Special Courses

As part of our commitment to undergraduate education, our faculty are constantly devising innovative new courses. 

Programs for First-Years are listed under First-Year Offerings.

Featured Courses

Below are a list of courses devised in the interdisciplinary spirit of the Humanities Program that are currently on offer. Not all courses are taught by faculty with official appointments in the Humanities Program, but all share the outlook and mission of the Program. HUMS Majors - click here for a more detailed listing showing which major requirements they might fulfill

  • This course will explore some of the purposes that have been ascribed to college, including development of personal character, participation in a community, conversation on intellectual matters, and preparation for citizenship.

    Fall 2022, Fall 2020
    TTh 2:30-3:20pm
  • This course focuses on verbal artistry and textual analysis; on dramaturgy, staging and the nature of spectatorial experience, as on developing the craft of persuasive argument through writing in relation to European tragedies.

    Fall 2022, Spring 2022
    MW 11:35am-12:50pm
  • From Gilgamesh to Persepolis is an introduction to Near Eastern civilization through its rich and diverse literary achievements. Our main approach will be close reading: to investigate deeply small parts of a text to illuminate the whole. 

    Fall 2022, Fall 2021
    TTh 1pm-2:15pm
  • This course intensively studies four operas central to the western repertory, spanning the years from the early 17th to the late 19th century: Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Wagner’s Die Walküre (from The Ring of the Nibelungs), and Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra

    Fall 2022, Fall 2021
    MW 1-2:15pm
  • This course focuses on Dante’s Divine Comedy, a masterpiece of world literature. After looking at the Vita Nuova (New Life) as the starting point of Dante’s poetic trajectory, we will read the Comedy in its entirety and in light of what it claims to be – a journey to God. 

    Fall 2022, 2021
    TTh 1pm-2:15pm + 1
  • An interdisciplinary study of cinematic representations of the historical past. Films that treat historical events realistically; others that deliberately present history as it did not happen. 

    Fall 2022
    W 3:30-5:20pm
  • Following general reflections on the term Modernism and its variations in different linguistic and national contexts as well as its relation to Realism, to the Avant Garde and to Postmodernism, this course explores some of the major works of German Modernism. 

    Fall 2022
    W 3:30-5:20p
  • This seminar examines three great poets and shapers of the American imagination–Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens–with some attention to their inspirer Ralph Waldo Emerson and inheritor John Ashbery.

    Fall 2022
    T 3:30-5:20pm
  • This seminar is co-taught with Sheila Heti. It discusses shifts in how the unchosen is conceived and how it is valued, across a range of contemporary fields and historical models. The goal to explore whether and how a contemporary concept of fate may come into focus.

    Fall 2022
    W 3:30-5:20p
  • This is a multi-media seminar that studies the Latin American cultural and political discourses of liberation throughout the sixties, with an eye at assessing their legacy today. 

    Fall 2022
    W 7-8:50p + section
  • Arabic-Islamic civilization has produced numerous works that would make it onto almost anyone’s list of wondrous books. In this course, we will read a selection of (or from) those books and study the literary and intellectual cultures that produced them.

    Fall 2022
    M 3:30-5:20p
  • This Beinecke-intensive course considers the published works of living poets alongside the processes they used to create them: drafts, letters, journals, fragments, objects and other artworks that were directly or indirectly part of their artistic development. 

    Fall 2022
    Th 12pm-3pm
  • The course is a semester-long study of the quintessential big Russian novel, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, about Napoleon’s failed 1812 war against Russia. 

    Fall 2022
    MW 9:25-10:15am + section
  • This course explores how certain novels, which prima facie may not appear to be political, become political novels through the act of censorship.

    Fall 2022
    F 1:30-3:20p
  • In this seminar, we undertake a careful examination of Thucydides’ so-called History of the Peloponnesian War in its entirety.

    Fall 2022
    MW 2:30-3:45pm
  • In this course we read “mirrors for princes,” a type of political writing by courtiers and advisors. We learn about the ethical and moral considerations that guided (or were meant to guide) rulers in their conduct.

    Fall 2022
    M 1:30-3:20pm
  • This course studies accounts of pandemics, from Thucydides in Athens up to our ongoing Coronavirus outbreaks. We trace the histories of understanding that accompanied pandemics: religious, scientific, philosophical, ethical, literary. 

    Fall 2022
    Meets:Th 1:30-3:20pm
  • Living together is difficult. How do some people do it? How can we do it less badly, or much better, or in the very best way? In this seminar we read sources from several disciplines that describe positive modes of conviviance. 

    Fall 2022
    M 3:30-6:30pm
  • The French Revolution of 1789 and its legacies, as viewed through the late-eighteenth-century debates about democracy, equality, representative government that shaped an enduring agenda for historical and political thought.

    Fall 2022, Spring 2021
    W 1:30-3:20pm
  • A reading of the central work of prose fiction in the Japanese classical tradition in its entirety (in English translation) along with some examples of predecessors, parodies, and adaptations (the latter include Noh plays and twentieth-century short stories). 

    Fall 2022
    TTh 4-5:15pm
  • The truth can set you free, but of course it can also get you into trouble. We begin with the revolt of the Hebrews and the Socratic questioning of democracy, and end with various contemporary cases of censorship within and between regimes. 

    Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Fall 2020
    W 3:30-6:00pm
  • The engagement of the Victorian novel with the world of politics. Emphasis on how systems interact with individual agents to make stories and how methods such as realism, romance, and the courtship plot portray the mechanics of government. 

    Fall 2022
    MW 11:35a-12:50pm
  • In this course, we explore theatre as a site of adaptation, as intermedial constellation. We investigate the relationship between dramatic literature and its performance and performability, between textual outlines and their realization(s): between scripts and stages. 

    Fall 2022
    W 3:30-5:20pm
  • Examination of the origins of human modernity in the light of evolutionary and archaeological evidence; merging evolutionary reasoning with humanistic theory to understand the impact of human culture on natural selection across the last 250,000 years.

    Fall 2022, Spring 2022; Spring 2020
    T 1:30-3:20
  • The course demonstrates the ways in which Modernist movements in Moscow and Paris were intimately connected and mutually influenced through decades of artistic exchange and competition.

    Fall 2022
    Th 1:30-3:20pm
  • Psychoanalysis’ development was intertwined with Freud’s interpretations of classical Greek tragedy, and Greek tragedies in turn can shed light on psychoanalytic concepts in excess of Freud’s readings. 

    Fall 2022
    MW 4-5:15pm
  • A course on key moments in the history of jazz in America until 1960 with special focus on the role of jazz within broader streams of American cultural life; improvisation; jazz as popular music and as art music; the racial politics of jazz; and its artistic achievements. 

    Fall 2022
    MW 11:35a-12:50p
  • Biblical references in modernist literary works illustrate literature’s potential to transform ancient forms into driving forces of renewal. The course explores this dynamic in the work of major German-Jewish modernists such as Franz Kafka, Else Lasker-Schüler and Paul Celan.

    Fall 2022
    Th 9:25-11:15am
  • The course looks closely at the intersection of literature, philosophy and natural science through the lens of the thought experiment. Throughout we try to be attuned to overlap between the humanities and the sciences. 

    Fall 2022, Fall 2021
    TTh 2:30pm-3:45pm
  • This course explores fundamental philosophical questions of the relation between matter and form, life and spirit, necessity and freedom, by proceeding from Aristotle’s analysis of the soul in De Anima and his notion of practical agency in the Nicomachean Ethics. 

    Fall 2022, Fall 2021
    W 1:30pm-3:20pm

Core Seminars: Interpretations and Modernities

Humanities Majors are required to take one seminar in “Interpretations” and one seminar in “Modernities.”  Both core courses include substantial attention to methodological concerns that are fundamental to the humanities disciplines, and to distinctively humanistic activities like persuasion and interpretation. Click here for more information

  • Looking beyond art history’s traditional understanding of “medium” as referring to what a work of art is made from, this seminar explores the broader range of “media” that were central to early modern debates in science, religion, and the arts. 

    Fall 2022
    TBD
  • A psychological study of love, marriage, and family through literature, visual arts, and music, from the ancient world to the mid-20th century. Works will be principally drawn from the Western tradition with some from Indian, Chinese, and Arabic traditions.

    Fall 2022
    TTh 1pm-2:15pm
  • In this seminar we will close-read a wide range of Emily Dickinson’s poems, seeking to understand tensions that run throughout her work, between feeling and intellect, chaos and control, power and passivity, things hidden and revealed, ecstasy and despair, life and death. 

    Fall 2022
    TBD
  • Drawing on English-language literature, art, and history-writing since 1800, this class explores how the past can illuminate and complicate the ways we perceive the present. 

    Fall 2022
    MW 11:35am-12:50pm
  • This seminar examines three great poets and shapers of the American imagination–Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens–with some attention to their inspirer Ralph Waldo Emerson and inheritor John Ashbery.

    Fall 2022
    T 3:30-5:20pm

Franke and Shulman Seminars

The Franke and Shulman Seminars are upper-level seminars for Humanities majors conducted in conjunction with the Franke and Shulman Lectures; a series of four visiting lectures in the Whitney Humanities Center.  Click here for more information about past seminars.
 

We explore the possibility of a ‘cognitive metaphysics’ where each field is enriched by the other. Topics include the ways in which we understand the nature of space, time, objects, events, causality, persistence, and possibility. 

Spring 2022
T 3:30pm-5:20pm

An investigation of the experience and purposes of mass incarceration in the Soviet Union and the United States in the twentieth century. Incarceration is a crucial aperture into basic questions of values and practices. 

Fall 2021
Th 9:25am-11:15am

Special Admissions

Below are a number of courses that require instructor permission, application, or have otherwise irregular entrance procedures. Click here for a complete list.

The Life Worth Living Program is an effort to revive critical discussion in universities and the broader culture about the most important question of our lives: What is a life worth living?

Spring 2022
Varies per section