Welcome to the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) website!

It gives me great pleasure in welcoming you to explore the virtual world of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) at Nanyang Technological University.

Established in 2003 as one of the youngest schools of the NTU family, HSS has made remarkable progress in a short span of time.  At present, we have more than 160 full-time faculty members, who are supported by over 60 administrative staff. Our undergraduate student numbers have also grown rapidly from just 53 to over 2600 today, and our graduate student numbers have multiplied to about 300.

As one of the fastest growing faculties in the region, HSS offers degrees in six disciplines, namely, Chinese, Economics, English Language and Literature, Linguistics and Multilingual Studies, Psychology, and Sociology. The School also offers six additional Minors in Creative Writing, Environmental and Urban Studies, History, Philosophy, Public Administration, and Translation. In addition to the Language and Communication Centre which provides teaching of English and communication courses for students across the NTU campus, the School also houses the Centre for Chinese Language and Culture as well as the Centre for Modern Languages. The School is in the process of upgrading some existing minor programmes to majors, with an aim to offer more choices for our existing and prospective students.

HSS is proud of being able to provide a student-centered education through which our students would not only obtain specific knowledge about the disciplines they major in, but also develop critical thinking capacities that could be applied in classroom and beyond. The majority of our undergraduate courses are made available to students from other Schools, thus affording ample opportunities of interdisciplinary dialogues. Furthermore, through Student Exchange Programmes and HSS Professional Attachment Programme, our students have gained valuable experiences by attaching to other higher learning institutions in Singapore and overseas.  In a similar vein, our graduate students have benefited from the opportunities of choosing a wide range of courses offered by all divisions within the School, in addition to concentrating in their specialized areas of research.

HSS boasts a staff of dedicated and dynamic faculty members who were educated at renowned universities world-wide, and come from a multitude of national and cultural backgrounds. While critically engaging dialogues of cutting-edge research issues confronting the humanities and social sciences, we aim to place these dialogues within the changing context of Asia and its long-standing interactions with the West and beyond. It is our belief that new knowledge will emerge from this fruitful cross-fertilization. Our interdisciplinary endeavor has been facilitated by institutionalized mechanisms such as the Centre for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) which is a cross-school research centre under the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. The School also plays an important part in contributing to the Five Peaks of Excellence (Sustainable Earth, Future Healthcare, New Media, New Silk Road, and Innovation Asia)--the key areas of research identified by the University in its five-year strategic plan, NTU 2015, which maps out how it will become a great global university by 2015.

I welcome you to explore the enriching learning and research programmes offered by our School and look forward to future opportunities of interacting with you. Please note that our homepage is an on-going project which will be updated on a regular basis. I appreciate your feedback and suggestions on the improvement of our website and programmes.

Professor Liu Hong
Chair, School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Nanyang Technological University