018)
• Placing Religion in Film (2016-17)
• The Future of Graduate Education in the Humanities (2015-16)
• New Perspectives on Renaissance Art (2014-15)
• Transformations in South Asian Folk Arts (2013-14)
• Aesthetics and Commodities; Listening to the Wampum, Positions of Dissent and Moving Borders (2012-13)
• The Culture and Politics of Displacement in and from Latin America and the Caribbean (2011-12)
• Sex and Power from the Late Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (2011-2012)
• Music of Conflict and Reconciliation (2010-2011)
• Iconic Books (2010)
• Postmodernism, Religion and Culture, III: The Politics of Love (2009)
• Feminist Rhetorics for Social Justice (2008)
• Rethinking Michelangelo (2008)
• Art Works: The Role of the Arts in US Workers Struggles (2008)
• Iconic Books (2007)
• Postmodernism, Religion and Culture, II: Feminism and the Return of Religion (2007)

The William P. Tolley Distinguished Teaching Professorship in the Humanities

• Mike Goode (2022-2024)
• Gwendolyn Pough (2020-2022)
• Ken Frieden (2018-2020)
• Kenneth Baynes (2016-2018)
• Mark Heller (2013-2015)
• James Watts (2011-2013)
• Silvio Torres-Saillant (2009-2011)
• Robert Van Gulick (2008-2010)
• Beverly Allen (2005-2007)
• Ann Gold (2005-2007)
• Laurinda Dixon (2003-2005)
• Dympna Callaghan (1999-2003)
• David Miller (1996-1999)