School of Arts & Sciences

The Heart of the University

The School of Arts & Sciences is the heart of the University of Richmond’s offerings. You can choose from or combine majors from 24 departments and 13 interdisciplinary programs. In the School of Arts & Sciences, you will learn to integrate your classroom experience with your true interests — your calling.

It’s the chance to explore a topic you’ve always been curious about, whether that’s Russian, modern dance, or environmental ethics. It’s getting a different perspective on your favorite subject — thinking through concepts and problems in a way you never have before. It’s satisfying your curiosity and love for learning, and then working to translate that into a career path.

Support A&S

School of Arts & Sciences Dean’s Annual Report

2023-24 Now Available!
A&S Next

A&S Next

Turn Your Education into a Career with Passion and Purpose.
You’re a Spider, so you dream big. You don’t want to land just any job after UR, but a purposeful career you’re passionate about.

A&S NEXT on Friday, Jan. 31 through Saturday, February 1, at the Marriott downtown Richmond in downtown Richmond, is a career program specifically for A&S students where we aim to give you the tools to understand your personal strengths and how you can translate your education into a career that you love. You’ll meet alums with unexpected and interesting career paths and you’ll gain hands-on experience exploring and solving real-world problems alongside alums and faculty who work to solve these problems in their own careers every day.

Tucker-Boatwright Festival of Literature and the Arts

2024-20245 Tucker Boatwright Festival of Literature & the Arts

The Nature of Representation

The Nature of Representation asks how our understandings of “nature” have been shaped by representational practices in both the aesthetic and political senses, exploring how the current climate catastrophe is inextricable from colonialism and anthropocentric worldviews. The festival features contemporary writers, artists, and thinkers who don’t take for granted that language is merely human, that there are other “natural” languages, and that attuning to those other languages allows us to tell stories that disrupt the violence of Man.

"Art as a Vehicle for Change: a Conversation with Cathy Park Hong" with Chad Shomura.
Thursday, January 23, 4:30 p.m. | Humanities Commons


Cathy Park Hong is professor and Class of 1936 Chair in the College of Letters and Sciences at the University of California – Berkeley. She is the author of three volumes of poetry — Translating Mo’um, Dance Dance Revolution, Engine Empire — and the award-winning collection of essays, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. She is the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Windham-Campbell Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Chad Shomura is assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, Denver. His research interests include political thought, affect, biopolitics, new materialism, and ecology. His recent publications are in Theory & Event, American Quarterly, Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, and Empire and Environment: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific. Chad’s current book project, A Life Otherwise, examines minor assemblies of life that upset the good life.


Hosted by the Department of English.

Lindsay McIntyre

Film Studies: Indigenous Filmmakers Series

Lindsay McIntyre, Filmmaker & Multi-Media Artist

Film and/as Material Practice

Thursday, Nov. 21, 7 p.m. | Adams Auditorium, Boatwright Memorial Library

Join us for rich conversation and view film excerpts with Lindsay McIntyre, an Indigenous filmmaker and multi-media artist. McIntrye is of Inuit and settler descent in Richmond as a featured presenter at the Pocahontas Reframed Film Festival. 

Having made over 40 short films over the past 20 years, McIntrye is Associate Film & Screen Arts Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Canada. Her recent short, NIGIQTUQ/The South Wind (2023) won Best Short Live Action at imagineNATIVE, a 2025 Academy Awards submission, the Whistler Film Festival EDA Award for Best Short Film Directed by Woman, and the FAVA FEST Outstanding Short Narrative Film. In her portfolio, too, is her first feature,  The Words We Can’t Speak, which won the 2021 WIDC Feature Film Award.

Two scholars

Meet the 2024-25 Beckman Scholars

A&S students Marcos Hendler, of Rye, New York, and Aine MacDermott, of Lexington, Virginia, have each been awarded a prestigious Beckman Foundation Scholarship to support faculty-mentored student research in the sciences.

Beckman Scholars are selected among undergraduate biology and chemistry students based on commitment to research, strong academics, and potential to become scientific leaders. UR has had 26 Beckman Scholars since 2006.

Hendler, a chemistry major, is studying computational chemistry focused on molecules related to anticancer, which has implications in possible treatments. Hendler’s faculty mentor is chemistry professor Carol Parish. MacDermott, a biochemistry & molecular biology major, is researching ancient DNA under the mentorship of biology professor Melinda Yang. MacDermott is focused on the evolution of the alcohol metabolism gene ADH1B in present-day and ancient East Asian humans.

Representing Nature Question

Humanities Center

2024-2025: How (And Why) Do We Represent Nature?

This question invites us to consider “representation” in both its political and aesthetic meaning. “Nature” is represented in paintings, poems, scripture, music, dancing, novels, laws, regulations, equations, activisms, advertising campaigns. This question asks how environments — and often their relations to human concerns — are represented across media, geographic and cultural contexts, and different historical moments.

Events

Faculty Expertise

Do you envision college as a place where your professor’s office hours are spent in deep conversation about topics beyond this week’s assignment? Where you can work side-by-side with a faculty member on cutting-edge research that is published in a professional journal?

In A&S, our faculty are experts on the cutting edge of their fields. While they could work in some of the top research institutions in the world, our faculty chose Richmond because they believe in educating tomorrow's leaders and are passionate about mentoring and sharing their knowledge with students.

A&S Faculty Highlights

Dr. Nigel James
James Published

Nigel James, assistant professor of health studies, published "Epidemic preparedness and response capacity against infectious disease outbreaks in 186 countries, 2018-2022" in BMC Infectious Diseases.

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Dr. Nigel James
James Presented

Nigel James, assistant professor of health studies, presented “Quality of Care and Health Insurance Uptake in Namibia” at the Interdisciplinary Association of Population Health Sciences (IAPHS) 2024 Annual Meeting.

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Dr. Nigel James
James Presented

Nigel James, assistant professor of health studies, presented “Quality of care and health insurance uptake in Namibia: A geospatial analysis” at the American Public Health Association (APHA) 2024 Annual Meeting and Expo.

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Dr. Kelly Lambert
Lambert Awarded

Kelly Lambert, MacEldin Trawick Professor in Psychology, received the Educator of the Year Award from Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience at the Society for Neuroscience 2024 Annual Meeting.

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Dr. Yücel Yanıkdağ
Yanıkdağ Published

Yücel Yanıkdağ, professor of history, published "Ottoman and Turkish Exception(alism): States of Exception in Turkey, 1909–1927" in First World War Studies.

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Dr. Tze M. Loo
Loo Published

Tze M. Loo, associate professor of history and global studies, published “Actions toward Modern Japanese National Consciousness,” a translation of the Okinawan historian Gabe Masao's essay, “Kindai Nihon kokka ishiki e no taiō: Ryūkyū Okinawa chīki no ba’ai” and "Gabe Masao in Translation," an accompanying introduction to Gabe's scholarship in Pacific Historical Review.

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