Humanities

The humanities in Iranian universities encompass several ways of studying language, thought, and the human past. Institutional labels need careful reading. The World Higher Education Database's Shahid Beheshti University entry places languages, history, philosophy, and social sciences within an Arts and Humanities faculty. It records education and psychology separately, and also identifies a distinct theology and religious studies faculty. This is one institutional arrangement, documented in an entry updated in 2019, rather than a universal classification for Iran. s1

For an international reader, the practical lesson is to look beyond a faculty's English name. A humanities label can cover subjects that another institution organizes elsewhere. Comparing actual departments is more informative than assuming that similarly named faculties have identical academic scope. s1

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Aḥmad Tafażżolī's historical account in Encyclopaedia Iranica traces the University of Tehran's humanities faculty to literature, philosophy, history, and geography courses inherited from the Teachers' College. The faculty moved to the university's main campus in 1958 and adopted the name Faculty of Letters and Humanities in 1966. These developments connect modern disciplinary organization with an earlier institution responsible for educating teachers. s2

The boundaries subsequently shifted. Social sciences became a separate faculty in 1972, while foreign languages acquired separate faculty status after the 1979 Revolution. Literary scholarship also developed supporting institutions: the Dehkhoda Dictionary Institute, created to complete the large Persian dictionary begun by Ali-Akbar Dehkhoda, came under the faculty's administration through a parliamentary decree in 1957. The account illustrates how teaching, reference publishing, and specialist research became connected. Its descriptions of arrangements that were 'present' when written must not be treated as a current organizational chart. s2

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Humanities education also developed outside the capital. The University of Isfahan's institutional profile in FAO's AGRIS directory describes the expansion of literature and foreign-language teaching between 1958 and 1968. Its account includes Persian, English, French, Armenian, Arabic, geography, history, and social science. It subsequently places the development of education, including philosophy and psychology, within the university's further expansion. s3

The inclusion of Armenian alongside other languages is a concrete reminder that the institutional history is broader than Persian literary study alone. This profile documents an institutional narrative of expansion; it does not establish the present availability of each program or allow comparisons of teaching quality between cities. s3

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The University of Tehran's faculty website continues to identify a Faculty of Literature and Humanities and provides access to its library and research and graduate-education offices. That establishes an institutional presence, but the homepage does not supply a complete, dated account of curricula or research conditions. s4

The strongest conclusion from these sources concerns institutional development: humanities subjects acquired university departments, libraries, publishing activities, and sometimes separate faculties. A fuller contemporary account needs additional evidence about teaching practice, intellectual debate, access to sources, and graduate destinations. Historical faculty histories are valuable foundations for that work, but cannot by themselves establish the experience of studying humanities across Iran today. s1s2s3s4

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