Founders Day -Humanities

Equip students to understand, assess, and communicate to their full potential

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Goal: 10,000

Humanities: English, History, & Interdisciplinary Studies

Language creates community, and community creates language. – Dr. Nancy Llewellyn, Associate Professor of Latin Languages

It seems appropriate that the Humanities, as cornerstones of Benedictine liberal arts education, make their home in the very first administrative and educational buildings on Belmont Abbey’s campus, built with the bricks our first monks formed from local clay. 

Moreover, today’s BAC Humanities show vigorous signs of new growth! Humanities leadership have exciting plans to enrich the Abbey’s already nationally recognized undergraduate educational experience, and you can join them. Your gift today helps to cultivate tomorrow’s critical thinkers and communicators, not only equipping them with the requisite skills to excel in their chosen professions, but also encouraging them to embrace the True, the Good, and the Beautiful as lifelong learners.

English

The English Department hosts more core classes than any other program on campus. Exploring literature and the English language, students develop as thinkers and writers, engaging across genres and eras with what it means to be human and how we make sense of experiential reality through narrative, verse, drama, and informational texts. In English classes, students participate in the ongoing conversations that inform cultural and personal values, negotiating the relationships between form and content, signifier and sign.

Thanks to your generosity to last year’s Founders’ Day Campaign, Dr. Farrell O’Gorman’s English Department provided enrichment and networking experiences for students: sponsoring student membership in the North Carolina Writers’ Network and attendance the NCWN Conference and the Conference on Christianity and Literature.

This year, your contribution responds to even greater needs. Your gift to English this Founders’ Day will go toward:

  • Facilitating further student participation in conferences and professional associations, including the North Carolina Writers’ Network and the biennial Conference on the Catholic Literary Imagination
  • Creating and funding regular teaching, writing, and research internship opportunities

History

Belmont Abbey’s History Department offers a type of context critical to understanding, not only who we are as a culture, but also how human agency and human societies have understood themselves, their past, and their relationships to each other. History provides a deeper understanding of how and why we pursued the good and express the meaning of community, leadership, and identity. 

Last year’s Founders’ Day funds enabled BAC History to sponsor and provide lectures, conferences, and experiential learning opportunities for students throughout the Humanities.  

This year, you can expand these opportunities, enabling Dr. Patrick Wadden and his fellow department faculty to: 

  • Offer further student trips to local museums, archives, and historical sites
  • Develop new course opportunities engaging Catholic culture and Southern history

Support the Humanities at Belmont Abbey College

Your support addresses the needs of these dynamic and essential Departments, creating not only enrichment opportunities, but also vital curricular expansion, across the Humanities. 

Moreover, supporting BAC Humanities supports all students, who develop foundational skills in their core classes. All majors, vocations, and careers benefit from robust Humanities, which help to cultivate in all of us the capacities to think critically, to communicate, and to practice excellence and virtue in community.  

And, as a special thank you for a donation of $25 or more during the Founders’ Day Challenge, we will send you a Tiny Saint Benedict keychain as well as a bracelet featuring Saint Benedict’s medal.

Recent Donations

“Now that I am in the graduate program of my dreams, I find myself thinking of Belmont Abbey’s English department all the time. These professors went above and beyond for me when I was a student, and their support did not end after I graduated! I wish I could give back a fraction of the good gifts Belmont Abbey’s English department bestowed on me as a student as well as an alum.”

Bethany Gareis ’20

“The primary principle of modern medicine is “treat the person, not the disease” and the Honors College has prepared me to do just that. In four years of diving into the Great Books I was constantly shown the beauty, strength, and intelligence of the human person in the form of great works and explorations of the greatest questions. This recognition of the person as spiritual, intelligent, and worthy of respect is as essential to good philosophy and art as it is to clinical care of patients. This is to say nothing of the hard work and logical thinking that I learned from working through the Great Books with my friends and professors at the Abbey.”

Patrick Means '22

Patrick Means ’22

“As a current 1L in Law School, I am able to say that my history degree equipped me with the quick, profound deductive reasoning skills that you need in law school. The approach and considerations to critically analyzing a document in the law is very similar to the approach as a historian. As a result, the expertise from the history department allowed for my confident and smooth transition into law school.”

Madeleine Kortsch

Madeleine Kortsch