Welcome from the Dean

Robin Kelsey

Welcome to Harvard and to the Arts & Humanities!

Your arrival in the Yard marks the beginning of a four-year exploration of new ways of knowing the world. This is your time to study unfamiliar arts forms, languages, traditions, and cultures. This is your chance to become conversant with the work of writers and artists such as William Shakespeare, Toni Morrison, Andy Warhol, Lady Murasaki, Jorge Luis Borges, Immanuel Kant, and Miles Davis. This is your opportunity to learn how to make compelling art, literature, theater, dance, or music in your own right. No university is perfect, but Harvard remains peerless as a place to expand the range of your mind.

A Harvard education is for a lifetime. It can prepare you to meet personal as well as societal goals, to address daily struggles as well as global challenges. Your future after college will unfold in accord with the person you have become. Pursuing the arts & humanities will strengthen your powers of discernment and deepen your understanding of human creativity, readying you for the inevitable trials and serendipitous discoveries that life will bring.

Be ready to reimagine and renew the world; experience the Arts & Humanities.

Sincerely,

Robin E. Kelsey
Dean of Arts & Humanities
Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography
Department of History of Art & Architecture