Courses

The courses listed below are provided by the JHU Public Course Search. This listing provides a snapshot of immediately available courses and may not be complete.

Course registration information can be found on the Student Information Services (SIS) website.

Course # (Section)	Title	Day/Times	Instructor	Location	Term	Additional Details
AS.010.255 (01)	Introduction to Performance Art	MW 1:30PM - 2:45PM	Schopp, Caroline Lillian	Krieger 300	Spring 2026	Description: Performance art is provocative and often controversial because it troubles, without dissolving, the distinction between art and life. Not just a matter of activating bodies or spurring participation, performance art asks what kinds of actions count as worthy of attention in contemporary culture. Studying performance art provides a unique introduction to art history because it allows us to rethink established art historical concerns with representation, form, perspective, and materiality, while at the same time offering critical insight into the forms of attention that structure everyday life. In this introduction to performance art and its history, we will explore how performance art addresses ingrained assumptions about action and passivity, success and failure, embodiment and mediation, “good” and “bad” feelings, emancipation and dependency. The study of performance art invites transdisciplinary approaches. Students from across the university are welcome. Our attention to a wide array of artists and practices will be supplemented by readings in art history and art criticism as well as diverse theoretical approaches. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 2/24 Tags: HART-MODERN
AS.150.487 (01)	Philosophies of History	W 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Moyar, Dean	Gilman 55	Spring 2026	Description: Is there a purpose to history? Under what descriptions does history make sense? This course will examine the idea of philosophy of history as it arose in classic German philosophy (esp. Kant and Hegel) and was transformed by radical thinkers in reaction to that original program (Marx, Nietzsche). The last part of the course will examine twentieth century philosophies of history, including those of Spengler, Toynbee, Koselleck, and Fukuyama. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 3/10 Tags: PHIL-MODERN, PHIL-ETHICS, CES-LSO
AS.213.446 (01)	Nature and Ecology in German Literature and Thought	T 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Gosetti, Jennifer Anna	Gilman 10	Spring 2026	Description: Nature and Ecology in German Literature and Thought examines the representation of the natural world and ecological thinking in literary works and aesthetic theory from the 18th to the 20th centuries. Themes include the aesthetics of nature, poetic reverence for nature, anthropocentric depictions of nature, the thematization of landscape, the representation of animal life and environment, the impact of technology, urbanization, and industrialization on our sense of nature. Readings may include works from poetry, novels, or short fiction and fairy tale, as well as philosophy and theory. Readings may include poetry by Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin, Rainer Maria Rilke, and WG Sebald, fairy tales or Märchen by the brothers Grimm, and fiction by Adalbert Stifter, Wilhelm Raabe, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Horst Sternn and Christa Wolf, along with theoretical works by Goethe, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jakob von Uexküll, Hans Jonas, and Gernot Böhme, and contemporary German ecocriticism. The course is taught in English with texts in English translation; German speakers will be invited to use original texts. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 0/10 Tags: ENVS-MAJOR, ENVS-MINOR, CTAL-CONCEPT
AS.225.410 (01)	Theater and Philosophy	T 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Lichtenberg, Drew	Merrick 105	Spring 2026	Description: This course focuses on a powerful current in theater and thought from ancient works to the modern day: plays that self-consciously use the means of theater, such as a play-within-the-play, to represent the world. This type of play, along with its close relative, the Dream Play, traces its origin more to Plato and his motif of the Theatrum Mundi (the theater of the world/the world as theater) than to Aristotelian mimesis (the imitation of reality), and poses an alternative to the realist tradition. An ancient, alternate modality, this non-realistic line is also a modern one, recurring throughout history. By the 20th century, this “secret smuggler’s path” becomes a dominant language for theater itself, posing an alternate dialectics, an alternate metaphysics, an alternate hermeneutics for our ability to understand reality as well as illusion. This course—which lies at the intersection of both disciplines—will be cross listed between Theatre Arts and Philosophy. We will read plays from across histories as well as philosophical and theoretical texts, unearthing surprising correspondences in the two overlapping (Shakespeare would say "undistinguishable") fields. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 3/10 Tags: n/a
AS.300.102 (01)	Great Minds	TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM	Marrati, Paola	Gilman 208	Spring 2026	Description: This course offers an introductory survey of foundational authors of modern philosophy and moral and political thought whose ideas continue to influence contemporary problems and debates. The course is taught in lectures and seminar discussions. Authors studied include Plato, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Iris Murdoch, James Baldwin, Cora Diamond, Judith Butler, Kwame A. Appiah and others. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 0/25 Tags: INST-PT, CES-ELECT
AS.300.216 (01)	Heart Matters	TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM	Ender, Evelyne	Gilman 479	Spring 2026	Description: Translated from the French, Maylis de Kerangal’s award-winning The Heart reads like a brilliant and moving contemporary medical novel. This course is designed to explore the broader critical, ethical, and philosophical questions that this literary work, which is based on an accident, pursues. Built like a mosaic, our text will prompt discussions on such topics as the meaning and forms taken by “tragedy”, body/mind issues, trauma and its spaces (especially the ER and the ICU), the existential challenges and experiences that shape the collective hospital environment beyond its visible protocols and instruments. A close reading of this book along different paths will help us focus on the ethical, humanistic dilemmas faced in world of modern, highly advanced medical procedures. While its readers must face the darker, mysterious places of human suffering, these are inseparable from compassionate, generous, and sometimes heroic actions that spread collectively across the story. You will be asked to read other texts, as a fuller grasp of what is at stake (scientifically and humanely speaking) in this book, calls for a context, which will be provided by historical research and allusions scattered across our fictional text. Our seminar will thus also explore a long history of beliefs and of piecemeal anatomical or clinical discoveries about the heart that can help us understand the place held by this organ across cultures as well as in our imaginations. One or two guests familiar with the ER will bring us closer to the medical aspects of The Heart. Also planned for this course is the viewing of the film inspired by the book. NB this course fulfills is designed to fulfill the "text" requirement for our minor in CTL. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 1/12 Tags: n/a
AS.300.222 (01)	Acting by Accident in Literature and Film	MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM	Siraganian, Lisa	Gilman 208	Spring 2026	Description: When is an action just an accident--and when should it be called intentional? What about a double murder that is planned to look accidental … but goes very wrong in practice? And who is responsible in these situations? This course explores these and other fascinating stories of planned actions, accidents, and unintended consequences. Reading and watching twentieth-century literature and movies, we will follow a range of different creators as they think about what an intentional action is and is not, and how accidents impact how we understand our world. What can these works tell us about how we intend, act, or make meaning at the limits of our control? Texts will include films by Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Justine Triet, and fiction by Kate Chopin, Flannery O’Connor, Richard Wright, James Cain, and Patricia Highsmith. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 9/18 Tags: CTAL-CONCEPT
AS.300.346 (01)	Revolution in Theatre, 1880-1930	TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM	Lisi, Leonardo	Gilman 208	Spring 2026	Description: The years 1880-1930 constitutes one of the most intense periods of experimentation in Western drama. We will look closely at texts and performance practices from this time to trace how dramatists upended the conventions that had governed the theatre since the time of Shakespeare and imposed a completely new understanding of the artform. Authors to be read will include August Strindberg, Maurice Maeterlinck, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, W. B. Yeats, Sophie Treadwell, Luigi Pirandello, Federico García Lorca. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 7/12 Tags: CTAL-TEXT
AS.300.400 (01)	Anti-nostalgia in Literature and Film	TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM	Jerzak, Katarzyna Elzbieta	Gilman 208	Spring 2026	Description: I looked for home elsewhere, and was confident of finding none which I should relish less than the one which I was leaving. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Caught between Paradise Lost and the Promised Land, between a yearning for utopia and the menace of dystopia, humans seem prone to nostalgia. Originally defined as a disease, nostalgia in literature has functioned both in space and in time. If Romanticism codified certain forms of literary nostalgia, it only follows that anti-nostalgia comes later, maturing in modern exilic and science-fiction works. Both notions lose their raison d’être without the concept of home, be it a place, a temporal home of childhood, or a future home. In the seminar we will analyze modern expressions of anti-nostalgia, from Stendhal’s revulsion towards his hometown of Grenoble, through various accounts of precluded return, to a poisoned, mangled return. Disappointment, disillusionment, even horror accompany anti-nostalgia. Shock and trauma pervert a sense of belonging into disgust and fear. While nostalgia is lyrical, anti-nostalgia can be violent and bitter or passive and indifferent. We will study works of prose (Stendhal, Kafka, Bunin, Lem, Lispector, Márai, Bobowski) and poetry (Szymborska, Grynberg) as well as film (Nadav Lapid, Paweł Łoziński). Our secondary sources will include Jean Starobinski, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Jean Baudrillard, and Jora Vaso. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 2/12 Tags: n/a
AS.300.401 (01)	Comparative Late- and Post-Cold War Cultures in China, the USSR, and Beyond	W 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Hashimoto, Satoru; Schmelz, Peter John	Gilman 208	Spring 2026	Description: This course invites students to explore culture in the late and post-Cold War world from a broader perspective by surveying literature, thought, cinema, art, and music in Chinese and Soviet (and post-Soviet) societies from the 1980s to the present. How did Chinese and Soviet (and post-Soviet) intellectuals reconfigure, reform, and/or reinvent their cultures as they re-embraced or debated ideas of freedom, democracy, and globalization? How did they grapple with the legacies of their socialist and even pre-socialist pasts as they entered new eras of reforms? How did reform movements adopt different forms and strategies in different parts of the USSR and in the Sinophone world? What kinds of negotiations took place between various centers and peripheries within and around these regions? What can we learn from their cultural endeavors about the promises, contradictions, and discontents of the post-Cold War world, as we witness the rise of a so-called “new cold war” and revisionist coalitions against globalization today? In this co-taught course, specialists in Sinophone and Soviet cultures and their legacies will guide students in reading and discussing representative works from the 1980s onward from a comparative perspective. Readings include the film Hibiscus Town, Cui Jian, Yu Hua, Ge Fei, Can Xue, Mo Yan, Yan Lianke, and Ng Kim Chew, as well as the film Russian Ark, Viktor Tsoi, Komar and Melamid, Aka Morchiladze, Oksana Zabuzhko, and Serhiy Zhadan. No prerequisites. All course materials will be provided in English translation or with English subtitles. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 7/18 Tags: CES-LSO, CTAL-TEXT
AS.300.412 (01)	Indigenous Ecologies: Thinking with Indigenous Worldviews	T 1:30PM - 4:00PM	El Guabli, Brahim	Mergenthaler 431	Spring 2026	Description: Indigenous people represent an important share of planet Earth’s inhabitants. Totaling almost 500 million people in the entire world, Indigenous people speak a variety of languages, produce knowledge in their mother tongues, and have deep connections to their lands and cultures. However, neither their demographic significance nor their long histories spared them the tragedies of settler colonialism and its aftermaths of dispossession, exclusion, and segregation. Since the early twentieth century, Indigenous people have been at the helm of a Global Indigeneity Movement that has mobilized both scholarship and activism in search of a better world. Despite their best efforts, the rich histories of indigenous activism, environmental practices, and cultural production as well as the worldviews they sustain remain confined to very limited circles. Building on the notion of "indigenous ecologies," which spans a wide range of approaches and fields, this course will interrogate some of the salient questions related to activism, literature, translation, extraction, environmentalism, and social justice from the perspective of Indigenous creators. Students will engage with materials produced by Indigenous thinkers, filmmakers, activists, and academic scholars to gain a deeper understanding of indigeneity across cultures and continents as well as the myriad critical ways in which its proponents approach pressing issues that face Indigenous peoples from myriad perspectives and positionalities. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 4/12 Tags: ENVS-MAJOR, CDS-GI, MSCH-HUM, ENVS-MINOR, CTAL-TEXT
AS.300.414 (01)	Comparative Thought: Pass-words Across Zhuangzi, Thoreau, and Heidegger	T 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Bennett, Jane; Culbert, Jennifer	Gilman 208	Spring 2026	Description: Exploration of key terms, such as “action,” “uncertainty,” and “change,” as they resonate across the works of three authors, each associated with a different tradition of thought: Zhuangzi (ancient Daoism), Thoreau (American transcendentalism), and Heidegger (German phenomenology). Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 0/5 Tags: CTAL-TEXT
AS.300.418 (01)	The Modernist Novel: James, Woolf, and Joyce	Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Ong, Yi-Ping	Gilman 208	Spring 2026	Description: In this course, we will survey the major works of three of the greatest, most relentless innovators of the twentieth century – Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce – who explored and exploded narrative techniques for depicting what Woolf called the “luminous halo” of life. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 9/20 Tags: CTAL-CONCEPT, CTAL-TEXT
AS.300.501 (01)	Independent Study		Jerzak, Katarzyna Elzbieta		Spring 2026	Description: Undergraduate student having directed work with a specific faculty. Credits: 1.00 - 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 3/3 Tags: n/a
AS.300.501 (02)	Independent Study		Ender, Evelyne		Spring 2026	Description: Independent Study: research related to course AS.300.216.01 Hearth Matters Credits: 1.00 - 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 1/1 Tags: n/a
AS.300.508 (01)	Honors Seminar		Ong, Yi-Ping		Spring 2026	Description: The Honors Seminar is a mandatory component of the Honors Program in Humanities, which offers qualified undergraduates the possibility of pursuing an independent research project in their Junior and Senior years in any humanistic discipline or combination of disciplines: intellectual history, comparative literature, philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis, religion, film, etc., as well as points of intersection between the arts and the sciences. Sophomores who plan to study abroad in their Junior year should also consider applying to the Program. In the 2024-2025 academic year, the Seminar will focus on a close reading of Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello and associated texts, which will serve as a point of departure for discussion on the relation between different intellectual disciplines and the idea of the humanities. Credits: 3.00 Status: Canceled Seats Available: 10/10 Tags: n/a
AS.305.288 (01)	The Aesthetics of Resistance	TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM	Todarello, Josh	Krieger 307	Spring 2026	Description: This course surveys the stories and storytellers of key moments of resistance or revolution, such as the 1848 Revolutions, the Haitian Revolution, the 1968 Student Movement, Occupy, Arab Spring, and Women Life Freedom. We will critically examine how such moments are, or become, narratives and how, as such, they may or may not acquire afterlives. To this end we will investigate a variety of materials, produced from a variety of points of view: the press, participants, observers, commentators, instigators, theorists, and those reconstructing the events after the fact as histories or fictions. Key themes include notions of personhood, citizenship, solidarity, equality, and futurity, as well as the aesthetics of how social uprisings are represented in a variety of media. Readings might include texts by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Alejo Carpentier, C.L.R James, Peter Weiss, Manuel Puig, Carlos Fuentes, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Audre Lorde, Joshua Clover, and others. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 0/15 Tags: CDS-SSMC
AS.360.305 (01)	Introduction to Computational Methods for the Humanities	TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM	Lippincott, Tom; Sirin Ryan, Hale	Bloomberg 168	Spring 2026	Description: This course introduces basic computational techniques in the context of empirical humanistic scholarship. Topics covered include the command-line, basic Python programming, and experimental design. While illustrative examples are drawn from humanistic domains, the primary focus is on methods: those with specific domains in mind should be aware that such applied research is welcome and exciting, but will largely be their responsibility beyond the confines of the course. Students will come away with tangible understanding of how to cast simple humanistic questions as empirical hypotheses, ground and test these hypotheses computationally, and justify the choices made while doing so. No previous programming experience is required. Credits: 3.00 Status: Canceled Seats Available: 12/12 Tags: MSCH-HUM
AS.360.306 (01)	Computational Intelligence for the Humanities	TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM	Messner, Craig A	Bloomberg 168	Spring 2026	Description: This course introduces substantial machine learning methods of particular relevance to humanistic scholarship. Areas covered include standard models for classification, regression, and topic modeling, before turning to the array of open-source pretrained deep neural models, and the common mechanisms for employing them. Students are expected to have a level of programming experience equivalent to that gained from AS.360.304, Gateway Computing, AS.250.205, or Harvard’s CS50 for Python. Students will come away with an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of different machine learning models, the ability to discuss them in relation to human intelligence and to make informed decisions of when and how to employ them, and an array of related technical knowledge. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 1/10 Tags: COGS-COMPCG, MSCH-HUM
AS.371.152 (01)	Digital Photography I	W 2:00PM - 5:00PM	Caro, Christiana	The Centre 318	Spring 2026	Description: In this introductory photography course, we will learn the fundamental techniques of image-making using digital camera technology. Emphasis will be placed on DSLR/Mirrorless camera functions as both a means of proper image exposure and creative effects. We will also explore the traditional rules of photographic composition and contemporary image design. Adobe software will be used to organize, edit, adjust, and manipulate our images to produce high-quality files and inkjet prints. Throughout the semester, we will engage in classroom critiques, field trips, readings, and discussions to expand on our photographic vocabulary. In this course, creative exploration will be fostered through the visual language of photography. Canon Mirrorless cameras are available on loan for the semester. Attendance for the first class is mandatory. Course approval will be evaluated following registration in SIS. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 0/10 Tags: n/a
AS.371.152 (02)	Digital Photography I	F 10:00AM - 1:00PM	berger, phyllis Arbesman	The Centre 318	Spring 2026	Description: In this introductory photography course, we will learn the fundamental techniques of image-making using digital camera technology. Emphasis will be placed on DSLR/Mirrorless camera functions as both a means of proper image exposure and creative effects. We will also explore the traditional rules of photographic composition and contemporary image design. Adobe software will be used to organize, edit, adjust, and manipulate our images to produce high-quality files and inkjet prints. Throughout the semester, we will engage in classroom critiques, field trips, readings, and discussions to expand on our photographic vocabulary. In this course, creative exploration will be fostered through the visual language of photography. Canon Mirrorless cameras are available on loan for the semester. Attendance for the first class is mandatory. Course approval will be evaluated following registration in SIS. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 0/10 Tags: n/a
AS.371.152 (03)	Digital Photography I	F 2:00PM - 5:00PM	berger, phyllis Arbesman	The Centre 318	Spring 2026	Description: In this introductory photography course, we will learn the fundamental techniques of image-making using digital camera technology. Emphasis will be placed on DSLR/Mirrorless camera functions as both a means of proper image exposure and creative effects. We will also explore the traditional rules of photographic composition and contemporary image design. Adobe software will be used to organize, edit, adjust, and manipulate our images to produce high-quality files and inkjet prints. Throughout the semester, we will engage in classroom critiques, field trips, readings, and discussions to expand on our photographic vocabulary. In this course, creative exploration will be fostered through the visual language of photography. Canon Mirrorless cameras are available on loan for the semester. Attendance for the first class is mandatory. Course approval will be evaluated following registration in SIS. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 0/10 Tags: n/a
AS.377.274 (01)	Philosophy of History and Science in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace	TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM	Juharyan, Victoria	Krieger 180	Spring 2026	Description: This course is a study of philosophy of history and science primarily through a reading of Leo Tolstoy’s works and his epic War and Peace (1863-69). Over seven years, Tolstoy wrote a massive work that he refused to call a novel—but what was it? War and philosophy are more vital to it than peace or love stories. We entertain the idea that Tolstoy's radical ideas on narrative have a counterpart in his radical ideas on history, causation, freedom and necessity, catastrophe, commitment, and the formation of a moral self. To frame War and Peace and our discussions of philosophy, we will read Jeff Love’s studies on Tolstoy’s use of calculus for the development of his philosophy of history, “Tolstoy’s Integration Metaphor from War and Peace” by Stephen T. Ahearn as well as excerpts from philosophers like Plato, Kant, and Hegel that Tolstoy addresses in his writings. We will also study shorter works by Tolstoy, fictional and non-fictional, written before and after War and Peace, which attempt to answer huge questions with succinct definitions free of irony or reservation: What is war? courage? human experience? family? love? art? faith? death? freedom? Before War and Peace, Tolstoy poses these questions covertly and searchingly. After 1880 he answers them overtly and categorically—so much so that no authoritative text was safe. In this context, we will also read Tolstoy’s philosophical works Confession (1882), On Life (1888), and Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 26/48 Tags: n/a
AS.001.123 (01)	FYS: Telling Stories	TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM	Ender, Evelyne	Gilman 134	Fall 2026	Description: Stories give shape to human lives. Although AI now seems capable of generating plots that appear life-like, only humans can be affected by stories and carry this knowledge into the real world. Short stories are central to this seminar, which explores how modern fiction does not so much “copy” the world as offer new perspectives born from nothing more than signs inscribed on a page. Materials drawn from studies in narratology and research on the reading brain will support this argument. This course invites you to actively engage in class activities that combine writing and discussion. As part of the experiential learning that is a feature of FYS seminars, you will have a chance to discuss the art of storytelling with one or two local authors or with writers at Hopkins. Our classwork will depend on attentive, in-depth readings of a selection of short stories chosen because they can lead to productive encounters that reveal the wealth of meanings and wisdom that inhabit literary works. As studies in narrative have shown, fiction can introduce us to the views, memories, and feelings of other human beings, even though these entities are born from nothing more than words cast on a page. For a broader perspective, we will also explore recent scientific studies that offer models for the reading brain and argue that our existence as humans depends on our capacity to elaborate and transmit stories across time as part of apprehending the world we inhabit. We will read selections from Stanislas Dehaenne, Maryanne Wolf, Roy Schafer, and Fritz Breithaupt. Our initial sampling of short works includes stories written over the last twenty years by authors such as Alison Baker, Tessa Hadley, Junot Díaz, Xuan Juliana Wang, Joy Ladin, and Sidik Fofana. As readers yourselves, you may suggest additional stories to present, or even choose to cap the course with a story of your own inspired by the approaches to storytelling we will explore together. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 12/12 Tags: n/a
AS.001.137 (01)	FYS: The Power of Speech: Law, Politics, and the Humanities	TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM	Culbert, Jennifer; Watters, Aliza	Gilman 134	Fall 2026	Description: What don’t we do with words? Even silence makes manifest the power of speech. This First-Year Seminar will introduce you to some of the ways that power has been described and thought about. In addition to studying arguments that connect the power of speech to what it means to be human, we will explore various attempts both to protect and limit speech, taking into consideration not only how we do things with words but how words affect us. Topics that will be covered include freedom of speech, censorship, hate speech, talking back, silence, and storytelling. We will read texts in philosophy, political science, law, and literature, and we will watch at least one film or play. While we discuss the power of speech, we will also reflect on the ways in which discussion fosters a community. In other words, the experience of our discussion is a topic for our conversation. First-Year Seminars are designed to encourage “meaningful civil exchange among students across disciplinary interests and backgrounds” as well as to “foster early, sustained faculty-student interaction and mentorship.” We will talk about how such seminars are supposed to work and how they may (or may not) realize their goals. Reading, analyzing, and discussing the texts assigned in this course will help us develop foundational critical thinking skills; how might these activities also establish a sense of (group) identity? Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 12/12 Tags: HIST-LAW
AS.001.197 (01)	FYS: Doctors and Patients: A Few Case Studies	MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM	Ender, Evelyne	Gilman 134	Fall 2026	Description: A famous, very experienced clinician used the phrase "The Soul of Care," signaling that medicine is not merely about fixing bodies. He wants to remind us that scientific knowledge involves mastery as well as empathy. "Narrative medicine" as this domain is called, assumes that the close study of stories can play a decisive role in preparing doctors for the challenging humanistic aspects of their profession. We focus in this First-Year Seminar on stories connected to medical cases, stories that can take us beyond medical questions to deeper issues connected to the human condition. Our seminar will be centered on discussions, often prepared in teams, based on your attentive close reading and research. The aim is to exercise your observational skills and imagination. What is at stake, medically and humanly speaking, is our capacity to uncover problems, dilemmas, ethical questions woven into texts that take us into the worlds of doctors and patients. Readings will involve a combination of modern and contemporary short stories, some of them more obviously fictional than others, some of them geographically or culturally more remote. Part of our study will also involve one longer text, namely When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi, and a small "anthology" of documents of a preparatory kind. We'll have at least one guest speaker, and also see a film together. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 12/12 Tags: n/a
AS.001.214 (01)	FYS: Doing Things With Maps	Th 4:30PM - 7:00PM	Patton, Elizabeth	Gilman 208	Fall 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 12/12 Tags: n/a
AS.001.294 (01)	FYS: Living and Writing Across Cultures	W 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Hashimoto, Satoru	Gilman 108	Fall 2026	Description: Many of us live across multiple cultures, but those real, visceral experiences often go unrecognized or even suppressed in our everyday lives. Whether stemming from migration, relocation, family backgrounds, or even the global ubiquity of social media and pop culture content, more people are living cross-cultural lives than ever before. And yet, the existing vocabularies appear quite inadequate to grasp the nuances, challenges, and complexities of those lives. Going beyond overused notions like cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and cultural hybridity, we explore in this First-Year Seminar what it means for us as individuals to live and exist across multiple cultures and consider the roles reading and writing play in making sense of such lives. What happens to us when we cross a cultural boundary? How have cross-cultural experiences been written about and conceptualized in different civilizations and periods of human history? How do economic and political circumstances influence those experiences? How do the transformation of information and media technologies shape them? We examine literary, philosophical, ethnographic, cinematic, and other artistic works from different civilizations and historical periods that engage with cross-cultural lives. Based on discussions of those texts, students are invited to explore their own cross-cultural experiences through writing and other creative media. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 12/12 Tags: n/a
AS.010.483 (01)	Three Artists (Three Sick Women): Art, Illness, Death	T 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Schopp, Caroline Lillian	Gilman 177	Fall 2026	Description: What happens when the artist becomes sick? How does illness become the subject of artistic practice? And what does art concerned with sickness tell us about the entanglement of gender and medicine in contemporary life? This course draws inspiration from Anne Wagner’s book, Three Artists, Three Women (1996), in which she explores an expectation that undergirds modernist art history: that the work of artists who are also women must reveal their femininity. We take up the challenge to this normative expectation with the work of three artists (who happened also to be three sick women) active in the post Second World War period. A German-Jewish immigrant to the US, Eva Hesse is known today for the fragile latex sculptures she made before dying from a brain tumor. Alina Szapocznikow, a Polish concentration camp survivor, employed her sculptural practice of body casting to index the symptoms and effects of her metastatic breast cancer. Hannah Wilke, an American feminist performance artist, painstakingly documented her treatments for terminal lymphoma. These artists’ careful explorations of their bodies and their illnesses trouble assumptions about femininity and feminism in the late twentieth century. They also afford an introduction to post-minimalism in the US, nouveau réalisme is Europe, and international conceptual and performance art. We constellate their interconnected work with that of others whose practices are infused in diverse ways by illness and its permeable definition: Indira Allegra, Cassils, Bob Flanagan, Yayoi Kusama, Wangechi Mutu, David Wojnarowicz, Florentina Holzinger. Readings in art history will be complemented with historical and contemporary approaches in feminist theory and critical disability studies, as well as a selection of literary and hybrid-form writings on art, illness, and death, including: Ingeborg Bachmann, Johanna Hedva, Audre Lorde, Paul Preciado, Gillian Rose. Credits: 3.00 Status: Waitlist Only Seats Available: 0/6 Tags: HART-MODERN
AS.040.121 (01)	Ancient Greek Mythology: Art, Narratives, and Modern Mythmaking	TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM	Yatromanolakis, Dimitrios	Gilman 108	Fall 2026	Description: This course focuses on major and often intricate myths and mythical patterns of thought as they are reflected in compelling ancient visual and textual narratives. Being one of the greatest treasure troves of the ancient world, these myths will further be considered in light of their rich reception in the medieval and modern world (including their reception in the modern fields of anthropology and philosophy). Credits: 3.00 Status: Waitlist Only Seats Available: 0/15 Tags: ARCH-RELATE
AS.100.338 (01)	Islam and Dune	Th 3:00PM - 5:30PM	Noor, Rao Mohsin Ali	Maryland 202	Fall 2026	Description: In this course we will explore how religion in general and Islam in particular informs the world of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune, laying particular emphasis on how the messianic and mystical tradition within Islam pervades the first novel. We will also watch excerpts from the film adaption by Denis Villeneuve, and the forthcoming second part in its entirety together in a local theater. As we do so, we will also discuss questions of Orientalism, representation, adaption, and appropriation in both the books and the films. Credits: 3.00 Status: Waitlist Only Seats Available: 0/15 Tags: HIST-MIDEST
AS.100.411 (01)	AI and Data Methods in History	Th 4:30PM - 7:00PM	Hyman, Louis; Jabko, Nicolas	Hodson 213	Fall 2026	Description: This course engages both a ‘history of data’ and the ‘data of history’ by exploring American labor, consumer and business history. Students will learn how to think critically about how data are made and organized. They will then use that data to build arguments and visualizations about social and economic change over time. Throughout the course, we will learn to use various tools such as Google Sheets, Python, and ChatGPT for data analysis. No prior experience with statistics or programming is necessary, but students should come with a desire to learn. Credits: 3.00 Status: Canceled Seats Available: 35/35 Tags: HIST-US, AGRI-ELECT, MSCH-HUM, CES-LC, CES-TI
AS.190.415 (01)	Political Arts: Dada, Surrealism, and Societal Metamorphoses	M 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Bennett, Jane	Gilman 132	Fall 2026	Description: In the years between World Wars I and II, a fascinating group of artists, manifesto-writers, performers, intellectuals, and poets, in Europe and the Caribbean, who were put off by conventional politics of the time, decided to pursue other means of societal transformation. This seminar explores the aims and tactics, and strengths and liabilities, of Dada and Surrealism, as it operated in Europe and the Americas in the years between the World Wars. We will also read texts and images from writers and artists influenced by Dada and Surrealism but applied to different historical and political contexts. Credits: 3.00 Status: Waitlist Only Seats Available: 0/15 Tags: INST-PT, POLI-PT
AS.213.332 (01)	Literature and the Visual Arts	T 3:00PM - 5:30PM	Gosetti, Jennifer Anna	Maryland 309	Fall 2026	Description: Literature and the Visual Arts is devoted to exploring the resonances between literary and visual forms of artistic expression and their enrichment of the modernist cultural landscape. We will aim to understand how the interest in visual art by modernist writers, and the impressions of literature on modernist and contemporary artworks newly illuminate or challenge traditional aesthetics of the temporality and spatiality of the work, aesthetic judgment, and the phenomenology of aesthetic attention. Readings may include works of literature or aesthetics by Immanuel Kant, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Klee, Stefan Zweig, Martin Heidegger, Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Siegfried Lenz, and Virginia Woolf, alongside work of many visual artists from van Gogh and Cézanne to German Expressionism and Anselm Kiefer. Taught in English. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 7/12 Tags: n/a
AS.213.398 (01)	Speaking Truth to Power: From Martin Luther to Audre Lorde	TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM	Frey, Christiane	Gilman 377	Fall 2026	Description: “Here I stand; I can do no other.” With these words, Martin Luther challenged the greatest powers of his time. Centuries later, Audre Lorde declared that “your silence will not protect you,” reframing truth-telling as a tool for survival and liberation. This course explores the ethics and aesthetics of fearless speech (Parrhesia). We will examine how individuals and literary figures—from 16th-century reformers to modern activists, from Sophocles’ Antigone to Wieland’s Diogenes—risked their lives and reputations to speak a truth that disrupts the status quo. How does language become a weapon? What is the cost of breaking the silence? And can truth remain “true” once it enters the arena of political power? These and other questions will be at the core of our inquiry in this seminar as we navigate the boundary between private conscience and public defiance. Readings include: Martin Luther, Plato, Sophocles, Wieland, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Audre Lorde. A section in German will be offered for interested students. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 2/15 Tags: n/a
AS.300.215 (01)	Law and Literature	TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM	Culbert, Jennifer	Hodson 315	Fall 2026	Description: This course will examine the relationship between law and literature. As many have observed, literature and law have much in common as well as much to teach each other. Topics this course will discuss include practices of interpretation, issues of authority, and the power of narrative. In addition to reading essays by scholars in the field, students will read a selection of judicial opinions, short stories, novels, and plays. Final grades will be based on class participation, three in-class essays, and a group project due at the end of the semester. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 2/15 Tags: CTAL-CONCEPT, HIST-LAW
AS.300.309 (01)	Heidegger’s "Being and Time"	F 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Lisi, Leonardo	Gilman 217	Fall 2026	Description: This year marks the centenary of Martin Heidegger’s "Being and Time," arguably the most important work of philosophy in the 20th century. Often considered an impenetrable book, in this course we will aim at a clear and jargon-free understanding of the overarching stakes and shape of its argument, as well as its individual passages and steps. To that end, we will work our way through the text as closely and systematically as possible. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 1/8 Tags: n/a
AS.300.311 (01)	God and Modern Literature	TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM	Lisi, Leonardo	Gilman 186	Fall 2026	Description: Modernity has often been described as the age in which God has died. But concern with the nature and experience of divinity pervades modern literary texts. In this course we will sample a variety of works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries that investigate the possibilities and limitations of religious belief under the conditions of modernity. Authors to be read include Kierkegaard, G. M. Hopkins, George Eliot, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Hermann Hesse, C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Solvej Balle, and Jon Fosse. This class counts towards the requirements of a text-based course for the minor in Comparative Thought and Literature. Credits: 3.00 Status: Waitlist Only Seats Available: 0/12 Tags: n/a
AS.300.315 (01)	Authoritarianism, Freedom, and the Arts	T 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Schmelz, Peter John	Gilman 208	Fall 2026	Description: What is the proper role of the arts and artists in society? Is censorship of the arts or artists ever permissible, for political or other reasons? How may artists and their publics challenge conventional frames of reference or control, state-sponsored or otherwise? Are any of the arts better suited than others to resistance or opposition? Are any of the arts better suited than the others to fostering control and compliance? This class will employ a comparative framework to examine these and other central questions raised by theories and histories of authoritarianism and the arts. It will investigate various theoretical and philosophical frameworks for understanding its key concepts, ranging from Plato, Kant, and Tolstoy to Dewey, Adorno, Arendt, and beyond. The class will concentrate on specific case studies drawn from across world history, beginning with examples from the early modern era, moving into the twentieth-century (including Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, the USSR, China, and the US 1950s, 1960s, and 1980s), and ending with the present day worldwide. It will draw on various art forms, including music, visual arts, literature, film, and various combinations of these and other art forms. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 11/16 Tags: INST-GLOBAL
AS.300.319 (01)	Fictions at Work	TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM	Siraganian, Lisa	Gilman 208	Fall 2026	Description: When you are working for a business, how do you distinguish your ideas, actions, and responsibilities from the firms’—if that is even possible? What is corporate culture or a corporate person, and how is it similar or different from any other kind of culture or person? These and related questions inspired and fascinated writers from the nineteenth century through the present. By reading and thinking about short stories, novels, films, and a play, we will explore these issues and potential resolutions to them. The course especially considers how problems of action, agency, and responsibility in capitalism become an intriguing challenge for writers and filmmakers. Texts by Herman Melville, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alice Munro, and George Saunders, and David Mamet; films Charlie Chaplin, Boots Riley, Kitty Green, and Bong Joon-ho. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 14/20 Tags: n/a
AS.300.372 (01)	Children’s Literature and the Self: From Fairy Tales to Science-Fiction	TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM	Jerzak, Katarzyna Elzbieta	Gilman 219	Fall 2026	Description: - You know, Hela, you’re an anxious human being. She: - I’m a human being? - Why, of course. You’re not a puppy. She pondered. After a long pause, surprised: - I’m a human being. I’m Hela. I’m a girl. I’m Polish. I’m mommy’s little daughter, I’m from Warsaw…. What a lot of things I am! Janusz Korczak, Ghetto Diary This course isn’t what you expect. We will tackle painful topics: orphanhood, loneliness, jealousy, death. You will learn that “Snow White expresses, more perfectly than any other fairy-tale, the idea of melancholy” (Adorno). We will also deal with parenthood, childhood, justice, and love. We will not watch any Disney films. Who is a child? “Children are not people of tomorrow; they are people today,” wrote in 1919 Janusz Korczak, pediatrician, and children’s author who believed in children’s rights. We will read folk tales, authorial fairy tales (Oscar Wilde), fantasy books (Tove Jansson’s Moomintrolls) and science-fiction (Stanisław Lem’s Fables for Robots). We will also investigate the special connection between children and animals (Juan Rámon Jimenez, Margaret Wise Brown). Many iconic children’s literature characters, such as Peter Pan, “a Betwixt-and-Between,” Little Prince, and Pippi Longstocking, are outsiders. All along we will consider how children’s literature reflects and shapes ideas of selfhood, from archetypal to post-humanistic ones. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 1/25 Tags: n/a
AS.300.399 (01)	Cinema and Philosophy	MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM	Marrati, Paola	Gilman 208	Fall 2026	Description: What do films and philosophy have in common? Do films express, with their own means, philosophical problems that are relevant to our experience of ourselves and the world we live in? This term we will study such issues with a particular focus on questions of justice, truth, revenge, forgiveness, hope, hate, and fear. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 7/10 Tags: n/a
AS.300.441 (01)	Thoreau and Whitman: The Concept of Influence	F 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Bennett, Jane	Gilman 313	Fall 2026	Description: Readings from the works of Thoreau and Whitman, with an eye toward how they explore the multi-specied process of influence upon subjectivity-formation. “Influence” names the incursion, absorption, digestion, and transformation of an outside (including bodies, ideas, affects, elements, moods, atmospheres) into a subjectivity experienced as an inside. What are the powers and limits of Whitman’s and Thoreau’s experiments with language and writing (rhetoric, syntax, imagery, myth) as they seek to induce, inflect, combat, and transform influences? What role do their physical encounters with nonhuman agencies (of plants, animals, objects, divinities) play in, first, the way such encounters are turned into words (depicted and described) and, second, in the degree and kind of influence that those encounters and words have upon us as readers? Cross listed with Political Science Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 11/15 Tags: CTAL-CONCEPT
AS.300.501 (01)	Independent Study		Jerzak, Katarzyna Elzbieta		Fall 2026	Description: Undergraduate student having directed work with a specific faculty. Credits: 1.00 - 3.00 Status: Approval Required Seats Available: 5/5 Tags: n/a
AS.300.501 (02)	Independent Study		Schmelz, Peter John		Fall 2026	Description: Undergraduate student having directed work with a specific faculty. Credits: 1.00 - 3.00 Status: Approval Required Seats Available: 4/5 Tags: n/a
AS.305.246 (01)	Out of Place: Diasporic Stories, Real and Imagined	TTh 4:30PM - 5:45PM	Todarello, Josh	Gilman 381	Fall 2026	Description: How do displaced people turn their experiences into stories? What can narratives of displacement teach us about the formation of individual and collective memory, the construction of personhood, and the placeness of diaspora, at once real and imagined? In this seminar, we examine the facts, fables, and fictions of displacement to and from the United States as constructed in literature, film, visual art, popular media, and personal accounts. Our investigations may include Chinese labor on the transcontinental railroad; Germans fleeing fascism in Los Angeles; Black Americans’ self-exile; forced displacement after Hurricane Katrina; Latin American immigration; and migration patterns in Silicon Valley. Working though these events, we will map differences and commonalities in modes of displacement and analyze the structure and quality of their narratives. Theoretical texts will orient and deepen our investigations; these may include works by Homi Bhabha, Richard Wright, Mike Davis, Cherríe Moraga, Fred Moten, Louise Pratt, Theodor Adorno. Student assignments will present opportunities for informal and formal writing and small group collaborations. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 3/15 Tags: CDS-MB, CDS-SSMC, CES-RI, CES-LC, CES-BM