My hook into the humanities has been language learning, which turned into taking advantage of texts as insights into culture, politics, and other social aspects. I went from German in high school to Russian in college and grad school and I'm still amazed that the odd noises we make and weird scribbles we write or characters we type can be so powerful in so many ways. As you might guess from that last sentence, my favorite theoretical camp is 1920s Russian Formalism, especially Viktor Shklovskii and his concept of "making things strange" (остранение).