In this First-Year Seminar, we explore the long history of humans thinking about what it means to be human. In myth, religion, science, art, literature, and philosophy, humans have never stopped posing the question of how we fit in, or fail to fit in, to the natural world; what our relation is to the cosmos, to gods, to animals, and even to other beings we may not yet have encountered. In our own quest we will read fascinating stories, poems, and philosophical texts; visit museums to view and discuss provocative works of art; and delve into the ramifications of our thinking they impact our relations with machines, with non-human animals, and with each other.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Egginton, William
• Room: Gilman 134
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

In the Republic, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato posed three questions: what is justice? How would a just person live? How would a just society be governed? These three questions form the basic subject matter of of political theory. In this course we will survey the history of political theory, reading a series of political theorists who took up Plato’s questions in a wide range of contexts, from Renaissance Italy and early modern England to late colonial India and the Jim Crow US South. Throughout, we’ll consider whether there are better and worse answers to these questions, or simply different answers that appear better or worse depending on the perspective from which one considers them. We’ll look closely at how the circumstances in which political theorists lived influenced their thinking, and how those circumstances should influence our own evaluation of their thinking. And we’ll ask whether Plato’s questions were the right questions to ask in his time, whether they are still relevant in ours, and whether there are other questions that political theorists would do better to spend their time considering.

• Days/Times: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
• Instructor: Simon, Josh David
• Room: Gilman 50
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/20
• PosTag(s): INST-PT, CES-ELECT, POLI-PT

In the Republic, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato posed three questions: what is justice? How would a just person live? How would a just society be governed? These three questions form the basic subject matter of of political theory. In this course we will survey the history of political theory, reading a series of political theorists who took up Plato’s questions in a wide range of contexts, from Renaissance Italy and early modern England to late colonial India and the Jim Crow US South. Throughout, we’ll consider whether there are better and worse answers to these questions, or simply different answers that appear better or worse depending on the perspective from which one considers them. We’ll look closely at how the circumstances in which political theorists lived influenced their thinking, and how those circumstances should influence our own evaluation of their thinking. And we’ll ask whether Plato’s questions were the right questions to ask in his time, whether they are still relevant in ours, and whether there are other questions that political theorists would do better to spend their time considering.

• Days/Times: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 1:30PM - 2:20PM
• Instructor: Simon, Josh David
• Room: Gilman 50
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/20
• PosTag(s): INST-PT, CES-ELECT, POLI-PT

A course that examines how women's bodies are depicted in horror literature and film, asking: how are issues of race, class, national identity, and belonging illuminated through the genre and its ongoing fascination with gender and sexuality? Why do we return to women's bodies to illuminate our fears? Why do we represent women's bodies through the horror genre? Focusing on speculative fiction and film, we will investigate how women's bodies speak to issues of power and spectatorship through affects such as disgust, terror, titillation, and pleasure.

• Days/Times: M 3:40PM - 6:10PM
• Instructor: Gil'Adí, Maia
• Room: Gilman 479
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/5
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

In this First-Year Seminar, we will ask why maps and mapping technologies have become useful – some would say central – to the pursuit of new knowledge. Do they clarify, simplify, amplify, organize, reveal unexpected connections, point the way forward, or severely complicate our thoughts and send us back to the drawing board? We will learn/review some ArcGIS mapping basics. Those of you with previous experience in mapping technologies will be welcome to contribute ideas and share skills (no previous experience is required), and we will visit various mapping hubs around Hopkins, such the history of world maps as well as Geospatial Data mapping at Milton S. Eisenhower and Peabody Libraries, brain mapping technologies behind current research in the department of Biomedical Engineering (BME), and genetic engineering at the Translational Tissue Engineering Center (TTEC). Across the semester we will also ground ourselves in the Humanities by reading The Odyssey of Homer (trans. James Lattimore, any edition). Each student will create an ArcGIS map website to locate and illustrate an assigned Odyssey episode. In this way, we will test out various mapping techniques on the intersecting adventures of “great hearted” Odysseus, “circumspect” Penelope and their son, “thoughtful” Telemachus. A series of short close reading assignments on selected passages from The Odyssey will help to refine analytical and writing skills, and at the end of the semester students will present to the group the completed GIS map of the adventures of these characters across the Mediterranean.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Patton, Elizabeth
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

A course that examines how women's bodies are depicted in horror literature and film, asking: how are issues of race, class, national identity, and belonging illuminated through the genre and its ongoing fascination with gender and sexuality? Why do we return to women's bodies to illuminate our fears? Why do we represent women's bodies through the horror genre? Focusing on speculative fiction and film, we will investigate how women's bodies speak to issues of power and spectatorship through affects such as disgust, terror, titillation, and pleasure.

• Days/Times: M 3:40PM - 6:10PM
• Instructor: Gil'Adí, Maia
• Room: Gilman 479
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/5
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

In Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall (2023), a woman is tried for murdering her husband. In the myth of Antigone, a young woman is torn between the obligation to obey the law and the necessity to resist. Which way will she embrace? In Yorgos Lanthimos' The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a heart surgeon must sacrifice a member of his family to compensate for mishandling an operation as he was drunk. Is it just to demand a life for a life? Fiction constitutes an inexhaustible source of alternative worlds and experiences that theoretical reasoning fails to address. That is, fictions often present us with dilemmas for which there are no clear answers. And yet, we are asked to choose. In this class, we will explore and analyze a variety of extreme situations. What is so tantalizing about fictional dilemmas? Do they teach us something that can last? Together, we will experiment with a variety of critical reading practices that bring us to grapple with our own position as readers, judges, interpreters, and ethical agents who are forced to make impossible choices for which we are nevertheless accountable.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Morin, Barthelemy
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 13/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

Using Daniel Albright’s Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (2000) and Panaesthetics: On the Unity and Diversity of the Arts (2014) as guides, this class investigates the idea of collaboration and communication across and between the arts from the late nineteenth century to the present. Albright’s book includes the famous dictum: “The great Modernist collaborations all survive as fragments.” This class examines and, as possible, reassembles and reassesses these fragments. Among other artistic collaborations, topics will include dialogues between Eric Satie, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Cocteau; Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein; and John Cage and Merce Cunningham; as well as Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk—“Total work of art”—and its implications for artistic interrelationships from his time to now, including its impact on Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, among many others.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Schmelz, Peter John
• Room: Gilman 400
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 17/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

William Shakespeare and Henrik Ibsen are the two most frequently performed playwrights in history, and both have been credited with reinventing drama: Shakespeare for the Elizabethan stage and Ibsen for the modern. In this course we will pair plays by each author – those that stand in an explicit relation of influence as well as those that share a significant set of concerns – in order to investigate how each takes up and transform key problems in Updated description: the literary, political, and philosophical tradition for their own historical moment. Plays to be studied by Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, Coriolanus, The Tempest; by Ibsen: Hedda Gabler, The Wild Duck, An Enemy of the People, The Master Builder. As part of the course, we will try to organize at least one excursion to a Shakespeare or Ibsen performance in the Baltimore-D.C. area. This class counts towards the requirement of text-based courses for the minor in comparative thought and literature.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

Modern China’s foremost writer and intellectual Lu Xun (1881–1936) wrote to think, to innovate, to fight, and, ultimately, to transform. What and how did he write as he confronted a radically changing world in early-twentieth-century China, and what can we learn from his works, as we once again face an uncertain world? This course introduces students to fundamental methods of textual analysis by exploring the contemporary significance of Lu Xun’s writings—short stories, poems, “miscellaneous essays”—through three distinct approaches: literary, comparative, and philosophical. Our investigation will revolve around questions such as: How did he expand what written language was capable of doing? How did he engage with world literature (from Europe, Russia, and beyond), and how have his works been read and adapted by writers in East Asia? How can his works be understood in a broader context of the global spread of Enlightenment thought and the discontents it caused? This course is open to any student interested in Lu Xun’s works and their transnational significance, and satisfies the “text-based” course requirement for the minor in Comparative Thought and Literature. All readings are in English.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Hashimoto, Satoru
• Room: Smokler Center Library
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Literary and philosophical imaginations of moral community in the post-WWII period. Texts include: Coetzee, Disgrace; McEwan, Atonement; Achebe,Things Fall Apart; Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World; Roy, The God of Small Things; Lessing, The Grass is Singing; Mistry, A Fine Balance; Morrison, Beloved; and essays by Levi, Strawson, Adorno, Murdoch, and Beauvoir on the deep uncertainty over moral community after the crisis of World War II. Close attention to novelistic style and narrative will inform our study of the philosophical questions that animate these works. What does it mean to acknowledge another person’s humanity? Who are the members of a moral community? Why do we hold one another responsible for our actions? How do fundamental moral emotions such as contempt, humiliation, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, and regret reveal the limits of a moral community?

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/12
• PosTag(s): CES-CC, CES-ELECT

Virginia Woolf famously called the lives of women “infinitely obscure” seeing as their everyday, domestic existence had long passed unnoticed, undervalued, and unrecorded. The personal essay, a form which inherently values the ordinariness and even triviality of subjective experience, has helped counteract the burdensome “accumulation of unrecorded life,” to use Woolf’s phrase, and fill in the gaps of women’s collective history. In this course we will read a diverse range of personal essays by Sei Shōnagon, Virginia Woolf, Alice Walker, Anne Carson, Audre Lorde, Naomi Shihab Nye, Annie Dillard, Joan Didion, and more, tracing a tradition of women’s essayism. We will attend to the essay’s unique and flexible modalities for portraying subjectivity, exploring universal themes, and experimenting with form. This is a writing intensive course that will incorporate critical and essayistic modes of writing that will teach us first-hand about experimentation with voice, temporality, rhetorical argument, narrative, and the representation of consciousness on the page.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Theodoropoulos, Eleni Eleni
• Room: Gilman 75
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

Although fundamentally grounded in human existence, Illness, pain, and suffering are also cultural experiences that have been depicted in literature and film. The way different cultures relate to and convey pain is embedded in the cosmogonic ideas each society holds about suffering and its outcomes. Reading through different literary texts from different parts of the world and drawing on movies that portray varied experiences of illness, this course aims to help students think about illness and its ramifications in a more transcultural way in order to understand how illness functions across different geographic, climatic, political, and social conditions. The students will also gain a better understanding of the causes of pain, its symptoms, and the different manners in which the authors and filmmakers whose works we will study mediate it to their readers and viewers. From basic traditional potions to hyper-modern medical technologies, illness also mobilizes different types of science across cultures and social classes. By the end of the course, students will develop an ethics of reading for illness not a as monolithic condition but rather as an experience that has unique cultural codes and mechanisms that need to be known to better understand it and probably treat it.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: El Guabli, Brahim
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/15
• PosTag(s): CDS-GI, MSCH-HUM

Knowing who or what counts as a person seems straightforward, until we consider the many kinds of creatures, objects, and artificial beings that have been granted—or demanded or denied—that status. This course explores recent debates on being a person in culture, law, and philosophy. Questions examined will include: Should trees have standing? Can corporations have religious beliefs? Could a robot sign a contract? Materials examined will be wide-ranging, including essays, philosophy, novels, science fiction, television, film. No special background is required.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Siraganian, Lisa
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/19
• PosTag(s): CES-LSO, CES-ELECT, MSCH-HUM

How is the so-called “AI Revolution” altering the landscape of work? This course takes up this question through the lens of underemployment, migratory labor, and diasporic communities. We will read a variety of key works on migration and imagined communities, precarity and alienation, labor, automation, and empire—as well as texts produced in the margins of globalization. In conversation with these texts, we will investigate the dynamics of diasporic communities, migration, and solidarity vis-a-vis the future of work in a global society increasingly automated by AI models such as DeepSeek, ChatGPT, and Qwen 2.5, and the entities that own them. Through a variety of writing assignments and presentations, students engage issues such as race, class, gender, the border, citizenship, and community as they exist for diasporic and migratory workers. This course explores themes relevant to students of Critical Diaspora Studies, as well as the history of science and technology, political science and political economy, international studies, literature, film, and sociology. Readings may include works by Ruha Benjamin, Audre Lorde, Harry Braverman, Benedict Anderson, David Harvey, Edward Said, Mary L. Gray, Octavia Butler, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

• Days/Times: TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Todarello, Josh
• Room: Maryland 309
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/15
• PosTag(s): CES-BM, CES-LC, CES-RI, CES-TI, CDS-MB, CDS-SSMC

In the Republic, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato posed three questions: what is justice? How would a just person live? How would a just society be governed? These three questions form the basic subject matter of of political theory. In this course we will survey the history of political theory, reading a series of political theorists who took up Plato’s questions in a wide range of contexts, from Renaissance Italy and early modern England to late colonial India and the Jim Crow US South. Throughout, we’ll consider whether there are better and worse answers to these questions, or simply different answers that appear better or worse depending on the perspective from which one considers them. We’ll look closely at how the circumstances in which political theorists lived influenced their thinking, and how those circumstances should influence our own evaluation of their thinking. And we’ll ask whether Plato’s questions were the right questions to ask in his time, whether they are still relevant in ours, and whether there are other questions that political theorists would do better to spend their time considering.

• Days/Times: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
• Instructor: Simon, Josh David
• Room: Gilman 50
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/20
• PosTag(s): INST-PT, CES-ELECT, POLI-PT

In the Republic, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato posed three questions: what is justice? How would a just person live? How would a just society be governed? These three questions form the basic subject matter of of political theory. In this course we will survey the history of political theory, reading a series of political theorists who took up Plato’s questions in a wide range of contexts, from Renaissance Italy and early modern England to late colonial India and the Jim Crow US South. Throughout, we’ll consider whether there are better and worse answers to these questions, or simply different answers that appear better or worse depending on the perspective from which one considers them. We’ll look closely at how the circumstances in which political theorists lived influenced their thinking, and how those circumstances should influence our own evaluation of their thinking. And we’ll ask whether Plato’s questions were the right questions to ask in his time, whether they are still relevant in ours, and whether there are other questions that political theorists would do better to spend their time considering.

• Days/Times: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 1:30PM - 2:20PM
• Instructor: Simon, Josh David
• Room: Gilman 50
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 11/20
• PosTag(s): INST-PT, CES-ELECT, POLI-PT

How has the Holocaust been represented in literature and film? Are there special challenges posed by genocide to the traditions of visual and literary representation? Where does the Holocaust fit in to the array of concerns that the visual arts and literature express? And where do art and literature fit in to the commemoration of communal tragedy and the working through of individual trauma entailed by thinking about and representing the Holocaust? These questions will guide our consideration of a range of texts — nonfiction, novels, poetry — in Yiddish, German, English, French and other languages (including works by Primo Levi and Isaac Bashevis Singer), as well as films from French documentaries to Hollywood blockbusters (including films by Alain Resnais, Claude Lanzmann, and Steven Spielberg). All readings in English.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Spinner, Samuel Jacob
• Room: Gilman 400
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/15
• PosTag(s): INST-GLOBAL