In this course, we will explore American labor, business and immigration history through data using AI. 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 Chat GPT for data analysis. No prior experience with statistics or programming is necessary, but students should come with a desire to learn. For advanced undergraduates and graduates.

• Days/Times: M 5:00PM - 7:30PM
• Instructor: Hyman, Louis
• Room: Wyman Park 350
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/25
• PosTag(s): HIST-US, AGRI-ELECT, MSCH-HUM, CES-LC, CES-TI

The Caribbean is often described as enigmatic, uncommon and supernatural. While foreigners assume that the Caribbean is exotic, this course will explore this assumption from a Caribbean perspective. We will examine the links between Caribbean and Old-World imagination, the relationship between exoticism and Caribbean notions of superstition, and the way in which the Caribbean fictional universe derives from a variety of cultural myths. The course will be taught in English and all required texts are in English, French, and English translations from French. Students in the French program can choose to read all the original French versions and write in French.

• Days/Times: TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Desormeaux, Daniel
• Room: Smokler Center 214
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

What does it mean to exist, and to be able to reflect on this fact? What is it mean to be a self? This course explores the themes of existentialism in literature and philosophy, including the meaning of existence, the nature of the self, authenticity and inauthenticity, the inescapability of death, the experience of time, anxiety, absurdity, freedom and responsibility to others. It will be examined why these philosophical ideas often seem to demand literary expression or bear a close relation to literary works. Readings may include writings by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Heidegger, Rilke, Kafka, Simmel, Jaspers, Buber, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, and Daoud.

• Days/Times: T 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Gosetti, Jennifer Anna
• Room: Gilman 479
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course critically engages the presentation and imagination of animals and other non-human life in modern literature, philosophy, and thought. We will examine the figure of the animal and the means of conceptual differentiation between the animal and the human, considering animals' relation to or perceived exclusion from language, pain, embodiment, sexuality, and the visual gaze. The course is ideal for students interested in fascinating themes in literature and how they reflect philosophical concerns. No prior courses in philosophy are required. Students will read philosophical texts alongside literary works in learning the conceptual history of animals and of humanity as a distinct species. Expect fascinating readings and engaging, lively discussions. Readings may include works by Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger Derrida, Agamben, Poe, Kleist, Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Kafka, Mann, Pirandello, and Coetzee.

• Days/Times: W 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Gosetti, Jennifer Anna
• Room: Bloomberg 276
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/15
• PosTag(s): CES-LE

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.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Marrati, Paola
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/25
• PosTag(s): INST-PT, CES-ELECT

The “founding father of modern Chinese literature,” Lu Xun (1881-1936) saw himself as a contemporary of writers like Gogol, Ibsen, and Nietzsche in creating his seminal short stories and essays, and likewise, he has been seen by numerous Chinese and Sinophone writers as their contemporary since his lifetime until today. In this course, we will survey Lu Xun's canonical works and their legacies through a comparative approach. What echoes do Lu Xun's works have with the European and Russian texts he engaged with? Why did his works manage to mark a “new origin” of Chinese literature? How were his works repeated, adapted, and appropriated by Chinese and Sinophone writers from the Republican period through the Maoist era to the post-socialist present, even during the Covid-19 pandemic? Are his times obsolete now that China is on the rise? Or, have his times come yet? We will raise these questions to guide our comparative investigation into Lu Xun’s works and their legacies in China’s long twentieth century and beyond.

• Days/Times: WF 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Hashimoto, Satoru
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): INST-GLOBAL

This course offers a broad survey of tragic drama in the Western tradition, from its origins in ancient Greece to the twentieth century. In lectures and discussion sections, we will study the specific literary features and historical contexts of a range of different works, and trace the continuities and transformations that shape them into a unified tradition. Key questions and themes throughout the semester will include what counts as tragic, the tragedy of social and political conflict, the bearing of tragedy on the meaning and value of life, the antagonistic relation between world and humans, the promises and dangers of tragedy for contemporary culture. Authors to be studied: Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Shakespeare, de la Barca, Racine, Goethe, Strindberg, Lorca, and Beckett.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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.

• Days/Times: Th 4:30PM - 7:00PM
• Instructor: Jerzak, Katarzyna El?bieta
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

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 societies from the 1980s to the present. How did Chinese and Soviet intellectuals reconfigure, reform, and/or reinvent their cultures as they re-embraced the 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” today? In this co-taught course, specialists in Sinophone and Soviet cultures will guide students to read and discuss representative works from the 1980s onward from a comparative perspective. Readings include Cui Jian, Yu Hua, Can Xue, Mo Yan, Yan Lianke, Guo Songfen, and the film Hibiscus Town, as well as Viktor Tsoi, Komar and Melamid, Aka Morchiladze, Oksana Zabuzhko, Serhiy Zhadan, and the film Repentance. No prerequisites. All course materials will be provided in English translation or with English subtitles.

• Days/Times: F 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Hashimoto, Satoru; Schmelz, Peter John
• Room: Gilman 381
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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.

• Days/Times: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Lippincott, Tom; Sirin Ryan, Hale
• Room: Gilman 55
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

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.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Backer, Samuel Ehrlich; Messner, Craig A
• Room: Gilman 195
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/10
• PosTag(s): COGS-COMPCG

Deserts have always mesmerized and fascinated people from different cultures and backgrounds. These arid lands, which are principally known for the scarcity of water resources, excessive heat, and dusty winds, have attracted romantics, dreamers, mystics, spies, ethnographers, explorers, and fearless adventurers as well as social outcasts and brigands. Students in the course will engage with different literary works that are emplotted in different deserts. Drawing on the tension between Saharanism, which we simply define as a universalizing imaginary of deserts, and ecological care (ecocare), whereby is meant the intimate relationship between people and place, the course will allow students to engage in multifaceted analyses of the representations of the desert in scholarship, literature, and cinema. In addition to subverting all sorts of romantic, colonialist, and adventurist approaches to deserts, the students will emerge from the course understanding that desertic spaces are home to myriad forms of mobility, solidarity, and connectivity. Literature depicts people as they go about their quotidian life, producing artifacts, exchanging material and immaterial goods, and forming relationships, thus debunking Saharanism myths of emptiness, death, and danger that have overtaken the image of deserts in popular imagination. Accordingly, by excluding the false assumption of the desert’s death, the course will allow students to think about the environmental and humanistic ethics of nuclear experiments, policing, and extraction that unfold in deserts across the globe.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: El Guabli, Brahim
• Room: BLC 4040
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 14/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Climate change poses an existential threat to human civilization. Yet the attention and concern it receives in ordinary life and culture is nowhere near what science tells us is required. What are the causes of this mismatch between crisis and response? What accounts for our collective inability to imagine and grasp this new reality, and how can it be overcome? In pursuit of these questions, we will pair literary works and films with texts from politics, philosophy, literary theory, and religion, that frame climate change as a fundamental challenge to our ways of making sense of the human condition.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/12
• PosTag(s): CES-LE

This course critically engages the presentation and imagination of animals and other non-human life in modern literature, philosophy, and thought. We will examine the figure of the animal and the means of conceptual differentiation between the animal and the human, considering animals' relation to or perceived exclusion from language, pain, embodiment, sexuality, and the visual gaze. The course is ideal for students interested in fascinating themes in literature and how they reflect philosophical concerns. No prior courses in philosophy are required. Students will read philosophical texts alongside literary works in learning the conceptual history of animals and of humanity as a distinct species. Expect fascinating readings and engaging, lively discussions. Readings may include works by Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger Derrida, Agamben, Poe, Kleist, Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Kafka, Mann, Pirandello, and Coetzee.

• Days/Times: W 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Gosetti, Jennifer Anna
• Room: Bloomberg 276
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/4
• PosTag(s): CES-LE

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: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
• Room: Gilman 10
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/12
• PosTag(s): CES-CC, CES-ELECT

"Love is mad, love is obsessive, love can be a painful or tragic, or on the contrary an experience to be treasured forever. That's what books have taught us, by giving poetic souls a chance to imagine and develop romantic ideas -- on paper. These books have in turn inspired films, or in earlier days, great operas. This course is offered to those of you who might miss the experience of getting lost in a book or story! As a historian of ideas and a specialist of narrative with a keen interest in bodies, minds and feelings, and in gender, I will explore with you in this seminar a few favorite love stories. Each is chosen because it helps us uncover a universe of romantic feelings, often in conflict with social conventions (as is Romeo and Juliet for example). Our course will also involve the study of a film (Jane Campion's Bright Star) and possibly of the opera, La Traviata -- as well as a class trip to the movies to see, if available, a recent presentation of our theme. Among the readings for this class: The Legend of Tristan and Isolde, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther; a selection of contemporary short stories.

• Days/Times: TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Ender, Evelyne
• Room: Shriver Hall 001
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

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.

• Days/Times: MW 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Ender, Evelyne
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

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 GIS basics, and those among you with previous experience in these technologies will be welcome to contribute ideas and share skills (no previous experience is required). Over the course of the semester students will pursue their own group projects, developed in class discussions and visits to various mapping technology hubs around Hopkins, such as Geospatial Data and GIS technologies at Milton S. Eisenhower Library, brain mapping technologies at Biomedical Engineering, and approaches to mapping the heavens at the Space Telescope Science Institute. We will also ground ourselves in the Humanities by reading The Odyssey of Homer (trans. James Lattimore, any edition) and testing out various mapping techniques on the intersecting adventures of Odysseus, his son Telemachus, and his wife Penelope. A series of short close reading assignments on selected passages from The Odyssey will help to refine analytical and writing skills, and a final group or personal project report on a topic of your choice will address the (very) general subject of “How maps enhance, change, clarify or complicate ideas.

• Days/Times: M 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Patton, Elizabeth
• Room: Gilman 134
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dystopia (from the Latin) means “bad place.” Classic literary dystopias such as We, 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451 depict societies gone wrong, bad places in which socioeconomic ideas promise harmony but produce nightmarish, even apocalyptic outcomes. A common theme of dystopian fiction is the conflict between collective need and individual desire. In this course we will pursue this theme, and others, as we read works of fiction alongside influential works of socio-economic thought. One of our aims will be to tease out the buried dreams and latent possibilities in the historical realities and literary imaginings of dystopic worlds. Readings include selections from popular fiction and contemporary media as well as texts by authors such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Hayek, Rosa Luxemburg, W.E.B. Du Bois, Franz Kafka, Juli Zeh, Olivia Wenzel, Elias Canetti, Brigitte Riemann, Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Herta Müller, and Philip K. Dick.

• Days/Times: TTh 4:30PM - 5:45PM
• Instructor: Todarello, Thomas Josh
• Room: Gilman 77
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 11/14
• PosTag(s): MLL-GERM

For the past fifty years, scholars and cinephiles have been drawn to psychoanalysis as a tool for understanding the unconscious effects films have on their viewers. However, over the past twenty years, since the dawn of television’s Second Golden Age, there has been significantly less psychoanalytic engagement with television as a medium. Marxist theorists and critics, on the other hand, have long been interested in television. But until relatively recently, this was usually to bemoan it as an ideological product of the “culture industry.” This course draws on central texts of media studies, as well as key texts in psychoanalytic and Marxist theory, to ask some of the following questions: What is formally unique about the television episode? Are series works of art or commodities, or both? What is Prestige TV, and is it over? What role have streaming services played in the evolution of the medium? What is binge watching, and why do we both love and hate to do it? We will watch episodes of many of the most lauded serial dramas of the past few decades, such as The Sopranos, Twin Peaks, Mad Men, The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Succession, as well as critically acclaimed comedies like The Simpsons, Seinfeld, The Office (UK), and Peep Show. We will read theorists such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Laura Mulvey, Jason Mittell, Mark Fisher, and Todd McGowan.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Meyer, Marshall
• Room: Shaffer 202
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course examines the revolutions produced by four of the most innovative and influential figures in modern drama: Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Bertolt Brecht, and Samuel Beckett. We will look in detail at specific plays and literary programs in order to trace the transformation drama underwent during this period and to probe the claims and ambitions of modern art.

• Days/Times: F 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Marrati, Paola
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/25
• PosTag(s): n/a

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.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 14/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

A comparative tour of modern narrative forms from 3 continents. The emphasis is on the development of shorter fictional models, though some of the founders and innovators are better known for their novels. The emphasis will be on the emergence new structural, rhetorical, and thematic concerns, including adaptation to other media. There will be an optional hour for queries and discussion TBA.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Marrati, Paola
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 23/25
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

Great Books and Conversations” engages students across all disciplines in critical reading of and writing on foundational texts of the Western tradition (and beyond), from Homer’s The Odyssey to Dante’s Inferno, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, Virginia Wolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and others. The course encompasses lectures by JHU professors and guest speakers, group discussions, and an introduction to the library’s exceptional collection of rare books. Guided by a team of Humanities professors from different departments, students will learn how to read closely, analyze, and converse on great literature. This course fulfills three foundational abilities: (1) Writing and Communication; (3) Culture and Aesthetics; and (5) Ethics and Foundations.

• Days/Times: Th 10:30AM - 11:45AM, T 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Bedran, Marina; Patton, Elizabeth
• Room: Croft Hall G02
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

Great Books and Conversations” engages students across all disciplines in critical reading of and writing on foundational texts of the Western tradition (and beyond), from Homer’s The Odyssey to Dante’s Inferno, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, Virginia Wolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and others. The course encompasses lectures by JHU professors and guest speakers, group discussions, and an introduction to the library’s exceptional collection of rare books. Guided by a team of Humanities professors from different departments, students will learn how to read closely, analyze, and converse on great literature. This course fulfills three foundational abilities: (1) Writing and Communication; (3) Culture and Aesthetics; and (5) Ethics and Foundations.

• Days/Times: Th 10:30AM - 11:45AM, T 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Bedran, Marina; Patton, Elizabeth
• Room: Croft Hall G02
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/12
• PosTag(s): n/a