NTU’s School of Humanities offers a wide range of single and double major programmes and opportunities that allows you to craft your own unique learning journey. You can choose from our core disciplines including Art History, Chinese, English, History, Linguistics and Multilingual Studies, and Philosophy, and can also opt to study for minors in creative writing, communication studies, film, and translation studies. Assoc Prof. Matthews will show you what you can expect as a member of our vibrant and thriving academic community, as well as the many career opportunities available to you as a humanities graduate. Join us to find out more about how you can tailor your education to suit your goals at the School of Humanities!

What contributes to a good life? Hedonists claim that our lives go well to the extent, and only to the extent, that we maximize pleasure and minimize pain. On the other hand, desire theorists claim that our lives go well insofar as we satisfy our desires, and avoid frustrating them. These two views often come into conflict. For example, getting what we want doesn’t always make us happy. This lecture will introduce the two views, highlight some relevant thought experiments, and compare some of their strengths and weaknesses.

What is the Cold War? Is it useful to use the analogy of "Cold War 2.0" to describe the geopolitical tensions we are witnessing today? In this talk, I hope to break down the stereotypical understanding of the Cold War as a military competition between the Western and Eastern Blocs by bringing in the lived experiences of the peoples in the global south, the evolution of mass culture and media in different parts of the world, the roles of ideology and technology, and the emerging networks of interdependence that bound societies together in new ways. This talk will also provide some of the factual grounding and conceptual apparatus necessary to understand the contemporary world.

新加坡独立后，华文文学在各个文类上都有长足的发展进步。这次讲座通过分析莫河、梁文福之散文作品的思想内容和艺术技巧，见证新加坡独立以后的华文散文的成就和影响力。

We have often heard the following said about women’s language -

• ‘Good girls don’t swear’

• ‘Women talk more than men’

• ‘Women are more polite’

• ‘Women are better at languages’

Is there any truth in these claims? In this talk, we will briefly explore some of the stereotypes about women’s speech and examine the research that linguists work with to understand the relationship between language and gender.

What makes the skits of Saturday Night Live so popular, and why do we find Annette Lee so funny? This lecture will introduce you to some of the defining traits and effects of satire by charting how different satirical forms shame us into changing our behaviours while making us laugh at the same time. Using the 18th century novel Gulliver’s Travels as a case study, we will study how satirical works respond to and shape their cultural contexts by experimenting with generic convention and style. As we will see, some of the satirical techniques 18th century writers like Jonathan Swift used continue to be deployed today.