Welcome to the Faculty of Arts, the oldest and the second largest teaching and research unit of the University of Ghana with current enrolment figures at around 9,500 undergraduates annually. Our post graduate studies community now includes 200 students and is growing. We continue to enrol the largest sector of international students each year to study African traditional and contemporary religions, theatrical ceremony and indigenous drama, dance and music. Our School of Performing Arts is home to the world renowned Abibigromma Dance Company and is embarking on a new cinema arts programme next academic year.

We inspire students from every sector of Ghanaian society and the global community to reflect aesthetically and critically on the human condition through all the disciplines of modern and ancient literatures, African and European languages, the performing and creative arts, and the introspective inquiries of philosophy, religion and classics.  Language majors are studying intensively Swahili, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, French, and Russian. Recently we have acquired advanced technology in our language learning laboratory. Our Language Centre is the hub for the University’s extensive English academic writing and proficiency programmes, run by research fellows who focus on intensive investigation of indigenous languages, who also tutor the country’s diplomatic community in English writing, reading, and speaking. As a leading centre of its kind throughout Africa, our Department for the Study of Religions allows students to focus on Islam or Christian as well as indigenous African and eastern spiritual traditions.  One of the strongest departments of linguistics internationally resides in our Faculty, which is also home of the Linguistics Association of Ghana originally founded in 1967.

We nurture innovative research and the international publication efforts of all our faculty members at every stage of their careers. Only just in 2012, the first two issues of the biannual Ghana Journal of Linguistics resumed a long history of cutting edge theory in general linguistics. The Ghana Bulletin of Theology has been in existence since the 1960s. The Journal of the Performing Arts has been generating issues since the 1980s, revived in 2009 with forty articles from authors based in Ghana, Nigeria, the UK and Germany.  Our flagship Legon Journal of the Humanities is one of the University’s oldest continuously running journals currently receiving manuscripts. We are also committed to the production of creative works in theatre, dance, film and music in major national and international venues.

Our creative artists include the world renowned names of novelists, poets, playwrights and choreographers—Mohamed ben Abdallah, Ama Ata Aidoo, Kofi Anyidoho, Kwesi Brew, and the late Efo Kodjo Mawugbe. Former humanities scholars included Kwame Anthony Appiah and Kwasi Wiredu.The Arts Faculty has produced several professor emeriti over the years, several of whom have rose to the most distinguished ranks of religious leadership in Ghana and abroad—including the late Professors C. G. Baeta and K.A. Dickson. Among our first Classics graduates eventually became the University’s first Ghanaian Vice Chancellor Alexander Adum Kwapong. Three more of our living professor emeriti are still deeply entrenched in scholarship: the theological teacher and world-renowned ecumenist John S. Pobee, the linguist Mary Esther Kropp Dakubu, and the philosopher Kwame Gyekye.

Each year since 2002 we have run an Arts Colloquium, from which a selection of blind reviewed papers have comprised issues of our journals and two cross disciplinary anthologies, Identity Meets Nationality: Voices from the Humanities in 2011 and The One In the Many: nation building through cultural diversity in 2013, an anthology series we will continue to build and distribute locally and by internet print-on-demand through the African Books Collective.