Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice - Faculty of Arts

The history of the Faculty of Arts dates back to 1660 when a university was established in Košice by Emperor Leopold I, who granted it all the privileges and rights of a faculty, on a par with the universities in Vienna, Prague, Olomouc, Graz and Trnava. In the year 1773 that university became a state affiliate of the only Hungarian university in Buda, changing its name to Academia regia.

The Faculty's indirect restoration occurred only in 1959, when the merger of a branch of the Medicine Faculty of Comenius University in Bratislava and the Philosophical Faculty of the Faculty of Philology of the University of Pedagogy in Prešov led to the establishment of the Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice. On 1 January 1997, as a result of social-political events, the university split into two separate entities - the Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice and the Prešov University in Prešov.

The forerunner to the present-day Faculty of Arts was the Institute of Social Sciences which was created as a research and educational institution in 2006. The organisational structure of the Institute initially consisted of five departments, and from 1 September 2006 their number grew to eight. These were the Department of English and American, the Department of Non Slovak Languages, the Department of Slavic, Slavic Philology and Communications, the Department of Psychology, the Department of Economics and Management of Human Resources, the Department of Philosophy and History of Philosophy, the Department of Educational and Health Psychology, and the Department of Education. The board of the Institute of Social Sciences prepared all materials needed for the accreditation of the new faculty and on 1 January 2007 the Faculty of Arts was established at UPJŠ.