The University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) is the liberal arts and sciences school of the University of Michigan. The college was established in 1841.
Contents
History
The College of Literature, Science, and the Arts was originally designated the Literary Department and was the core of the University of Michigan. From 1841 to 1874, the faculty elected a president that communicated with the regents about department needs. In 1875, Henry Simmons Frieze became the first of the deans of LSA.
Departments
The College of Literature, Science, and the Arts consists of three divisions: the Humanities Division, the Natural Sciences Division, and the Social Sciences Division.
Humanities Division
The Humanities Division consists of the following academic departments and units:
Department of Asian Languages and Cultures
Department of American Culture
Department of Afroamerican and African Studies
Frankel Center for Judaic Studies
Department of Classical Studies
Department of Comparative Literature
Department of English Language and Literatures
Department of Film, Television, and Media
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Department of History
Department of the History of Art
Institute for the Humanities
Kelsey Museum of Archaeology
Department of Middle East Studies
Department of Philosophy
Residential College
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Natural Sciences Division
The Natural Sciences Division consists of the following academic departments and units:
Applied Physics Program
Department of Astronomy
Biological Station
Department of Chemistry
Center for the Study of Complex Systems
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Department of Mathematics
Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology
Museum of Paleontology
Department of Physics
Department of Biophysics
Department of Program in the Environment
Department of Statistics
Social Sciences Division
The Social Sciences Division consists of the following academic departments and units:
Department of Anthropology
Department of Communication and Media
Department of Economics
Department of History
International Institute
Department of Linguistics
Museum of Anthropological Archaeology
Department of Organizational Studies
Department of Political Science
Department of Psychology
Department of Sociology
Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science
Department of Women’s and Gender Studies
Deans
Source:
Helen Zell Writers' Program
The Helen Zell Writers' Program is a two-year, fully funded Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing within the University of Michigan's English Department. Students in the program concentrate in either fiction or poetry. In 2013, Helen Zell gave $50 million to support the graduate writing program, which was renamed for her.
Alumni and former students include Jesmyn Ward, Celeste Ng, Brit Bennett, Danez Smith, Vievee Francis, and Chigozie Obioma.
Residential College
The Residential College (RC) is a unit within the Humanities Division at the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts..
Founded in 1967, the Residential College was designed to create a smaller liberal arts program with the resources of a larger university. The college was developed by a planning committee of faculty that included Theodore Newcomb, Carl Cohen, and Bradford Perkins.
Students in the RC take classes in LSA as well as specially designed RC courses, many of which are seminar courses with fewer than fifteen students each. All RC students are required to live in the same residence hall, East Quadrangle, for at least one year. Since the RC is a part of the LSA, all LSA academic requirements apply to its students. In addition to the usual concentrations in LSA, RC students may choose to pursue five additional concentrations (RC website): "Arts and Ideas in the Humanities," "Creative Writing and Literature," "Drama," "Social Theory and Practice," and an option for an "Individualized Major."
A major requirement for RC participation is intensive language training, which consists of two eight-credit courses similar to language immersion, and one four-credit readings course. Intensive Japanese at the RC has no reading courses, and the semi-immersion curriculum consists of two ten-credit courses. The other languages offered are Spanish, French, German, and Russian.