Department website: http://history.jhu.edu/
The Department of History offers students the opportunity to work intensively in the classroom and with individual faculty to discover the richness and complexity of history. Undergraduates begin with general courses, but progress quickly to courses that explore topics in depth and provide experience in researching, analyzing, and writing about the past. Graduate students work independently and with faculty advisors on reading and research in their fields of interest, while departmental seminars bring them together to discuss their research, forging a collegial intellectual culture. The department emphasizes European history, United States history, and the histories of Africa, Latin America, and East Asia. Faculty and students participate in a variety of interdisciplinary programs, including Africana Studies, East Asian Studies, Latin American Studies, Judaic Studies, Museums and Society, the Program for the Study of Women, Gender & Sexuality, and International Studies. Students also have opportunities to work with the Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe and the Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance.
Facilities
In addition to the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at the University, students in the Department of History can use the collections of the Peabody Institute Library, the Enoch Pratt Free Library, and the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore, and of the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and other specialized libraries in nearby Washington, D.C. There is provision for regular transportation to and from the Library of Congress. Also within easy distance are the holdings of specialized historical libraries and archives in Annapolis, Richmond, Williamsburg, Charlottesville, Wilmington, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Trenton, Princeton, Newark, and New York.
Graduate Programs
The graduate program prepares motivated students for a range of professional opportunities with expertise in historical analysis and application including careers as research scholars and college and university teachers, as well as analysts, consultants, and public scholars. Hence it is designed for candidates who want to proceed directly to the Ph.D. degree, who have developed historical interests, and who are prepared to work independently. Within the areas of European history, American history, and the histories of Africa, Latin America, and China, the department emphasizes social/economic and intellectual/cultural history. Although diplomatic and political history are not emphasized, attention is given to the social, economic, and cultural bases of politics.
The program is organized around seminars rather than courses, credits, or grades. AS.100.781 The Seminar, AS.100.782 The Seminar, and satellite seminars - in European, American, and Comparative World History, Asian History, the Black World and Gender History - bring together students, faculty, and invited scholars from outside the university to discuss their research work. These departmental regional and thematic seminars create a lively intellectual community in which graduate students quickly become contributing members. The combination of flexibility, independence, and scholarly collegiality offered by the Hopkins program gives it a distinctive character.
Students select four fields (one minor and three comprehensive) and make their own arrangements with professors for a study program leading to comprehensive examinations at the end of the second year. Those arrangements may include taking a seminar in the field. One, and exceptionally two, fields may be taken outside the Department of History. Students have maximum flexibility in the construction of individual plans of study, as well as the opportunity to work closely with several professors.
Admission and Financial Aid
In judging applications, the department puts particularly heavy emphasis on the quality of the student’s historical interests and prior research experience. Each applicant must submit a sample of written work. Ordinarily no candidate for admission is accepted whose record does not indicate an ability to read at least one foreign language.
The department accepts only those students who plan to work in the specific fields represented by the faculty, and each student is admitted only with the approval of at least one professor. Applicants should indicate the proposed field of specialization at the time of application. With the concurrence of a new faculty advisor, students may, of course, later change their major faculty advisor or co-advisor.
For current course information and registration go to https://sis.jhu.edu/classes/
Courses
AS.100.102. The Medieval World. 3 Credits.
This course explores selected topics in the political, economic, social, and intellectual history of Western Europe in the wider world in the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the fourteenth century. Special emphasis will be given to understanding the ways in which medieval society functioned as it reorganized itself after the almost total collapse of the ancient world. Topics include: religious plurality, sovereignty and subjecthood, flourishing of learning, chivalric culture, crusading, and the plague and its effects. We will follow the interplay between material and cultural forces in the processes of social organization.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.103. Early Modern Europe & the Wider World. 3 Credits.
This survey course examines the history of Europe from the early sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries. Topics to be examined include the Reformations and religious wars, curiosity, contact and conquest of non-European lands, the rise of modern bureaucratic states, the emergence of popular sovereignty as a political criterion, the new science, as well as expanding literacy and consumption.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.104. Modern Europe in a global context, 1789-Present. 3 Credits.
Modern Europe familiarizes students with key moments, ideas, communities, individuals, and movements which have defined European experiences in global encounters since the Revolutionary era. We will particularly focus on European imperial expansion, the formation of the modern nation-state, the history of political ideas and their global ramifications, and popular culture and social change.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.106. History of the Global Cold War. 3 Credits.
The Cold War was a defining event of the 20th century. But what was it? Where did it take place? Who were the major contenders? And what were the consequences? This introductory course will examine the Cold War in a global context, looking beyond the United States and Europe. Students will learn about how the Cold War unfolded in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, in relation to the fall of European empires, the process of decolonization, and the rise of U.S. global power. This course will introduce students to key themes and primary sources in the study of the Global Cold War, as a foundation for further courses in History, Critical Diaspora Studies, International Studies, Political Science, etc.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.107. History of the Global War on Terror. 3 Credits.
The United States and its allies launched the Global War on Terror in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attack. But it quickly exceeded the scope of neutralizing al-Qaeda, the organization behind that attack, leading to military campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and across numerous countries in Africa and elsewhere. This course will examine the historical background of the Global War on Terror, including its relationship to prior stages of colonialism and the Cold War. It will delve into the post-9/11 wars and examine the relationship between US foreign policy and regional politics in Asia and Africa. This course is sequential to AS.100.106, The History of the Global Cold War, though that course is not a prerequisite. This course will introduce students to concepts and methods in the study of recent history, as a foundation for further courses in History, Critical Diaspora Studies, International Studies, Political Science, etc.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.108. Making America: Black Freedom Struggles to 1896. 3 Credits.
The history of Africans and people of African descent in what becomes the continental United States. We will learn about the everyday experiences of Africans and people of African descent and the way this struggle for (and meaning of) freedom made make and shake the Americas. You will learn historical facts and how to distinguish change over time and place. You will learn to construct historical narratives using primary and secondary sources, about systems of oppression (like slavery) and how those systems operate--and how ordinary people and communities resisted and took that system down. Opportunities for independent research will be available for advanced students looking for professional development and research experience.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.111. Making America: Blacks in the Twentieth Century. 3 Credits.
This survey course explores the role of African-descended people and social-political responses directed at those people in the development of modern American society.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.115. Modern Latin America. 3 Credits.
A class combining Latin American history since independence and digital humanities. Students will build guided research projects while thinking about questions of republicanism, freedom and unfreedom, migration, and development.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.117. Introduction to Native North America. 3 Credits.
This course provides an overview of Native American History in North America. We will investigate the diverse Indigenous cultures and political systems that have called the continent home from large and historically well-documented polities such as Cherokee nation and the Haudenosaunee to the crucial yet often-overlooked role of smaller polities such as those of the Abenakis and the Petites Nations of the Gulf Coast. Along the way we will ask: how have geography (and displacement) shaped culture and politics? how have Indigenous histories shaped the history of the United States (as well as Mexico and Canada)? what are the unique challenges of studying and writing Native American History today?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.118. Introduction to the Middle East. 3 Credits.
Where is the Middle East? What is it exactly in the Middle of? What, if anything, defines it, and who gets to do the defining? This introductory course poses such questions. Whilst promising no easy answers, it will nevertheless introduce students who have no prior knowledge of the Middle East to the region. Emphasis will be placed on the history, geography, languages, religions, and culture of the pre-modern and modern Middle East. Students will also be exposed to different methods and approaches to the academic study of the region. The course, while at the introductory level, is reading and writing intensive.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.119. Introduction to U.S. Immigration History and Law. 3 Credits.
Many Americans celebrate the United States as a “nation of immigrants,” but defining which immigrants to include and exclude in the nation has always been a contentious process. This course will put some of today’s immigration debates in historical perspective, examining how past Americans debated questions about the “fitness” of immigrants for freedom and citizenship, and how those debates in turn shaped immigrant experiences, the law, and American identity. Topics that we will cover include colonialism and slavery; immigrant labor; families; gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality; immigration law; borders and deportation; refugees and asylum seekers; and citizenship and belonging.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.122. Introduction to History of Africa (since 1880). 3 Credits.
Explore the social and political changes that have transformed the African continent in the modern era, with a focus on the rise and fall of colonialism, the relation between Africa and the world in the post-colonial era, and effect of colonialism and its aftermath on African household structures and gender roles.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.125. The History of Gender and Sexuality on the Internet. 3 Credits.
This course examines the historical forces since the 1960s that gave rise to the computing industry, the internet, and social media. Topics will include the history of Silicon Valley, parasociality, loneliness, and identity politics.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.128. Approaches to Jewish History. 3 Credits.
The course will provide an introduction to the study of Jewish History.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.129. Introduction to Modern Jewish History. 3 Credits.
Jewish history 1750-present in Europe, the Near East, the US, Israel; the challenges of modernity and new forms of Jewish life and conflict from Enlightenment and emancipation, Hasidism, Reform and Orthodox Judaism to capitalism and socialism; empire, nationalism and Zionism; the Holocaust. Extensive attention to US Jewry and State of Israel.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.132. Introduction to Jewish America. 3 Credits.
An introduction to the study of the American Jewish experience, tracing five centuries of history from the colonial period through to the present. Topics will include immigration and citizenship, antisemitism and philosemitism, religion and politics.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.141. Error and Chaos in Military History. 3 Credits.
What does the aphorism that “war is hell” mean in practical terms? The course will serve as a deconstructive introduction to military history, overviewing soldiers’ and generals’ experiences of historically significant military disasters. Students will also be guided through the creation of a research paper on a conflict of their own choosing.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.143. China: Neolithic to Song. 3 Credits.
This class offers a broad overview of changes in China from Neolithic times through the Song dynasty (roughly from 5000 BCE through the 13th century CE). It features discussion of art, material culture, philosophical texts, religious ideas, and literary works as well as providing a broad overview of politics and society. Close readings of primary sources in discussion sections and extensive use of visual material in lectures will allow students to consider the relationship between what (sources) we have—and what we can know about the past.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.144. Shopaholics: Consumer Revolution and the Material World, 1600-1850. 3 Credits.
We live in a world of global consumption. This course introduces students to the birth of global consumer culture in the period from the 1600s through to the American, French and Haitian revolutions. These revolutions were themselves sold to consumers through “revolutionary things”, and this period witnessed the first major consumer boycotts against slave-produced goods. Students will examine the histories of many key commodities involved in the “consumer revolution”, including fashion items such as shoes, wigs, clothing and accessories. A significant portion of the course will examine addictive stimulants like sugar, coffee, tea and tobacco, globalized and imperial goods which became common for the first time in this period. We shall see how production of these goods involved new forms of racialized exploitation; simultaneously, we shall explore the diversity of people involved in the consumer revolution, studying the consumption of important new goods by people living in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. By the end of the class, students will understand how the emergence of mass consumption affected the global politics of race, gender and class, with especially important consequences for women and non-elite men. Students will examine objects lauded for their politeness, decorative appeal, and cultural importance such as porcelain tea sets, snuffboxes, and fans. Students will choose their own objects for a student presentation and research project.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.145. Introduction to Computational History. 3 Credits.
History exists at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences and, thus, is a perfect gateway to students interested in either discipline. This course engages both a “history of data” and the “data of history” by exploring American labor, consumer, and business history. Students learn to think critically about how data are made and organized, then use historical datasets to build arguments and visualizations about social and economic change over time. Tools include Google Sheets, Python, and Claude AI. No prior experience with statistics or programming required.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Science and Data (FA2),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.170. Chinese Cultural Revolution. 3 Credits.
The Cultural Revolution was Mao Zedong’s last attempt to transform Chinese society spiritually and structurally. The events of this period were marked by social upheaval, personal vendettas, violence, massive youth movements, and extreme ideological pressure. What were the causes of the Cultural Revolution? How was it experienced and how is it remembered? To what extent are its reverberations felt in contemporary Chinese society, politics, and literature? How have subsequent events affected our understanding of the Cultural Revolution decade? This course will explore the Cultural Revolution from a variety of perspectives, focusing on the relationship between events in China from 1966-1976, and their subsequent interpretation as history and in historical memory in China and beyond.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.171. Europe since 1945. 3 Credits.
This class focuses on Europe from the end of World War II until today. We will discuss topics such as the Cold War, the European welfare state, Europe’s volatile relations with the US and the Soviet Union/ Russia, decolonization, 1989 and neoliberalism, racism, European integration and the role of the European Union in international politics. Expect to spend 25% of class time in group work, where we discuss the assigned literature, movies, documentaries, textual and visual primary sources.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.190. Modern African American History, 1896 – present. 3 Credits.
This course introduces students to the defining social, political, and cultural moments that reflect the experience of African Americans in the United States, 1896 – present. Topics include the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Freedom Struggle, African American politics, urban rebellion, mass incarceration, Hip Hop culture, the current movement for Black Lives, and more.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.203. The American Revolution in History and Memory. 3 Credits.
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution questions about the legacy and meaning of the revolutionary era circulate among both professional historians and the American public: How revolutionary was the American Revolution, and for whom? What did the diverse population of North America in the 1770s—including free and enslaved people of African descent, Native Americans, as well white women and men in the thirteen colonies—make of the political rupture between Britain and America? What type of nation did the founders envision and how does that continue to shape the United States today? How has the American Revolution been remembered and memorialized at different times in American history? In this course we will read current scholarship on the American Revolution and also visit museum and cultural sites to explore both the events of the American Revolution and their ongoing memorialization while exploring answers to these questions.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.209. Slavery in the Caribbean. 3 Credits.
An introductory examination of slavery in the Caribbean, this course explores the structure of slavery and its development and its transformative effects on people and the region, and the formation of the modern world. Students can expect to explore themes broadly related to gender and sexuality; politics and economy; science and technology; health and the environment; law, culture and society.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.220. "Bad Feminism": Exclusion and Essentialism. 3 Credits.
This course introduces students to major debates and controversies within the feminist movement in the United Kingdom and the United States from 1850 to the present. From colonial and eugenic women’s movements to anti-trans and carceral feminism, the contents and assessments of this course ask you to consider a pressing question in contemporary feminism: how do we reckon with the reality that many feminists have excluded and continue to exclude people from the liberatory futures they imagine? Together we will analyze the value and limits of historical context and evaluate the relationship between past and present controversies within the feminist movement. Employing critical feminist concepts such as intersectionality and positionality, we will consider what it means for people (including ourselves) to be “products of their time.” By doing historical research in newspaper databases, we will evaluate how feminist claims about “sisterhood” have changed over time.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.225. Mansa Musa’s Gold: the History of African Muslims. 3 Credits.
Today about one third of the world’s Muslims live in Africa, a continent where Islam has a long history. This course follows African Muslims as they traveled and migrated, built communities and states, produced literature and scholarship, and contended with slavery and empire. Our historical investigations will take us all over the African continent as well as across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, following the paths of African Muslim pilgrims, scholars, slaves, soldiers, merchants, rulers, and revolutionaries. No prerequisites needed.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.226. Antisemitism in Historical Perspective. 3 Credits.
This course explores the origins and evolution of antisemitism, with focus on questions of historical continuity and rupture, comparison with other hatreds, and the politics of history.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.229. African Women in the Postcolonial City. 3 Credits.
This course examines the many facets of women’s lives in postcolonial African cities. Using diverse sources, including films, novels, and newspapers, the course interrogates how women understood and fashioned themselves amid social, political, and economic change.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.233. History of Modern Germany. 3 Credits.
There is more to Germany than beer, BMWs, and Bayern Munich. We explore politics, culture, economics and society to understand Germany and its role within Europe and the world from the 18th century, through imperialism, WWI and WWII, the Cold War to German unification, the ‘Refugee Crisis’, the rise of the AfD, and EU politics today.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.239. Chronicling the Caribbean. 3 Credits.
This course is a critical inquiry into the writing of the region’s history as mere appendage to imperial history justifying European domination and exploitation of the region. It explores how innovations in Caribbean Archaeology, Caribbean History, and the Digital Humanities challenge Eurocentric knowledge claims extending the decolonization struggle beyond politics and economy to include the academy.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
AS.100.244. U.S. Conservatism. 3 Credits.
In this course we will explore the history of conservative ideas and their impact on American society from the late-19th century to the present. We will evaluate the successes and failures of conservative thinkers, activists, and movements in shaping policy and culture amidst major transformations in American life. In doing so, we will also investigate relationships and conflicts among a range of formations on the political right, including traditionalists, libertarians, the New Right, neoconservatives, paleoconservatives, neoliberals, and post-liberals. Some basic familiarity with modern U.S. history is recommended, but not required, to take this course.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.245. Islam East of the Middle East: The Interconnected Histories of Islam in Asia. 3 Credits.
Challenging the conception that Islam is synonymous with the Middle East, this course considers Muslim populations across Asia and interrogates how Islam and these regions have shaped one another.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.100.247. Making War in a New World: Warfare in Early America, 1492-1804. 3 Credits.
Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean set off a chain of violence that swept through the early modern Americas. In this course we will investigate how warfare shaped North America and the Caribbean in the period between Columbus’s fateful 1492 voyage and the establishment of an independent Haitian state. The interlinked patterns of colonialism and trans-Atlantic slavery forced together people from three continents and made Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans in the Americas rethink what it meant to fight a war, and how to do it. We will consider how different cultures understood, deployed, and attempted to control violence, and then focus on specific wars, engaging with both contemporary scholarship and primary sources. Along the way, we will consider how the Americas, despite a long history before Columbus, became a “new world” through the warfare that followed after him. Throughout this semester we will read and discuss a variety of different forms of historical writing and consider the wide applicability of the history we are studying in the world around us today. Students will have the opportunity to explore different forms of historically informed writing in their own work.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.250. The American Revolution in Unexpected Places. 3 Credits.
This course considers the American Revolution from the perspective of locations beyond the thirteen rebelling colonies. Covering a range of global hotspots, the focus is on events from 1763 to 1788.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.252. Sex and the American City. 3 Credits.
Why are cities associated with sex and vice? How did modern forms of policing and urban development first arise? This introductory course explores the place of US cities in the history of sexuality, including Baltimore.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.253. Modern Histories of Human Rights: Empire, Justice, and International Law. 3 Credits.
The language of human rights can be found all around us, as a legal framework, political discourse, and method of interpreting justice and liberation. Much of this language invests human rights with a unique scale of political and intellectual power, opening up a range of questions. Can human rights accomplish justice? How are they enforced? What does it mean to support human rights? In order to answer these contemporary questions it helps to start from some historical ones. Where did human rights come from? What is a human right? Who decides and does it matter? Recently, scholars, including historians and lawyers, have revived attempts to chart the historical development of human rights as a discrete project. Those histories have diverged in the power and intellectual weight they attribute to human rights as well as the basic chronology of human rights as a discourse. This class will provide a survey of these histories and in the process attempt to introduce students to historiography as a method as well as provide insight into the structure and function of the modern human rights project.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.256. History of Kabbalah. 3 Credits.
This course surveys the history of Jewish magic, mysticism, and secret traditions from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. We will explore the concept of sod (mystery) and its historical variations, examining how it evolved over time. Readings will include excerpts from foundational texts of Jewish esotericism, such as Sefer Yetzirah, the Bahir, and the Zohar. Additionally, we will discuss practical Kabbalah—including the preparation and use of amulets and charms—as well as beliefs surrounding demonic (and angelic) possession.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.100.257. Africans and France, 1900-2024. 3 Credits.
By 1900, France had conquered large parts of the African continent - mainly through violence - and gained a reputation as the least racist Western state. In 2023, the French government works to hold onto the power it still holds in multiple sub-Saharan countries while, at home and abroad, the perniciousness and persistence of French anti-African racisms spark debate and activism. This course examines the interactions between African and Afro-descendent people and France/the French, in Africa (with particular attention to North and West Africa), France, and beyond. We will focus on colonialism, decolonization, and neocolonialism - notably “Françafrique” - as well as how Africans and Afro-descendent people in France navigated the challenges and possibilities they encountered.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.271. Documenting & Digitizing Black Louisiana: Sources, Tools and Contexts. 3 Credits.
Documenting & Digitizing Black Louisiana: Sources, Tools and Contexts is an experiential, team-based, community-engaged undergraduate seminar that combines secondary literature on the history of colonial Louisiana as well as the digital humanities, with intensive deep readings of a selection of translated documents. Seminar sessions will include gatherings with research teams of faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students, with a special emphasis workshops, with and hosted by scholars at JHU and beyond (including team members at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans. Students with interests in Black history, in multimedia content creation, in digital infrastructure, in manuscript documents, in translation and languages, in public history, social justice and community engagement will find much to learn in this course.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Science and Data (FA2),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.274. Conspiracy in American Politics. 3 Credits.
Conspiratorial thinking is nothing new in American politics. Since the founding of the nation, Americans have been riveted—and riven—by conspiracy theories. This course introduces students to key methods and questions in U.S. history by exploring conspiratorial episodes from the American Revolution through the present. We’ll pick apart allegations and denials of conspiracies to discover what they tell us about American politics and culture. We’ll also consider historians’ analyses of conspiratorial claims, and think about the relationship between conspiracy and historical causality.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.275. Passing in American Culture. 3 Credits.
This course explores passing narratives – stories that feature people who cross race, class, ethnic, or gender boundaries. We will consider what passing narratives can teach us about power and identity, especially as power is presumed to reside in the self and race is presumed to no longer matter.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.282. Race & Power in Modern South Africa. 3 Credits.
History of colonialism, the apartheid state, and the anti-apartheid liberation struggle in South Africa, with special attention to the role of gender, race, religion, and ethnicity.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.283. Making and Unmaking Queer Histories: Identity, Self-Representation, Politics, and Contexts, 1800-Pre. 3 Credits.
This course investigates sexual cultures through the lens of modern Queer History in the United States and Western Europe, with forays into global and transnational histories.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.293. Historical Methods, Archives and Interpretations. 3 Credits.
This course will survey the main methods of and approaches to history since the Ancient times till the present. We shall begin by asking “What is history?” and explicate the basic concepts such as “fact”, “event”, “source”, narrative”, “evidence”, etc. We shall inquire if history can teach lessons for the future, or, for that matter, any lessons at all. We shall explore the interactions of history and collective memory and discuss various social, political, and psychological uses and abuses of historical writing.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.295. American Thought since the Civil War. 3 Credits.
A survey of major developments in American philosophy, literature, law, economics, and political theory since 1865. Among other subjects, readings will explore modernism and anti-modernism, belief and uncertainty, science and tradition, uniformity and diversity, scarcity and surfeit, and individualism and concern for the social good.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.301. America after the Civil Rights Movement. 3 Credits.
This course explores the history of late twentieth-century America by examining the social, economic, and political legacies of 1960s civil rights protest for the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.302. History of the French-Algerian War, 1954-1962. 3 Credits.
The Algerian Revolution (1954-1962) successfully challenged French claims that Algeria was part of France and led to an independent Algerian Republic. This struggle is often seen as the touchstone anti-colonial struggle as well as the matrix for modern forms of terrorism and state-sponsored torture. We will explore its history.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.303. Old Regime and Revolutionary France. 3 Credits.
Examines the history of France from the reign of Louis XIV to the French Revolution, focusing on early modern society, popular culture, absolutism, the Enlightenment, overseas empire, and the French and Haitian Revolutions.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.306. Cultural History of the USSR. 3 Credits.
This class explores the history of the USSR through its varied cultural domains. It will consider music, literature, film, painting, and sculpture in both “high” and “low” registers, as well as aesthetics, power, and control over the entire Soviet period, at both the center and, especially, the periphery.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.307. Research Seminar: The American Elections. 4 Credits.
The United States has had 59 elections in its history, and in 2024 it will be having the next. Every election reflects a particular moment. Political parties, of course, have a logic of their own, driven by individuals and circumstances, but in some way, the elections also reflect larger, changing questions about the future of the country. This course will set the 2024 election in the long history of the American election. Each student will choose a different election to study deeply for a substantial research project, drawing on the archives of DC. At the end of the semester, we will synthesize our findings into a more readily accessible format that lays out how the American election has changed over time. This shared piece, as well as the individual histories, will be combined into a volume and perhaps an exhibit.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.310. The French Revolution. 3 Credits.
This course immerses students in the rich historiography of the French Revolution. We will focus on recent scholarship to examine such themes as: the nature of revolution and popular activism; violence & trauma; constitutionalism; citizenship, democracy, and social rights; the revolution after Thermidor and why the republic collapsed.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.314. The Enlightenment. 3 Credits.
Examines the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement that swept Europe in the eighteenth century to shape the modern world. Students will not only read canonical works of the period (Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, etc.) but also consider the broader social and cultural contexts in which ideas evolved. Thus, the class will explore the rise of the book trade and popular reading practices; new understandings of gender and sexuality; and the development of anti-Black racism and slavery in the Atlantic world.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.315. Farming America: Food and Power in U.S. History. 3 Credits.
Praise and praxis of the small farmer and local foodways long predate "modern" advancements in farming technologies and industrial agriculture. And strands of agrarianism have persisted in the face of agro-industrial growth. Questions of sustainable agriculture, food security, food sovereignty, and heritage crops and cuisines have posed poignant social, political, and economic concerns in the past and present. This class focuses on topics and tensions around culture, agriculture, and the environment in U.S. history through intersectional and interdisciplinary frameworks.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.316. Sports - A Force for Good? Rhine Ruhr Valley as Case Study of Sports' Main Challenges, Past & Pres. 3 Credits.
Students must apply and be accepted by the global education office.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.322. Asian Americans and the Law. 3 Credits.
This course will explore the prominent role that Asian Americans have played in U.S. legal history. Paying close attention to the relationship between immigration, citizenship, law, and society, we will dive more deeply into the legal histories of numerous groups of Asian descent in the American past and present. We will also place these experiences within the more heterogeneous and complicated landscape of race relations in the United States, as well as considering international relations and transnational connections.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.323. Malcolm and Martin: Evolutionary Revolutionaries. 3 Credits.
This is a seminar-style course devoted to the writings attributed to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X (El-Hajj El-Malik Shabazz). While the two the key African American male icons of the Civil Rights Movement era gained prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, they are typically discussed as representing two ideological camps: racial integration deeply committed to the idea of American exceptionalism and democratic perfection, and black nationalism, a non-state ideological move that adjudged the U.S. nation state on the same terms as any other imperial power. We will explore these binaries in their thought and the social movements connected to them and also engage with multiple cinematic representations of the two figures that have carried them forward into contemporary times.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.327. The Islamic Age of Empires: The Ottomans, the Mughals, and the Safavids. 3 Credits.
In this course, we will survey the political, social, intellectual, and cultural history of the three Islamic early modern gunpowder empires that ranged from “the Balkans to Bengal”: The Ottomans (1300-1922), the Safavids (1501-1736), and the Mughals (1526-1858).
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.329. Animals in Chinese and Japanese History. 3 Credits.
Everyday, we all have encounters with animals: the mosquito that bites our arm, the rat that runs in front of us on the sidewalk, the dog that greets us upon our return home. These interactions are quotidian, but rarely reflected in the histories that we read. In this class, we will bring the animal back into the narratives that we tell by considering history from a multispecies perspective. Taking the examples of China and Japan, we will see how animals, both real and metaphoric, played a critical role in the political, economic, religious, and social lives of our historical, human, actors. We will see how the inclusion of animals in history bolsters and challenges history as it has been written and gain a deeper understanding of how our current mores regarding animals came to be. Our class will begin with a discussion of Japan and China in the 17th century and end with contemporary controversies surrounding Japanese whaling and shark fin soup. Throughout the course we will consider the ethical and philosophical ramifications of our inquiries like the agency of non-human animals. Designed for upper-level undergraduate students interested in the history of East Asia, prior knowledge of the region will be useful but is not required.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.330. National Identity in 20th Century China & Japan. 3 Credits.
Using primary sources, including literature and film, we will explore the changing ways in which ideologues, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens defined national identity in 20th century China and Japan.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.332. Early Asian Latin America. 3 Credits.
From 1565 to 1815, the Manila galleons sailed between Spanish colonies in the Philippines and Mexico. Thousands of free and enslaved Asians from all over coastal Asia disembarked these ships at Acapulco and, within decades, could be found throughout Mexico, Central America, and Peru. A second and larger migratory wave of Chinese and South Asian contract laborers arrived in the Caribbean and South America during the nineteenth century. This course examines these two waves and their entanglements to chart the trajectories of the earliest Asian diasporas in the Americas. In the evaluation of these topics, we will pay close attention to racialization, cross-cultural exchange, lived experience, and unfree labor.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.333. Knowledge and Faith in U.S. History. 3 Credits.
How do we know the truth? Which beliefs are valid? What sources of intellectual authority should we follow? US history has been shaped by fierce disagreements over these questions. This course will explore many of the proposed answers, focusing on scientific and religious frameworks. As citizens, it is crucial to understand conflicts over truth, belief, and authority. Yet very few people have a sense of the history of these disputes or a language for discussing them constructively. This class provides both.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.338. Islam and Dune. 3 Credits.
What does a sci-fi novel from the mid-1960s, written by an eccentric journalist, and set in a far distant (and entirely imagined) future, have to say about our past, our present, and perhaps our future? As this course will demonstrate: quite a lot.In this seminar-style course we will explore how religion in general and Islam in particular informed the world of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune, laying particular emphasis on how the messianic, mystical, and occultist traditions within Islam pervade books 1 and 2 of the series. As we do so, we will interrogate and problematize the distinctions between science/magic, religion/politics, nature/culture, man/machine, and history/fiction that have defined secular modernity. We will also watch excerpts from the film adaptions by Denis Villeneuve. As we do so, we will also discuss questions of Orientalism, representation, adaption, and appropriation in both the books and the films.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.345. Right-wing Populism since the 1980s. 3 Credits.
This seminar will explore the development of right-wing populism in the US since the 1980s, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s election and ending in the present day. A key focus will be the relationship between populist visions of American government, identity politics, and economic crisis.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.346. Soviet-American Cold War. 3 Credits.
The focus will be on Soviet-American interactions, Cold-War Cultures, and the impact on both societies.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.347. Early Modern China. 3 Credits.
The history of China from the 16th to the late 19th centuries.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.348. 20th-Century China. 3 Credits.
Survey of the history of China from ca. 1895 to ca. 1976.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.350. Law and Empire. 3 Credits.
Exploration of the role of law in creating modern empires, and the role of empire in internatinal law. Focus on Africa, with comparative examples from other modern empires.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.351. Colonialism and Digital Media in Latin America. 3 Credits.
The legacies of colonialism in Latin America have been bitterly contested in recent film and other digital media. From highlighting the afterlives of enslavement to asserting Indigenous rights, creators and audiences have turned to screens to address the open wounds of the region’s colonial past. By analyzing hits like También la lluvia and the Mexican cult favorite, 499, this course uses film analysis, cultural memory, and primary sources to understand how these media make arguments about Latin America's colonial past and its significance in the present. The course similarly engages with the field of historical game studies through the analysis of videogames and boardgames that create simulations of early modern societies in the Americas. In this course, students will develop the ability to identify how digital media production and reception shape the memory of colonialism in the American hemisphere. In so doing, they will also acquire a deeper knowledge of Latin American colonial histories and their influence on contemporary culture. Necessarily, the course heavily emphasizes Indigenous perspectives and so simultaneously serves as an introduction to Indigenous Studies in Latin America.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.354. Playing in the White: Black Writers, the Literary Colorline and Writing Whiteness. 3 Credits.
This course will turn to known and not-so-known black writers during the early to mid-twentieth century who defied literary expectation and wrote stories that featured or focused on whiteness. We will consider what whiteness offered black writers and the political work that their literary experimentations did for a white American publishing industry.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.360. The Modern British World: Imperial Encounters, Regimes, and Resistance, 1700-Brexit. 3 Credits.
The Modern British World introduces some of the major events, themes, and controversies that led to Britain’s global dominance and ultimate decline as an imperial power.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.368. European Socialist Thought. 3 Credits.
A survey of European socialist theories, including Marxism, anarchism, Social Democracy, feminism, and anti-imperialism. Authors include Proudhon, Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Bernstein, Lenin, Luxemburg, Kollontai, Césaire, and Fanon.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.372. African Cities: Environment, Gender, and Economic Life. 3 Credits.
This class explores the geographic, economic and cultural issues resulting from Africa’s urban growth from precolonial times to the present.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.373. Crime, Punishment, Felony and Freedom: Law and Society in Premodern England, 1066 to 1688. 3 Credits.
This course explores the development of English law and the English legal tradition from the Norman Conquest through the English Revolution (ca. 1066-1688). We will begin by tracing the impact of the Norman Conquest of England and examine the origins and development of English legal and political institutions such as kingship, the common law, the evolution of legal procedure, and the court and jury system, ideas of franchise, treason and the emergence of Parliament. We will also consider how English law constructs legal categories including aliens, women, heirs, traitors as well as the legal framework for the emergence of the English Church under the Tudors. When applicable the implications of these institutions for developments in the contemporary American and British legal systems will be addressed.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.378. Africa and the Atlantic World. 3 Credits.
This upper-division course is designed to help students examine and probe the significant role Africa has played in shaping the Atlantic world and its place within its economic, social, religious, cultural, and political configurations.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.384. Experiential Research Lab: Course. 2 Credits.
History Department experiential research lab courses cover a wide range of topics. This course is part one of a two semester sequence and will comprise of an in-class component (AS.100.384; 2 credits) during the Fall or Spring semester followed by a 10-12 day study abroad component (AS.100.385; 1 credit) during Intersession or Summer. Enrollment is by instructor permission. Interested students should contact the course instructor prior to enrolling in SIS. All expenses for the study abroad trip will be covered by Johns Hopkins.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.385. Experiential Research Lab: Study Abroad. 1 Credit.
History Department experiential research lab courses cover a wide range of topics. This course is part two of a two semester sequence. After the completion of AS.100.384 [required] during the Fall or Spring semester, students will enroll in the 10-12 day study abroad element of the course for Intersession or Summer. Pre-requisite: Must have completed AS.100.384, in the previous adjacent semester, to enroll. All expenses for the study abroad trip will be covered by Johns Hopkins.
Prerequisite(s): AS.100.384
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.386. Sports History of the Cold War. 3 Credits.
This class reassesses the history of the Cold War through sports. We will investigate how the Cold War has shaped sports, the Olympic movement, the role and perception of athletes at home and abroad. The class focuses on how sports intersected with domestic and foreign policy, and how sports constructed, reinforced, and challenged notions of race, gender, and class. We will also speak with JHU alumni and former athletes who made a career out of sports.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.388. Practicing Historical Research. 3 Credits.
Students work in close collaboration with a faculty member to produce an individual research project. The course is designed for history majors in conjunctions with AS.100.293, and it is recommended, although not required, that the AS.100.293 be taken first.
Prerequisite(s): AS.100.293
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.392. The Art of Lying: Lie, Dissimulation, and the "Fake News" in Pre-modern Europe. 3 Credits.
We live in an age that values authenticity, sincerity, and open and transparent communication. Yet this was not always the case. This course will examine the attitudes to lie, falsity, and dissimulation in pre-modern European society. We shall begin by exploring the concepts of lie and discussions of permissibility of lying in the canonical texts of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. We shall then focus on the texts composed between the 16th and the 18th centuries and explore questions posed by theologians (“Is lying always a sin?”, “Should one lie to protect lives?”, “Can God lie?”), philosophers and politicians (“Is the morality of the rulers different than that the ruled?”, “Are politicians bound to lie?”), and courtiers (“Is not telling the truth a necessary part of being polite?”, “Is all civility based on falsehood?”). We shall then move beyond the question of lying and probe the questions of dissimulation, imposture, and false or invented identities. We shall end with a discussion of the early romantic “cult of sincerity”.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.395. History of Global Development. 3 Credits.
This course explores development as an ideology and a practice. From colonialism to the Cold War to contemporary NGOs, we will interrogate the history of our attempts to improve the world. This iteration of the course will have a particular focus on the intersections between development and the environment. Graduate students welcome.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.396. The Gender Binary and American Empire. 3 Credits.
This seminar explores how the sex and gender binary was produced through US colonialism since the nineteenth century. Topics include domestic settler colonialism, as well as Hawaii, the Caribbean, and Asia.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.404. John Locke. 3 Credits.
John Locke’s works had enormous influence in eighteenth century America and on justifications of the American Revolution. In this 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence, this seminar- style course will read and discuss Locke’s major works intensively together with works influenced by Locke’s arguments and together with select scholarly interpretations. Locke’s works will be placed into the seventeenth century British, European and American contexts in which they were written, and the eighteenth-century American contexts in which they became extremely influential.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.406. Public History and Engaged Research. 3 Credits.
How do we interpret history for and with broad public audiences? This class introduces students to public history and community-engaged research, emphasizing collaborative knowledge production between academic and non-academic publics. Case studies include virtual reality experiments, walking tours, exhibitions, public art and performance, activist oral history, and community mapping. Students receive training in oral history and podcasting, benefit from guest speakers, and explore methods such as participatory action research, indigenous research methodologies, and shared authority.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.411. AI and Data Methods in History. 3 Credits.
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Science and Data (FA2),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.412. Baltimore, Basketball, and the Legacy of Bentalou. 3 Credits.
In this community-engaged sports history seminar, we partner with co-educator Coach Paul Franklin and an after-school youth basketball program in Bentalou, West Baltimore, founded in 1970. This class provides crucial lessons about US and sports history in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will study the history of urban planning, public health, law and order, and politics in Baltimore through the lens of this program and seek to better understand its significance for the community. Our group is tasked with researching the program’s evolution: we will speak with experts, sports figures, organizers and community leaders in the city, conduct interviews with past and current players, coaches, and supporters, explore relevant archives, newspapers, photos and film. Expect 90% group work and, instead of class, attend some U10 & U12 games. Collectively, we will decide on the deliverables to be presented to parents and players at the end-of-the-season celebration in April.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.413. London 1580-1830: The History of Britain's capital city. 3 Credits.
Seminar-style class analyzing the social, cultural, gender, religious, economic, and political history of London from Shakespeare's time through revolutions, plague, fire, and commercial, colonial, and industrial expansion.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.422. Society & Social Change in 18th Century China. 3 Credits.
What did Chinese local society look like under the Qing Empire, and how did it change over the early modern era?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.423. History of the Carceral State. 3 Credits.
This course will cover the state of the field in the history of the carceral state in the United States. It will cover key texts from the past few decades, as well as some of the latest works, on policing, surveillance, incarceration, migrant detention, border control and deportation, etc. Some works in the fields of Law, Political Science, Sociology, and Geography may also be included. Students will write an essay on the field in this course. Open to advanced undergraduates by permission of instructor.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.425. Research Seminar: Global Migrations. 4 Credits.
This course builds students’ research, writing, and analytical skills by guiding them through an independent research project in a collaborative classroom environment.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.426. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. 3 Credits.
Witchcraft, magic, carnivals, riots, folk tales, gender roles; fertility cults and violence especially in Britain, Germany, France, and Italy.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.428. Saints, Saviors, and Sovereigns in the Early Modern World. 3 Credits.
This reading intensive seminar will explore the myriad ways in which questions of sovereignty and the sacred were joined together across the early modern world. Emphasis will be placed on sacred and universal modes of kingship, saintly cults, and messianic movements amongst the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and South Asia.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.429. Witchcraft and Conflict in Early America. 3 Credits.
“They Say I am a witch,” declared one woman in seventeenth-century North America. Trials and fights over accusations of witchcraft provide rich material for an examination of early American power dynamics. This class will explore moments of such accusations. The class will culminate in a final project on a witchcraft case in early America.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.431. Law and Genocide in Modern Europe. 3 Credits.
Can law end genocide? Modern Europe has formed the site for some of the worst global atrocities in modern history. It has also served as the birthplace and proving grounds for many of humanity’s boldest experiments in genocide prevention and global justice. In this course, we will examine the historical links between mass violence and legal change. We will focus on pivotal trials and legal campaigns in Central and Eastern Europe from World War I to the present, including the Nuremberg Trials, the UN Yugoslavian Tribunals, and the ongoing Russia/Ukraine war. We will pay special attention to the question of what the historical entanglements between international law, human rights, and empire mean for the future of universal justice in Europe and beyond.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.433. Free Speech and Censorship in the United States. 3 Credits.
This undergraduate research seminar examines free speech and censorship laws, practices, and debates in the United States since the 19th century. Issues include political speech, obscenity and pornography, and racist hate speech. In addition to discussing common readings, each student will choose a free speech case or issue to research, present to the class, and analyze in a final essay.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.442. The Intellectual History of Capitalism, 1900 to present. 3 Credits.
Since 1900 global markets have undergone a dramatic transformation. This course will grapple with the writings of economists and social theorists who sought to understand the implications of these changes, and in some cases helped to inspire them. Questions they addressed include: does freedom result from the absence of coercion, or does it require the provision of capacities? Do markets reward desirable behaviors, or do they produce social and environmental pathologies? Does competition occur spontaneously, or does it require careful regulation and reinforcement? And what is the relationship between innovation and inequality? Readings include selections from Max Weber, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W.E.B. DuBois, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Polanyi, Joseph Schumpeter, Theodor Adorno, Milton Friedman, Donna Haraway, Wendy Brown, and Thomas Piketty. Class meetings will focus on the close reading of these texts, and discussion of how and why perceptions of the market economy have changed over time.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.444. Historiography of the Maghreb, 1939 to the Present. 3 Credits.
We will explore key texts in the historiography of post-1939 North Africa as well as key recent publications, in French as well as in English.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.445. Revolution, Anti-Slavery, and Empire 1773-1792: British and American Political Thought from Paine, Smith, and the Declaration of Independence to Cugoano, Wollstonecraft, and the Bill of Rights. 3 Credits.
This seminar-style course will focus on discussing British and American political thought from the "Age of Revolutions", a period also of many critiques of Empire and of many works of Antislavery. Readings include Paine's Common Sense and Rights of Man, the Declaration of Rights, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers; works by Smith, Burke, and Wollstonecraft; and antislavery works by Cugoano, Equiano, Rush, Wesley, and Wilberforce.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.446. Making Medieval History in 'Modern' America. 3 Credits.
This course examines the emergence and practice of medieval history as a field of history in the US beginning in the nineteenth-century. We will address what the medieval past meant for the formation of the discipline of history in the US and how an imagined medieval past came to inform scholarly discourse, research approaches, methodologies, ideas about race and gender, legal and constitutional history, and the contours of nation states. The narrative of the medieval origins of states will also be addressed and questioned as it developed over the course of the 20th century. Students will do archival research in the JHU archives and in other published and unpublished source sets.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.447. A Celluloid Archive: Constructing Modern Indian History through Film. 3 Credits.
Cinema enjoys extraordinary prominence in India, where in a given year the output of films in Bombay—to say nothing of other Indian film centers—far surpasses the number produced by all American studios combined. While many of India’s most successful films have been derided by critics in Europe and North America, this course takes them seriously both as an artistic form and as a historical tool, treating the films, together with their consumption and circulation, as a critical window into the social history of India. We will begin our investigation in the silent era to demonstrate how, even though the majority of early films are lost, reception histories can reveal much about the communities that viewed them. Moving into the Golden Age of Hindi cinema in the 1950s and 1960s, we will consider how the popularity of these films in Pakistan, Iran, West Africa, and the Soviet Union was tied to India’s global aspirations and self-representation. This course closes with an examination of the current era of Indian cinema and the extent to which its production values, moral and political claims, and viewership (especially in the diaspora) have responded to, and perhaps emboldened, domestic shifts toward economic liberalization and rightwing politics. Focusing more on the social spaces around Indian cinema than on specific films, this course touches on such topics as the segregation of cinemas, the politics of tiered seating, and the rise of multiplexes and (il)legal streaming. Our interrogation of these spaces will reveal how these films can expose social attitudes, even on matters like caste, class, religion, language, and race that they may address only obliquely. More than this, however, this course proposes that Indian cinema, as a primary means of social interaction, entertainment, and information for millions, is not only a historical record but a historical force in its own right.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.450. History Research Lab. 3 Credits.
In this course, students participate in a research “laboratory,” engaging in direct research on an area of faculty’s research, leading to the development of a collective, digital humanities project.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.452. From Slavery to Freedom: History and Personhood, 500BCE-1500CE. 3 Credits.
What did it mean to be free in the premodern world? What did it mean to be a serf or enslaved? How was freedom and unfreedom experienced differently based on gender, geography, religion and space? This course explores the long history of slavery, freedom, and ‘unfreedom,’ in its many and various degrees. We will consider an array of source materials spanning law codes, personal narratives, manumission cases, chronicles, histories, and hagiographies, as well as non-written sources. How did practices of slavery and degrees of unfreedom during the Greek and Roman periods come to shape an understanding of those categories in early medieval Europe, in the Islamic world, and across the pre-modern Mediterranean? How were slavery and empire connected in the past? We will also focus on how scholars have written about slavery, manumission, and freedom and how power, difference, and ideals of freedom have been theorized over time. What methods have scholars employed to get at the experiences of those who were enslaved and silenced? And how have they attempted to narrate these histories differently?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.453. Global Legal History. 3 Credits.
Introduction to the practice of global legal history, with focus on the growth of modern international law from the seventeenth century to the present, its relationship to nationalism and empire, war, atrocity-crimes and human rights, international institutions, and the relationship between law and history.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.464. Saints & Relics: Medieval Belief and the Material World. 3 Credits.
This course traces the rise and development of the cult of saints from the third to the sixteenth centuries. Topics covered include: sanctity and the body; saint-making and religious authority; miracles and belief; relics and portable Christianity; travel and migration; techniques of veneration; translation and adaptation, and so forth. Structured around key historiographical works addressing these topics, the course exposes students to the major research tools for working with saints’ cults, hagiography, liturgical texts, and writing about belief in the historical context, to build both a critical set of research skills and to gain a comprehensive understanding of the key debates and developments in the field. Short weekly research assignments or response papers are required.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.482. Historiography of Modern China. 3 Credits.
How has the history of modern China been told by Chinese, Western, and Japanese historians and social thinkers, and how did this affect popular attitudes and government policies toward China?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.486. Jim Crow in America. 3 Credits.
This course explores the history, politics, and culture of legalized racial segregation in the United State between the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries – a regime commonly known as “Jim Crow.”
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.494. Senior Honors Seminar. 1 Credit.
A two-semester coordinating seminar for history majors writing senior honors theses. Admission is granted by instructor only after the student has selected a faculty thesis advisor. AS.100.494 is to be taken concurrently with AS.100.507 Senior Thesis.
Prerequisite(s): AS.100.494 is to be taken concurrently with AS.100.507 Senior Thesis.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.495. Senior Honors Seminar. 1 Credit.
The Senior Honors Seminar is a coordinating seminar for senior history majors who are writing senior honors theses and wish to graduate with departmental honors. To be taken concurrently with AS.100.508, Senior Thesis.
Corequisite(s): AS.100.508
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.497. From Baltimore to Belgrade: 1968 in Global and Local Perspective. 3 Credits.
The sixties were a polarizing decade of unrest, revolutions, and fundamental change across Europe and the US. We will discuss 1968 through the lens of Baltimore and national case studies, and contextualize it within the Cold War and decolonization. We’ll speak with eyewitnesses, work with archivists, high school students, and community partners in the city!
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.507. Senior Honors Thesis. 3 Credits.
The Senior Honors Seminar is a coordinating seminar for senior history majors who are writing senior honors theses and wish to graduate with departmental honors. We will discuss the organization of your historical research projects and help you prepare for writing your senior thesis based on that research. This is an interactive class that helps make the most of your senior thesis experience!
Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.508. Senior Honors Thesis. 3 Credits.
This seminar is required for senior history majors who are writing senior honors theses and wish to graduate with departmental honors.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.;AS.100.507
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.535. Independent Study. 1 - 3 Credits.
Undergraduate independent research under a faculty mentor.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
AS.100.536. Independent Study. 1 - 3 Credits.
Undergraduate independent research under a faculty mentor.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
AS.100.602. The French Revolution. 3 Credits.
This course will engage the rich historiography of the French Revolution. We will focus on recent scholarship to examine such themes as: the nature of revolution and popular activism; violence & trauma; constitutionalism; citizenship, democracy, and social rights; the revolution after Thermidor and why the republic collapsed.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.603. Readings in the Early U.S. Republic. 3 Credits.
Small intensive group reading: the course is primarily intended for students working on their graduate field lists. Other formats are possible with permission of the instructor.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.605. Modern Britain & the British Empire. 3 Credits.
This course introduces major historiographical themes and debates in Modern British and British Imperial History to graduate students. It is designed to prepare students for major and minor fields in associated topics.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.611. Trade and Capitalism in African History. 3 Credits.
How have historians of Africa studied the development of commerce, trading diasporas, currencies and capitalism on the continent from the 8th through the 19th century? In this seminar, we will read both seminal studies and recent historiography. The readings will explore African economies and the social worlds they created, including trans-Atlantic, trans-Saharan, and Indian Ocean circuits of slavery and commodity exchange.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.613. Modern Japanese and Korean Histories. 3 Credits.
This graduate-level seminar provides an overview of innovative works in the overlapping histories of modern Japan and Korea. We will read both “classic” and recent works that will help us analyze the following: 1) trends in the historiographies of Japan and Korea; 2) analytical, conceptual, and political challenges in the writing of Japanese/imperial and Korean/colonial history; and 3) recent global, microhistorical, and transnational methodologies. Discussions will focus as much on the craft of writing history as on the content of it.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.618. Historiography of Law and Empire. 3 Credits.
Reading seminar on the role of law in shaping modern empire, with a focus on critical legal histories of European empires in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.619. Early Modern France and the French Empire. 3 Credits.
This seminar examines the history of France and its empire from the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century. Topics include: political culture; political economy; the rise of commercial capitalism; the Enlightenment, gender, and sociability; print and popular culture; empire, race, and slavery; and the French and Haitian Revolutions.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.620. Early Modern France and the French Empire. 3 Credits.
Part of a two-semester sequence, this seminar examines the history of France and its empire from the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century. Topics include: state formation; political culture; political economy; commercial capitalism; the Enlightenment; popular culture; empire, race, and slavery; and the French and Haitian Revolutions.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.622. New Directions in the History of Sex, Gender, and Empire. 3 Credits.
This seminar engages graduate students with recent historiography on Gender and Sexuality in the context of Britain and the British Empire. Subthemes include labor history, the history of technology, trans studies, and urban history.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.623. Telling Japanese Histories. 3 Credits.
A graduate-level seminar on the political, social, and intellectual concerns that have both shaped and undermined dominant ways of telling Japanese history, especially in Japan and the U.S. since 1945.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.626. Readings in African Popular Culture. 3 Credits.
Readings in African Popular Culture
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.628. Advanced Reading in Modern African American Studies & History. 3 Credits.
This course explores canonical and cutting-edge research and scholarship in the broad fields of African American Studies and History, 1865 – present. Students will move beyond a basic knowledge of the modern African American experience, while enhancing their critical research and analytical skills. Broad themes covered include questions of freedom, citizenship, agency, identity, and empowerment.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.629. Readings in African Modern History. 2 Credits.
A reading seminar in African modern history, from the 19th century to the present, covering issues such as slavery, colonial encounters and resistance, Africa’s postcolonial trajectories as well as current decolonial debates.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.631. Readings in Medieval History. 3 Credits.
This is an intensive reading course that covers the major historiographical developments in the history of medieval Europe and the Mediterranean ca. 1000-1500, with a focus on the history of religious and society. Students read and discuss major monographs and articles.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.632. Thirteenth-Century France: Documents, Devotions, and Authority, 1180-1328. 3 Credits.
The history of the consolidation of the kingdom of the Franks offers a window into some of the most important events, developments, and themes of the High Middle Ages. Building out from primary texts, we will analyze the nature of medieval kingship – the office, institution, and the person of the king; the consolidation of territory as so-called “feudal” lordships gave way to the mechanisms of the state; the role of religion, spirituality, and the development of religious ideologies as they relate to king and nation; the impact of religious difference and the persecution of heresy; the construction of gender and its association to power and sanctity; the consolidation of law as it took shape in practice, procedure, and text; the development of crusading and its impact; and the place of culture and royal ideology in and on the everyday lives of individuals living in Europe, and especially, France at this time. In addition to weekly readings focused on secondary scholarship most weeks we will also read at least one primary text in Latin or Old French.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.633. Spain and its Empire. 3 Credits.
This course examines the history and historiography of the early modern Spanish monarchy and Spanish Atlantic. It provides a broad overview of the period, including: politics, economics/trade, social structures, gender, religious culture, and race.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.634. The Haitian Revolution. 3 Credits.
This seminar examines the origins, course, and legacies of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), the most radical movement of the Age of Revolutions. It explores the colonial background, the overthrow of slavery, the founding of an independent nation, and the aftermath of revolution in the nineteenth century.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.635. Heterodoxy and Heresy in Early Modern Europe. 3 Credits.
An advanced graduate seminar devoted to the study and discussion of various early modern heretical groups and movements.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
AS.100.636. Making Medieval History in 'Modern' America. 3 Credits.
This course examines the emergence and practice of medieval history as a field of history in the US beginning in the nineteenth-century. We will address what the medieval past meant for the formation of the discipline of history in the US and how an imagined medieval past came to inform scholarly discourse, research approaches, methodologies, ideas about race and gender, legal and constitutional history, and the contours of nation states. The narrative of the medieval origins of states will also be addressed and questioned as it developed over the course of the 20th century. Students will do archival research in the JHU archives and in other published and unpublished source sets.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.638. Reading Seminar in Early Modern History. 3 Credits.
This is a graduate seminar devoted to close reading of crucial works in early modern history and historiography.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.642. Black Intellectual History. 3 Credits.
This seminar explores the black intellectual tradition through a range of reading, both from historical intellectuals, artists, and activists and studies of those figures. The readings will draw from across the disciplines and multiple genres, and explore some of the key concepts, movements, and interventions that have helped shape a broadly understood project of Black Study. We will focus primarily on black intellectuals from the Caribbean and the United States, with particular attention, though not singular, to the twentieth century.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.643. Queer and Trans Historiography of Western Europe/Empire post-1945. 3 Credits.
This seminar engages graduate students with recent and “classic” historiography on LGBTQ+ questions in French, German, and other western European spaces, with particular attention to empire.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.644. Reading Sefer Yetsirah. 3 Credits.
We will be reading Sefer Yetzirah.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.647. Historical Methods. 3 Credits.
This seminar introduces History doctoral students to archival methods and other scholarly approaches critical to the development of History as an academic discipline over the past two centuries. More broadly, the course prepares students to analyze and to pose the kinds of far-reaching and complex questions that sit at the heart of any dissertation or monographic study. This course is for History graduate students only.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.650. New Directions in the Histories of Labor, Gender, and Sexuality. 3 Credits.
This course introduces graduate students to innovative methodologies and practices coming out of the historiographies of British and American labor histories. Readings will focus on recent literature concerning the intersection of sex, work, gender, and empire.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.651. Twentieth Century Urban History. 3 Credits.
This graduate seminar explores some of the most innovative approaches to the study of the built environment. We will consider the evolution of what is commonly called “urban history” to examine broader developments in American economic, cultural, spatial, and political history.
AS.100.652. European Socialist Thought. 3 Credits.
A survey of European socialist theories, including Marxism, anarchism, Social Democracy, feminism, and anti-imperialism. Authors include Proudhon, Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Bernstein, Lenin, Luxemburg, Kollontai, Césaire, and Fanon.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.653. Africa in the Twentieth Century. 3 Credits.
Readings in modern African history covering the Twentieth Century.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.655. Reading Seminar in Black Women's History. 3 Credits.
The second part of a two-semester sequence, this seminar examines a variety of historical traditions in the field of black women’s history.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
AS.100.658. Readings in the History of the Eighteenth-Century French Empire. 3 Credits.
This seminar will examine the history and historiography of the eighteenth-century French empire. We will read recent work on colonialism, overseas trade, Atlantic slavery, economic thought, and the French and Haitian Revolutions.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.659. Black Radical Tradition and the Imaginary. 3 Credits.
This course considers how black intellectuals have envisioned alternatives to imperialism, racial oppression, and coloniality. It considers the role of imagination in Black Radical thought and how it has shaped political, theoretical, and epistemological questions that animate the black world.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.660. The Historiography of post-1968 France. 3 Credits.
We will engage with recent works on the history of France—in post-decolonization/international/European/transnational, as well as “national” frames—after 1968. We will work with texts in both French and English.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.661. Racial Literacy in the Archives. 3 Credits.
This course explores how to use race as a historical category of analysis, and teaches attendees how to locate how historical actors deploy race and racism to make claims, organize labor and identities, and imagine political possibility.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.662. Inter Asia Research Seminar. 3 Credits.
An intensive research seminar for graduate students currently conducting research on theories, methodologies, and histories of inter-Asian movements and networks. Instructor permission required.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.663. Religion and the Senses. 3 Credits.
This graduate seminar delves into the intricate relationship between religion and the senses, critically examining how sensory experience and perception have been theorized, cultivated, and contested within religious traditions (broadly conceived). Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives from history, anthropology, religious studies, and art history, we will interrogate the senses as epistemological tools, vehicles of discipline, metaphors for doctrinal and ethical concepts, and markers of sacred presence. This seminar engages with the multiple boundaries of sensory experience and its sociocultural implications through close readings of theoretical texts and case studies of ritual, material culture, and sacred spaces drawn from various religious traditions, such as Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.672. Medieval Materialities: Objects, Ontologies, Texts and Contexts. 3 Credits.
We will use the meanings and methodologies of “materiality” to examine the medieval world, by analyzing objects, texts, networks, patterns of circulation and appropriation, aesthetics and enshrinement, production and knowledge communities.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.680. Reading Seminar in Early American History, c. 1500-1850. 3 Credits.
Reading seminar on the state of the field in Early American History – mostly covering North America with some emphasis on transnational connections. Course is open to graduate students in history and other disciplines.
AS.100.681. Research Seminar in Early Modern History, ca. 1500-1800. 3 Credits.
Writing workshop for graduate students at all stages presenting work in progress. Discussion of theories, methods, and challenges of graduate student writing.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.691. Readings in the History of Mediterranean Religion. 3 Credits.
Graduate course in foundational texts in the history of religion in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.700. American Intellectual History. 3 Credits.
Readings on the intellectual history of the United States in a transnational context since the late nineteenth century.
AS.100.707. The Black World. 3 Credits.
This iteration of the Black World Seminar attends to the making and meaning of blackness through the concept of property and its application between the 16th and 21st centuries. We’ll consider the push and pull factors that snatched people out of Africa and drew people of African descent to travel, build lives and determine the meaning and making of land, territory and real estate. We’ll explore, too, the historical forces which created blackness as a marker on the body, as a political and cultural identity, and as a determinant of property’s value.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.708. The Black World II. 3 Credits.
The Black World Seminar considers the making and meaning of blackness between the 14th and 20th centuries and Africans and people of African descent’s impact on the making of the modern world, from the slave trade to the present. We explore, too, the historical forces which created blackness as a marker on the body and as a political and cultural identity.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.711. A Trans History of the Welfare State. 3 Credits.
This seminar investigates US trans history through the prism of the welfare state. Readings will prioritize the analysis of class, political economy, and labor to make sense of gender’s material functions, practices of transition, and the maneuvers and aims of policy and statecraft. The course will ultimately explore why a tiny population has become a significant object of welfare state management since the New Deal.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.713. Black Womanhood. 3 Credits.
What does a usable history of black womanhood (black queer and trans womanhood inclusive) look like? How do we imagine, create, and narrate black women’s stories? Black women’s history across time and space.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.716. Cultural Theory For Historians. 3 Credits.
An examination of modern cultural theories, with emphasis on mass culture and consumerism. Authors include Simmel, Kracauer, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno, Barthes, Debord, Bourdieu, and de Certeau.
AS.100.717. Directed Readings in Early Modern European Intellectual History. 3 Credits.
Directed Readings in Early Modern European Intellectual History.
AS.100.719. Directed Readings in Early Modern British History. 3 Credits.
Directed Readings in Early Modern British History.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.727. Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean. 3 Credits.
This course explores the history and historiography of early modern Spain, with a particular emphasis on its relationship with the Mediterranean - from religious, economic, social, diplomatic, and military perspectives. It will discuss piracy, the slave trade, the "morisco" question in Spain, the Jewish diaspora, and North Africa-Spanish relations, among other topics. These topics will be explored with an eye to discussions on conversion, gender, and race among other lenses.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.729. Reading Seminar: British America and the Early United States in Atlantic Perspective. 3 Credits.
Introduction to the history and historiography on British North America and the United States.
AS.100.730. Reading Seminar: British and French North America and the Early United States in Atlantic Perspective. 3 Credits.
This module combines small group readings and seminars with individualized tutorial-style discussions. It is primarily intended for students working on their graduate field lists. Other formats are possible with permission of the instructor.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.732. Environment and Geography Seminar. 3 Credits.
The Environment and Geography Seminar provides space for PhD students and professors to present works in progress. The goal is to bring together researchers in the physical sciences, social sciences, and humanities who work on the environment. In the 1990s, Donald E. Worster outlined two basic approaches to environmental studies: studying how cultures shape environments and how environments shape cultures. Since then, environmental studies scholars have attempted to synthesize these two approaches. Their key insight is that cultural and environmental change should be studied together, not separately. In that spirit, we convene this seminar so that scholars in the physical and social sciences can think together about how economic, social, and political systems interact with the environment (and vice versa). This seminar is open to researchers and students with an interest in agriculture, food, pollution, industrial waste, sustainability, energy policy, green growth/degrowth, epidemiology, conservation, more-than-human studies, biodiversity, deep-time, planetary systems, environmental justice, and climate change.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.733. Reading Qing Documents. 3 Credits.
Open also to advanced undergraduates with at least one semester of Classical Chinese. This course has several objectives. First and foremost, it is a hands-on document reading class designed to familiarize students with the skills, sources, and reference materials necessary to conduct research in Qing history. To that end, we will spend much of our time reading documents. At the same time, we will engage in problem solving exercises designed to develop and enhance basic research skills. Finally, we will consider important archive-based secondary works which demonstrate the ways in which historians have made use of Qing documents in their scholarship.
AS.100.735. Early Modern Britain and the Early Modern British Empire. 3 Credits.
The first part of a two-semester graduate seminar discussing major works on various aspects of early modern British history.
AS.100.736. Early Modern Britain and the Early Modern British Empire. 3 Credits.
A one semester graduate seminar discussing major works of early modern British and early modern British imperial history.
AS.100.744. Twentieth Century France and the French Empire. 3 Credits.
We will read and discuss recent monographs and historiographical essays that emerge from and inform French history, with particular attention transnational, imperial, Mediterranean, international, and colonial frames and questions.
AS.100.749. Social Theory for Historians: Marx, Durkheim, Weber. 3 Credits.
An examination of the works of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, as examples of the Hegelian, positivist, and hermeneutic traditions of social theory.
AS.100.753. Modern American Seminar. 3 Credits.
A graduate workshop in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in 20th century history. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.755. Modern American Seminar. 3 Credits.
A graduate workshop in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in 20th century history. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
AS.100.756. Reading Seminar in Chinese History. 3 Credits.
This reading seminar will introduce graduate students and advanced undergraduates (by permission) to recent English-language scholarship in the field (mostly) of early modern Chinese history.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.757. Cultural Histories of Late Imperial China. 3 Credits.
This reading seminar will introduce graduate students and advanced undergraduates (by permission) to recent studies of Late Imperial and Republican China that can (by various standards) be classified as works of cultural history.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.759. Arabic Historical Writing in the Middle Ages. 3 Credits.
The course examines various genres of Arabic historical writing during the high and late Middle Ages (10th-15th c.). All primary readings are in English/French translation (no Arabic required).
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.761. History of Capitalism. 3 Credits.
Readings on the history of capitalism since the mid-nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the American context.
AS.100.762. History and Historiography of 19th-Century France in Europe and the World. 3 Credits.
We will read and discuss recent work on nineteenth-century France, the French-dominated empire, and other “French” histories.
AS.100.769. Gender History Workshop. 3 Credits.
Workshop for presentation of works-in-progress on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality, including drafts of dissertation chapters, research papers, talks, and proposals. Students in disciplines other than history are welcome.
AS.100.770. Gender History Workshop. 3 Credits.
Workshop for presentation of works-in-progress on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality, including drafts of dissertation chapters, research papers, talks, and proposals. Students in disciplines other than history are welcome. Graduate students only.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.781. The Seminar. 2 Credits.
This course features presentations from invited speakers. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
AS.100.782. The Seminar. 2 Credits.
This course features presentations from invited speakers. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
AS.100.783. Seminar: Medieval Europe. 3 Credits.
A graduate workshop in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in Medieval European History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
AS.100.784. Seminar: Medieval Europe. 3 Credits.
A graduate workshop in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in Medieval European History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
AS.100.785. Seminar: Early Modern Europe. 3 Credits.
A graduate workshop in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in Early Modern European History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
AS.100.786. Seminar: Early Modern Europe. 3 Credits.
A graduate workshop in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in Early Modern European History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
AS.100.787. Seminar: Modern Europe. 3 Credits.
A graduate workshop in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in Modern European History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
AS.100.788. General Seminar: Modern Europe. 3 Credits.
A graduate workshop in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in Modern European History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
AS.100.790. General Seminar: America. 3 Credits.
A seminar series in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in American History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
AS.100.793. Seminar: African. 2 Credits.
A seminar series in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in African History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
AS.100.794. General Seminar: Africa. 2 Credits.
A seminar series in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in African History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
AS.100.795. Seminar: Asian. 2 Credits.
A seminar series in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in Asian History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
AS.100.797. First Year Graduate Workshop. 2 Credits.
The graduate workshop allows students, both the first-year cohort and all the graduate students in the department(s) as a group, to meet to discuss themes, topics, concerns, approaches, ideas, methods, and insights together and thus to build a sense of community, cohesiveness, and cooperation within the program and the department as a whole. This course is for History graduate students only.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.798. First Year Graduate Workshop. 2 Credits.
The intention of the graduate workshop is to allow students, both the first-year cohort and all the graduate students in the department(s) as a group, to meet to discuss themes, topics, concerns, approaches, ideas, methods, and insights together and thus to build a sense of community, cohesiveness, and cooperation within the program and the department as a whole. We will meet for an hour on a weekly or bi-weekly basis to engage in discussion. Occasionally there may be related readings, first-year paper drafts, or common materials that you will be asked to read, edit, or engage with in advance of the workshop meeting, but I will let you know when that is the case. You may also be asked to present comments, questions, reflections, and sometimes written feedback on shared materials or to share drafts of your cv, cover letters, proposals and the like for comment and feedback. The goal of the workshop is to provide a shared space that is informative and supportive for our graduate student community and that will enrich your experience in the department.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.801. Dissertation Research. 3 - 9 Credits.
Graduate dissertation research with their advisor.
AS.100.802. Dissertation Research. 3 - 9 Credits.
Graduate dissertation research with their advisor.
AS.100.803. Independent Study. 3 - 9 Credits.
Graduate independent research under a faculty advisor.
AS.100.804. Independent Study. 3 - 9 Credits.
Graduate independent research under a faculty advisor.
AS.100.805. Fall History Teaching Assistant Practicum. 3 Credits.
Fall practicum for History TA enrollment only (register under the faculty member’s section for which you will serve as a fall TA).
AS.100.806. Spring History Teaching Assistant Practicum. 3 Credits.
Spring practicum for History TA enrollment only (register under the faculty member’s section for which you will serve as a spring TA).
AS.100.890. Independent Study. 9 Credits.
Summer graduate independent research under a faculty advisor. For History Graduate Students only.
Cross Listed Courses
Agora Institute
AS.196.411. The Modern American Midterm Election in Historical Perspective. 3 Credits.
American elections – even rare, unexpected, or paradigm-busting elections – do not occur in a vacuum. Instead, they are created, shaped, and constructed by a variety of significant forces, over time.This seminar thus suggests that you cannot understand modern American politics and contests, including the 2024 election and the upcoming 2026 election, without examining the historical antecedents that make the present-day moment possible. Consequently, while enrolled in this seminar, students will grapple with the following central question: what are the foundational moments in modern American social, political, and economic history that provided the “building blocks” for the 2026 United States Midterm Elections? How can we use history to analyze and explain the developments of the 2026 election, and put them in context as those moments are happening in real time?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Anthropology
AS.070.205. Gods and Ancestors: East Asian Religions in Everyday Life. 3 Credits.
This course offers an introduction to the religious traditions of East Asia, including Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and Shinto. Moving chronologically from ancient foundations to modern developments, we will explore how religious ideas and practices have shaped—and been shaped by—East Asian societies over time. Emphasis will be placed on the diversity and unity of religious expressions in these traditions, with readings drawn from a wide range of texts: religious scriptures, philosophical texts, popular literature, and ethnographic accounts.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.070.311. Argot Workshop: Student Publishing from Start to Finish. 3 Credits.
Are you interested in learning how to design and run a student journal? Do you have a piece of writing you would like to prepare for a public-facing platform? If so, then join us for the Argot workshop. We will revitalize the JHU undergraduate anthropology journal, featuring work from students in the humanities and social sciences at Hopkins and beyond. In the workshop, students will engage with every aspect of the publication process, including soliciting submissions, reviewing and editing articles, and creating and designing the online platform. Students enrolled in the workshop will also submit one piece of work to be published in the journal. With that in mind, we ask that each student enter the workshop with a piece of writing they would like to see through to publication. This could be an essay from another course, a research project, or a visual or multimedia work (with a writing component). During the semester, students will work on their own submissions, provide editorial guidance for others, and design, create, and publicize the journal. The journal will be published online at the end of the semester, creating a concrete opportunity for student work to reach a wider audience.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.070.318. Black Atlantic Worlds. 3 Credits.
This seminar explores the formation of Black Atlantic worlds through a selection of historical and ethnographic texts, material artifacts, and films. We will encounter familiar themes of slavery, revolution, commodity production, and imperial power recast in the minor key of the Black experience. Exploring major works by anthropologists, particularly key figures from Johns Hopkins, the course also examines how studies of transatlantic movements have reshaped our very understanding of history and culture, not simply as static or official forms but as fields of contention.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Center for Africana Studies
AS.362.112. Introduction to Africana Studies. 3 Credits.
This course introduces students to the field of Africana Studies. It focuses on the historical experience, intellectual ideas, theories, and cultural production of African-descended people. We will consider how people of the black diaspora remember and encounter Africa. We will explore, too, how such people have lived, spoken, written, and produced art about colonialism and enslavement, gender and mobility, violence and pleasure. This course will be thematically organized and invite you to center your own stories about black people within your understanding of the modern world and its making.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.362.119. Abolition and the University. 3 Credits.
This course explores “critical university studies” through the lens of abolitionist thought, from W.E.B. DuBois to Ruth Wilson Gilmore. It historicizes universities’ growth within U.S. cities during the twentieth century.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.362.204. Anti-Black Racism and Black Freedom Struggles: History, Theory, and Culture. 3 Credits.
In Anti-Black Racism and Black Freedom Struggles: History, Theory, and Culture, students will learn about key historical, intellectual, and political aspects of white supremacy as a system or racial domination, and anti-black racism as a central feature of that global system. This class will explore the historical forms that white supremacy has taken—from colonialism and plantation slavery to Jim Crow, gentrification, and mass incarceration—racial ideologies, and how modern political systems have hinged on racial oppression. Most important, we will explore how black people have responded to the structures and ideologies of white supremacy, their thinking about freedom, being, and rights, and their efforts to fit into the worlds in which they found themselves, to improve those societies, and those projects that sought radical alternatives to the an anti-black world.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.362.318. Liberation in the African Diaspora. 3 Credits.
This course explores the historical, theoretical, and political question of liberation in the African diaspora from the period of enslavement up to the current era. We will consider three major themes: enslavement, marronage, and freedom; Pan-Africanism and anti-colonialism; Black Power and national liberation. We will examine how African peoples conceptualized freedom and liberation in each period, the major organizations and intellectuals who framed them, and how popular activity developed and informed all three (ideas, organizations, and intellectuals). Some of the questions taken up include: How did enslaved Africans conceptualize freedom? Did their ideas and activities merely extend western notions of liberty and freedom, or did they develop distinct conceptions of freedom, rights, and humanity? Why, in the early Twentieth Century, did African peoples around the world pursue pan-Africanism as a political philosophy? How do class, nationality, gender, and sexuality inform such movements? Did national liberation struggles from the 1950s through the 1970s in Africa and the Caribbean bring about fundamental changes to those societies or merely replicate colonial regimes? What connections existed between national liberation movements in Africa and the Caribbean, and Civil Rights and Black Power in the United States and England?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.362.326. Nothing About Us, Without Us: Storytelling as a Method for Community Organizing. 3 Credits.
This course offers a hands-on opportunity for students to develop new skills as community organizers by learning from the best teachers possible: residents who have been serving their neighborhoods and building grassroots power in Southwest Baltimore since the 1990s. As a community-based learning course with the Center for Social Concern, and co-taught by professors, archivists, cultural curators, and longtime residents, including the founder of Fayette Street Outreach, Ms. Edna Manns Lake, this course will leverage the narrative power of storytelling to help rewrite a multigenerational history of community organizing in a part of the city long neglected by local government and threatened historically by open-air drug markets, rampant criminalization, and predatory housing speculators. Through community immersion, including story circles, oral histories, community archiving, local meetings, and guest presentations, students will learn how to navigate, identify, and build upon existing neighborhood assets. Students will then collaborate with a community partner to co-design and complete a neighborhood project by the end of the semester. Dispelling myths, learning truths, documenting history, and honoring decades of struggle in the face of massive odds, students will help re-write the narrative of Southwest Baltimore, centering humanity and resilience among resident-activists who stayed and fought for their community.
Center for Economy and Society
AS.197.215. The Uses and Abuses of Economics in Modern America. 3 Credits.
This course takes a historical view on the American economics profession since the early 20th century. Rather than focusing on the theoretical content of economic ideas and models, students will pay attention to their applications and audiences. Students will reflect on what it meant for economists to serve as policymakers, journalists, foreign ambassadors, and business consultants, securing influence in spaces far beyond academia. How did the growing power of economists in these various spheres shape the world we live in today? These are some of the questions we will explore together through readings, lectures, and group discussions. Students need not have an economics or social science background to excel in this course.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Chemistry
AS.030.201. Theory and Practice of Alchemy: From Hermes to Isaac Newton. 3 Credits.
This course will serve as an introduction to alchemy and its development into modern chemistry beginning with its Greco-Egyptian origins. A strong emphasis of the course will be placed on understanding the philosophy and practice of notable alchemists, such as through their synthesis and pursuit of the mythical ‘philosopher’s stone.’ We will analyze how alchemists of the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, like Basil Valentine, Paracelsus, and Isaac Newton, sought to understand the natural world through alchemical theories, experimental methods, symbolic representation, and metaphysical reflections. We will explore the philosophical underpinnings of these alchemical theories, with a focus on the Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, and Hermetic influences. Through writing assignments, students will engage critically with texts and alchemical iconography. Finally, the course includes a laboratory component in which we will reproduce alchemical procedures and analyze the products using modern solid-state characterization techniques. This course is intended for students of all majors and backgrounds.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Natural Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Science and Data (FA2),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Classics
AS.040.137. Archaeology at the Crossroads: The Ancient Eastern Mediterranean through Objects in the JHU Archaeological Museum. 3 Credits.
This seminar investigates the Eastern Mediterranean as a space of intense cultural interaction in the Late Bronze Age, exploring how people, ideas, and things not only came into contact but deeply influenced one another through maritime trade, art, politics, etc. In addition to class discussion, we will work hands-on with artifacts from the JHU Archaeological Museum, focusing on material from Cyprus.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.040.216. Exploring the Ancient Astronomical Imagination. 3 Credits.
This course takes us on an exploratory journey through the ancient astronomical imaginary. We will focus on ancient Greek and Roman ideas about the structure of the cosmos, the substance and nature of the stars, the Earth’s place and role in the universe, ancient attempts to map the stars, and ancient beliefs about the significance of cosmic phenomena for events in the human world. The course will culminate in the extraordinary ancient tradition of lunar fictions, which are our earliest imaginative accounts of life on other worlds. Come join us for a voyage to the stars!
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.040.372. Plato’s Mathematical Cosmos. 3 Credits.
The Timaeus is often seen today as one of Plato’s more mysterious and puzzling dialogues. But it was also historically one of his most influential. Its account of creation, the cosmos, and its numerical ordering formed the foundation for considerable work at the junctures of science, mathematics, and philosophy, from Antiquity through the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This course will explore the complex and fascinating story told in the Timaeus together with its long-reaching legacy. We will read the dialogue in translation in its entirety as well as select later thinkers who build on its picture of the cosmos and its important mathematical, philosophical, and theological themes.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Science and Data (FA2),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
AS.040.631. Curating the Ancient in Baltimore. 3 Credits.
This collaborative seminar meets jointly with students from MICA to design an exhibition concerning a cast collection of ancient Mediterranean sculpture, founded in 1881, that resided at both institutions during different moments in its history (part of the collection is still located at MICA, where art students regularly engage with it). Participants will explore the dynamic position of the collection between these two urban institutions and its existence as part of the ongoing history of the city. This course is associated with the Baltimore ReCast Classics Research Lab. Advanced undergraduates can contact the instructor about joining the course.
AS.040.644. Reading & Writing in Pre-Modern Europe. 3 Credits.
This course has a fourfold aim: First, it is designed to familiarize participants with the basics of Latin paleography from Roman antiquity through the age of printing with moveable type; throughout, we will practice deciphering literary and documentary sources of various types, even as we concentrate on the evolution of different writing styles. Second, we will think about paleography’s status as a discipline. That is, the term “paleography” dates back to 1708 and Montfaucon’s classic work, Palaeographia Graeca. However, it was only in the late nineteenth century in the world of the German research university that paleography came into the orbit of the Geisteswissenschaften as a “Hilfswissenschaft.” Both implicitly and explicitly throughout the seminar we shall be asking what consequences that move entailed. Third, we will study the manner in which printing with moveable type changed western graphic culture: was printing revolutionary or evolutionary? Fourth, we will become familiar with certain aspects of “the history of the book,” discovering as we do what sorts of questions scholars in this broad field of scholarly endeavor have been asking recently.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Comparative Thought and Literature
AS.300.315. Authoritarianism, Freedom, and the Arts. 3 Credits.
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
AS.300.401. Comparative Late- and Post-Cold War Cultures in China, the USSR, and Beyond. 3 Credits.
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.300.409. Modernist Animacies and the Politics of Wonder. 3 Credits.
From dancing skeletons and Mickey Mouse to nuclear-powered robots and Fritz the Cat, modernist visual culture is replete with iconic images of animated existence. This course surveys these diverse forms of "animatedness” emerging within the interconnected histories of special effects film and animated media, focusing on their entanglement with broader modernist practices, movements, and styles between the 1920s and the 1970s. Students will explore the shared origins of animation and special effects in the frame-by-frame manipulations of early trick film, the hopes and fears attached to machine aesthetics in German expressionism, French surrealism, and Soviet avant-garde cinema of the 1920s, and the ambivalent agency expressed by animated bodies in American and Japanese cartoons of the 1920s-40s. They will then assess the continuities and ruptures in the aesthetic and political commitments of interwar and postwar modernisms through case studies from North American, Central and Eastern European, and Japanese animation. By engaging with the diverse forms of “animatedness” and animated media presented in this course, students will develop critical theoretical, historical, and comparative frameworks for navigating the complex entanglements of organic life, emotional states, and machine technologies that increasingly define contemporary existence.
Prerequisite(s): Students may not have taken the AS.300.321 version of this course.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.300.621. Thinking with Accidents. 3 Credits.
When is an action or a work of art just an accident--and when should it be called intentional? This course explores the problems and complications of willed actions, accidents, and unintended consequences. We will follow (primarily but not exclusively) a range of different modernist writers, surrealist and dada artists, noir filmmakers, and twentieth-century philosophers as they contemplate what an intentional action is or is not. What can these works tell us about how we make meaning at the limits of our control? Includes literature of Wallace Stevens, Nathanael West, James Cain, Patricia Highsmith, and Ann Petry; films of Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and Justine Triet; art of Marcel Duchamp and André Breton; and philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Philippa Foot.
Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, & Colonialism
AS.305.135. The Future of Work: AI, Labor, and Migration. 3 Credits.
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 Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.305.336. Insurgency and Counterinsurgency. 3 Credits.
The term “counterinsurgency” is typically associated with the disastrous US wars in Vietnam or Iraq. But is counterinsurgency always doomed to fail and insurgency guaranteed to succeed? This course will give students an overview of key literature in counterinsurgency and internal security, as well as representative literature produced by and for insurgents, revolutionaries, and guerrillas/terrorists. A central task will be to define these vexed terms and track their shifting meaning over time, including the importance of cultural, racial, and gendered significations to those definitions. The course will also include a large-scale simulation of an insurgency and efforts to control or extinguish it, comprising the student assignments and requiring active participation of every student in the course. Each student will be assigned roles that will require specific creative actions.
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.305.350. Immigrant Justice and Resources Lab. 3 Credits.
This seminar offers students an opportunity to combine historical research skills and community engagement for real-world, public impact. Through collaborative research and partnering with an immigrant justice organization, students in the seminar will gain a deeper understanding of immigration history, gather and analyze research for community stakeholders, and transform scholarly discussions into applicable resources for use in immigrant rights and justice cases today. Students who wish to take this course should have previously enrolled in at least one course covering immigration, but that is not a formal prerequisite.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
East Asian Studies
AS.310.202. Introduction to Korean Culture. 3 Credits.
From North Korea’s nuclear threat to South Korea’s K-pop, Korea is constantly in the US media. But how much do you know about Korea? This introductory course is designed to introduce students to the long and complex cultural history of Korea. While focusing on key aspects in shaping premodern and modern Korean identity, the course also places Korea in a larger cross-national context, particularly its close interactions with China and Japan. Reading primary and secondary sources combined with visual materials, the course chronologically and thematically examines major historical moments, from Korea’s participation in and exit from a Sino-centric premodern world order, Japanese colonialism and its ramifications in Korean society, economic development and democratization, to the global popularity of Korean popular culture.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.310.207. Cities and Urban Life in Chinese Film. 3 Credits.
This seminar introduces students to the phenomenon of migration in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan from theoretical, empirical, and comparative perspectives. The objectives of the course are to understand the 1) historical context behind present-day migrations in East Asia; 2) different patterns of migration flows and their consequences on receiving countries; 3) various theoretical frameworks for migration. The course is divided into three parts. In the first part, the course will examine theoretical approaches to migration, structured around the question of whether East Asia as a region represents a distinct model of migration. In the second, students will explore the empirical cases in greater detail by comparing and contrasting the different types of migrations. The third part addresses the responses to migration by host governments and societies and the implications of migration on citizenship and identity. Recommended Course Background: any class related to the history or politics of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and/or China.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.310.303. Women and Writing in Modern China. 3 Credits.
China’s turbulent 20th century was marked by social and political upheavals, wars, and economic hardship. Women writers played an important role in documenting these events. How did women experience and understand their historical context? How were their experiences and interpretations different from (or similar to) those of their male counterparts? This course will search modern China’s mind through women’s writings. Students will read works by women writers of the “long 20th century” (roughly 1890s-2020s) including, but not limited to, Ding Ling, Xiao Hong, Zhang Ailing, and Zhang Jie. We will engage in close readings of their literary works in context of their life experiences, considering key themes such as women’s identity and agency, nationalism, revolution, and social reform as well as new and changing gender norms. Basic knowledge of modern Chinese history helpful but not required.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.310.326. Labor Politics in China. 3 Credits.
This course explores the transformation of labor relations in China over the past century. It will cover the origins of the labor movement, the changes brought about by the 1949 Revolution, the industrial battles of the Cultural Revolution, the traumatic restructuring of state-owned enterprises over the past two decades, the rise of private enterprise and export-oriented industry, the conditions faced by migrant workers today, and recent developments in industrial relations and labor conflict. The course is designed for upper division undergraduates and graduate students.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.310.329. Women, Patriarchy, and Feminism in China, South Korea, and Japan. 3 Credits.
We will try to get a quick overview of the recent history of patriarchy in China, South Korea, and Japan from the mid-twentieth century to our present and then compare the initiatives of feminists to transform the lives of women throughout these three societies. We will also debate whether or how it makes sense to adapt the Western notions of patriarchy and sexism as well as the Western political program of feminism to the non-Western context of East Asia by reading books by historians, anthropologists, and sociologists.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.310.331. Islam in Asia. 3 Credits.
You will learn about the efforts of ordinary, non-elite Muslims to shape the relation between their communities and the state as well as to (where applicable) the non-Muslim majority through collective organizing over the last forty years. We will read and discuss books by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists studying Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, China, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
English
AS.060.417. Black Print Culture. 3 Credits.
Students interested in Black print culture will engage in intensive archival research, both collaborative and individual, using the Sheridan Library’s Rare Book and Manuscript collections, and will create an online exhibition. Texts include poems, printed lectures, pamphlets, novels, periodicals, ephemera, correspondence, etc., alongside relevant critical and theoretical reading. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have already taken, or are currently enrolled in AS.060.617, are not eligible to take AS.060.417.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.608. The Humanities in Ruins. 3 Credits.
This graduate seminar will examine the long history, dating back to the eighteenth century, of reflection on the nature of the modern university and the place of the humanities within it. With a focus on the much-discussed “crisis” of the contemporary humanities, it will examine the emergence and evolution of the humanistic disciplines. Have the humanities in the academy always been in crisis? What could this possibly mean and what does it imply about how we practice the humanities today?
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.060.632. Conjugality and Early Modern Imaginaries. 3 Credits.
This course considers the 'conjugal imaginary' in early modern European religious, scientific, economic, and political thought. Readings in early modern literature (More, Erasmus, Shakepseare, Milton, Cavendish, Behn, Locke, Astell) as well as theorists of family, feminism, and sexuality (Engels, Foucault, Cooper, Butler, Lowe, Kottman, Federici, Wynter). Topics include: the ‘sexual contract’ and patriarchalism; the 'private' as opposed to the 'public' sphere; the disciplining of the body; the establishment of racialized and gendered categories of humans; the definition of labor as production or reproduction; coercion and consent; the new anthropological logics regarding the global (in cross-confessional intimacies or with with partners outside Europe); and the new sciences of population and economies of resource management that shaped the emergent colonial logics. We will ask how early modern sexual regimes of consigning the family and sexuality to the intimate and economic spheres shape the meaning of politics in the period 1500-1700.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.060.697. Enchantment and Inquiry. 3 Credits.
This course explores texts from the 19th and 20th centuries that query the distinction between magical, occult, and supernatural discourses and scientific and rational inquiry. Modernism has often been seen to usher in a new and thoroughly disenchanted literature. But this view overlooks texts from across the wider period that challenge the boundaries between ‘official’ and ‘heterodox’ knowledges. Ranging across genres including experimental literatures, life writing, ghost stories and folk tales this course explores how and why writers such as H.G. Wells, Vernon Lee, Zora Neale Hurston, H.D., Shirley Jackson, R.K. Narayan, and J.M. Coetzee imagine the re-enchantment of the world.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Film and Media Studies
AS.061.396. Modern Paris on Film. 3 Credits.
This course uses French film to examine the history of twentieth-century Paris. We will consider how filmmakers interpreted the social, political, and technological transformations that shaped Paris in the modern era, treating movies as expressions of change and means by which filmmakers comment on it. Taught in English. $50 lab fee.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
First Year Seminars
AS.001.101. FYS: The Hospital. 3 Credits.
Hospitals: Virtually all of us were born in one, most of us will eventually die in one, and in between all of us will spend at least some time in one. Lots of you likely aspire to spend your careers in one. Along the way we, or some third-party payer, will spend a considerable amount of our health care benefits there. Our focus will be on the history of the hospital from its origins in early modern Europe and the Islamic world, through the early modern period, to the rise of the modern urban mega hospital. The Johns Hopkins Hospital has been ranked as one of the nation’s best by US News and World Report since its annual survey began, and spent nineteen straight years at number one. So we will devote some time to its history, and the history of its affiliated programs—The School of Medicine, The Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the School of Nursing. For your major project, you will serve as advisors to the university’s Planning and Architecture committee. Drawing on your extensive knowledge of the history hospitals and medicine, you will re-envision the medical campus of the 21st century
AS.001.102. FYS: Experimental Fish. 3 Credits.
How have fish and other aquatic animals contributed to the understanding of nature, the environment, and life itself? What features of aquatic organisms and the medium of water facilitated these investigations and why did certain research take place at certain times and places? This First-Year Seminar guides students to address these questions through the perspectives of the history of science and technology. Readings are composed of primary literature in biological studies of aquatic animals and related secondary literature in history of the life sciences. Through readings, lectures, discussions, field trips to local laboratories and aquarium, and an original research project, students will gain experience for future research in the life sciences or in historical studies of science. Topics include “fish” in natural history, taxonomy, physiology, embryology, genetics, neuroscience, fisheries /aquaculture, environmental testing, and molecular biology.
AS.001.103. FYS: America in the Rear View Mirror: How Car Culture Shaped a Country. 3 Credits.
Join us for a road trip through American history, from the horseless carriage to the latest EVs. In this First-Year Seminar, we'll explore the evolving automotive industry, car culture in film, novels, and music, auto racing, the great American highway, labor relations, environmental issues, and more. You'll be writing an 'autobiography' of a car driven by someone in your family, visit a classic car museum in Hershey, PA, and build a Visible V-8 engine, just like the one in my own 1964 Buick Riviera. We'll screen some classic car films--'Grand Prix', 'Bullit', 'Gone in 60 Seconds', 'American Graffiti''--and unpack some class car tunes like 'Little Deuce Coupe', 'Route 66' and 'Hot Rod Lincoln'. Should be a fun ride!
AS.001.106. FYS: Virtual Companions: History and Ethics. 3 Credits.
As interactions with virtual companions, chatbots, and emotionally responsive AI become increasingly common, this First-Year Seminar asks a set of urgent questions: What does it mean for a machine to simulate empathy? Who defines “care,” agency, and trust in human–machine relationships? Why do these technologies feel so persuasive? What new forms of bias, manipulation, dependency, or surveillance might these technologies enable?To address these questions, our course emphasizes not only ethical critique but also historical and technical understanding. We will examine how the concept and practice of emulated empathy was imagined, built, and justified, tracing key moments in the history of artificial intelligence and human–computer interaction. Core sources include Alan Turing’s writings on machine intelligence; ELIZA (1966), the first computer therapist; contemporary AI ethics frameworks such as the IEEE standard on emulated empathy in autonomous systems; popular media, including the film Her; and global case studies such as Japanese advertising for avatar girlfriends. The seminar discussion will be based on hands-on encounters with AI systems and sustained scrutiny of historical sources. Screenings and in-class demonstrations will anchor the discussion, while comparative analysis of archival materials and contemporary standards will enable students to learn how the history of technology informs ethical debates. Throughout the course, students will actively evaluate the promises and limitations of emulated empathy by contrasting what these technologies were designed to do with our expectations for human empathy, understanding, and companionship.
AS.001.120. FYS: U.S. History of the Present. 3 Credits.
Which ideas, movements, problems, and conflicts define the contemporary United States—and where did they come from? In this First-Year Seminar, we’ll study the history of this country since the turn of the 21st century to try to answer those questions. Using a range of texts and visual media, we’ll investigate the history behind concepts like "the War on Terror," “the free market,” “identity politics,” “culture wars,” and "populism," and discuss the causes and consequences of the debates they provoked in this period. We’ll also assess what’s appealing and challenging about studying the very recent past and using it to interpret our present.
AS.001.145. FYS: The Haitian Revolution. 3 Credits.
Long overshadowed by the American and French Revolutions, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) is now widely recognized as one of the most important events in modern history. The most radical of the Atlantic Revolutions, it began with a massive uprising of the enslaved against the institution of slavery and culminated in the independence of the nation of Haiti. This First-Year Seminar will examine the origins, course, and legacy of the Revolution, addressing such issues as colonialism, racism, slavery, emancipation, human rights, and national sovereignty – issues that continue to shape the contemporary world.
AS.001.161. FYS: Why are you here? Universities: Past, Present, and Future. 3 Credits.
As an undergraduate student at Hopkins, you’ve likely given much thought about which university to attend and which major to choose. But why does the institution to which you’ve pledged to spend four years of your life exist? Where did universities come from? Why are they currently organized in departments, and why weren’t they organized that way for most of their past? Why was Johns Hopkins founded, and how do its aims and structures differ from those of other American institutions of higher education as well as from other universities around the world?This course aims to give students insight into the history of the university as an institution that structures the quest for knowledge. Concentrating on the period from the founding of the first university in Bologna, Italy to the present moment, we will seek to understand how the human quest to know has informed the structure of academic institutions in different ways over the course of that history. We will explore ways that the quest to know has at times challenged and changed institutional structures. And we will conclude by thinking about how efforts to know that sit uneasily within the contemporary university are challenging its structures today. This course will require students both to engage sympathetically in the close reading of texts that are emblematic of different ways of knowing, and to think in institutional terms about how those different quests to know inspired and challenged academic structures over time. We hope that this manner of studying the history of the university will both expand and discipline our imagination of what is possible and good for its future.
AS.001.163. FYS: Abolition in the Urban South: Baltimore’s William Levington. 3 Credits.
This First-Year Seminar will use the tools of the historical and literary archive to etch a social history of African American life in Baltimore between roughly 1790 and 1860, focusing on the historical figure William Levington. The founder of the first black Episcopalian church in the slaveholding South, Levington was also the third seminary-trained black priest in America. Students will explore classic narratives revealing the lives of the enslaved in American cities and in the Chesapeake. The course will also consider the role of the black church as the principle independent institution and mass movement for antebellum African Americans. We will make a class visit to St. James in Lafayette Square, the church Levington founded, and also visit the Maryland Center for History and Culture, and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
AS.001.166. FYS: The Pleasures of the Imagination - British culture in the eighteenth century. 3 Credits.
Music, Art, Theater, Novels, Autobiographies, and Material Culture all expanded dramatically in Britain in the long eighteenth century (c. 1714-1830), creating a culture celebrating ‘happiness’, 'beauty', and the 'pleasures of the imagination'. This First-Year Seminar will introduce students to themselves experiencing and discussing these exciting cultural forms, with students attending and watching plays and movies from plays, discussing Jane Austen novels as read and as filmed, reading and discussing an Afro-British autobiography, listening to performances of different kinds of music, and discussing works of art and architecture both in the classroom and in the museum.
AS.001.172. FYS: Earth On Drugs - Medicine, Bodies, Environment. 3 Credits.
Sixty-eight percent of Americans report taking at least one prescription medication daily, and twenty-six percent say they’re taking at least four prescriptions per day. What are the ecological effects of the production and consumption of pharmaceuticals? Where do drugs go when they leave the body–and how are organisms and ecosystems affected? How are nonhumans implicated in drug testing and other exposures? What knowledge regimes undergird understandings of the human body as (1) treatable by medications and (2) dissociated from the natural world? What ecological knowledge has contributed to the biomedical pharmacopeia? In this seminar, we will learn about dolphins on LSD, the botanical links between the mafia and scurvy, cocaine-addicted animals, yams and the contraceptive pill, plants and the war on drugs, and more. Students will engage with historical, anthropological, cultural studies, and environmental health texts and media to examine these questions. Students will visit a clinical herbalist’s medicinal plant cultivation site, an open source insulin production lab, and a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) practitioner. We will also conduct water quality testing in the Chesapeake Bay watershed to determine the presence of pharmaceuticals. Using planetary health and cross-cultural lenses, we will ask after the relationship between drugs, bodies, and the environment, and consider nonbiomedical healing regimes that posit different relationships between them.
AS.001.174. FYS: Women and Family in Chinese Film. 3 Credits.
From the early 20th century, Chinese society underwent a turbulent process of modern transformation. Industrialization, urbanization, and democratization challenged previous gender and family norms. Meanwhile, at exactly this time, the Chinese film industry flourished, especially in the modern metropolis of Shanghai. Women and family provided a useful microcosm through which to explore national questions related to revolution, war, and modernity. They also entertained a public eager for new leisure pursuits. Popular feature films not only recorded but also interpreted and helped shape family and gender roles. Using filmic representations as the main material this First-Year Seminar will survey the "family question" (and "the woman question") in 20th century China
AS.001.190. FYS: Poisons! A History. 3 Credits.
Poisons aren't what they seem. Sometimes they look like food. Sometimes they look like drugs. From cinnabar to cinnamon, from dragon blood to goat bezoars, poisons result from careful human construction, collection, and creation. They are objects of early chemistry. Far from killing us, poisons have been central to the history of medicine. Physicians in the past and present monitor dosage, drug combination, and drug preparation to mitigate poison toxicity while still maintaining drugs' therapeutic potencies. Knowledge about poisons, in other words, quietly undergirds most of human civilization. Poisons are what keep us alive. Or not.This First-Year Seminar comes to understand poisons in three ways. First, it takes on individual poisons (mercury, opium, among others) to introduce major themes in the history of science and science studies. Second, it engages with global perspectives in the history of medicine to understand how poisons were deployed, refined, and neutralized around the world. Third, it introduces frameworks in the philosophy of chemistry to analyze the social, conceptual, and practical demands on empiricism. Together, these three perspectives will shift students’ perspectives on poisons from objects that kill to critiquing them as objects that are intimately tied to ideas of cure.
AS.001.198. FYS: Secret Science. 3 Credits.
In this course, we will examine the concealment of scientific knowledge from the Scientific Revolution to present day. Although science is regularly described as a public good, it has often been a private affair. Why have various scientists, institutions, governments, and media outlets chosen to restrict the flow of scientific knowledge? How have their efforts fared in practice, and what factors explain their successes or failures? More generally, how does our picture of modern science change if we highlight work done behind closed doors? This First-Year Seminar will explore these questions through case studies on alchemy, trade secrecy, nuclear physics, and climate change denial. Students will work with formerly classified sources during several weeks of the term.
AS.001.199. FYS: Technology and Globalization. 3 Credits.
In times of pandemic, trade war, and restrictions on the export of strategic technologies, it has become common to predict the ‘death of globalization.’ Such predictions are hardly new, however, and neither are the protectionist technology policies that are currently in vogue. In this First-Year Seminar, we will examine how technology historically has both helped connect people in different parts of the world and contributed to division and inequality at national and global levels. Focusing on the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, we will pay special attention to the impact of transportation and ICT technologies ranging from the telegraph and container ship to the airplane and the internet. But we will also consider the consequences of globalization and technological change in areas such as mining and agriculture, taking into account the perspectives of a variety of actors including multinational enterprises, governments, standard-setting scientists and engineers, and the anti-globalization movement. The local effects of globalization will be discussed on a class trip to the Baltimore Museum of Industry, and students will have the opportunity to develop a research project on a topic of special interest to them in consultation with the instructor. Course readings will be made available on Canvas; they include both original historical sources and studies by historians and social scientists.
AS.001.206. FYS: Wisdom: Global Perspectives and Practices. 3 Credits.
Where is wisdom to be found? And where is the place of understanding? These probing questions from the Hebrew bible's Book of Job arose from a wisdom tradition that was rooted in a particular time, place, and group identity. Yet versions of these same questions can be found the world over. Is true wisdom the exclusive power of a divine being in heaven, or can it found on earth, in human intelligence, learning, and virtue? Who is rightly considered a sage—the enlightened monk, the Stoic teacher, the ruler who dispenses justice, the hermit-saint communing with God? Is the perfection of wisdom an attainable goal or only an impossible ideal? Why do some cultures personify Wisdom as a female goddess, attributing to her voice, agency, and cosmic creative powers? This First-Year Seminar places these questions under a cross-cultural lens by visiting the wisdom traditions of ancient Israel, Greek and Roman philosophy, early Christianity, medieval mysticism, and Buddhism. Course materials are drawn from the Old and New Testaments, ancient dialogues, Buddhist sutras and Zen koans, and other sources. We will also look at a variety of visual images, from holy portraits and devotional icons to mystical diagrams and Tibetan mandalas. When existence is hard enough as it is, why do we seek wisdom? Can today's culture of fortune-cookie philosophy, meditation apps, and self-help accessories really help us attain it? We'll engage in a series of practical experiments in the "art of living," testing for ourselves the possibilities, challenges, and joys of living with wisdom.
AS.001.215. FYS: Mosques, Museums, and the Mind’s Eye - Discovering Islamic Art in Person. 3 Credits.
Despite its association with distant regions and time periods, Islamic art has a flourishing presence in today’s America, represented by rich museum collections, modern buildings designed in historical styles, and vibrant scholarly networks. This seminar explores how we, from the vantage point of twenty-first-century Baltimore, might experience works of Islamic art in ways that are informed by their own cultural contexts while also acknowledging the challenges involved in bridging this gap. We will spend much of the course engaging with objects and architecture in person, with visits planned to the recently reinstalled Islamic galleries at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, the Islamic Center of Washington, DC, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. You will be invited to handle artifacts in person and to try your hand at calligraphy, one of the most distinctive and esteemed Islamic artforms. In the classroom setting, we will read and discuss translations of primary sources written by historical practitioners and consumers of Islamic art, along with examples of modern scholarship that seek to understand the Islamic tradition from a variety of perspectives. As well as learning about such perspectives, you will be encouraged to develop and share—in presentations and written assignments—your own ideas about Islamic art, building on the close, firsthand encounters that run throughout the seminar.
AS.001.232. FYS: German Thought, German Theater: Reason, Capital, Sex and Science. 3 Credits.
Over the past 250 years, Germany has produced some of the most influential currents of theory as well as drama. In this course, we will read and view plays and films that address developments in German thought and society from the Enlightenment to the present. We will ask: How effective are performances at transmitting ideas and values? How do they balance emotional involvement with intellectual understanding? These issues will be examined with respect to four themes: reason and enlightenment; capitalism; sexualities; and moral dilemmas raised by scientific discoveries.
AS.001.240. FYS: Death in the Renaissance. 3 Credits.
During the Renaissance, Christians frequently depicted the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the personifications of disease, famine, war, and conquest. Nearly half of all children died before the age of five and ten percent of women died of childbirth or of pregnancy related complications. Wars consumed the continent during the bloody sixteenth century, thanks to advances in military technology and religious violence. With no knowledge of the cause of disease and absent antibiotics, disease was as terrifying as mass murder. In this class, we explore death, dying, health, and hope in early modern Europe. How did death and the fear of death shape society? How did it affect politics and economics, gender and family? At the center of death – and life - was religion; in this chaotic world, disease was a punishment and God the only cure; as a result, we will explore how religion was the other side of the coin of death and disease. We will learn how to read primary sources of Renaissance people grappling with their mortality and examine Renaissance art. In the process, we will investigate one of the biggest questions human beings confront: What is the meaning of life in the face of death?
AS.001.247. FYS: African Cities - Past and Present. 3 Credits.
What are the implications of Africa’s urban revolution? In the last century, Africa’s cities have boomed at a dizzying pace, witnessing the most rapid urbanization in human history. This trend is unstoppable; yet it comes with opportunities and challenges. This first-year seminar invites students to explore Africa’s cities, their evolution from precolonial times to the digital age, their quest for modernity, and the unique repertoires of urban life they have registered thanks to the creativity of their overwhelming young denizens
AS.001.255. FYS: Lab Animals. 3 Credits.
This First-Year Seminar explores the scientific-technological, philosophical, social, and ethical dimensions of using animals for scientific research from the early nineteenth century to present. Why did scientists use animals and how did they choose “the right animal for the job”? How did philosophers define a “model organism”? What were the political economies formed within research communities sharing research animals? How did financial and material infrastructure take shape for large-scale, long-term maintenance of genetically standardized mice or zebrafish? How did the interpretations of animals reflect the social imaginaries of researchers and our society? And how did animals “speak” back? These are questions we are going to examine through reading scholarly publications, watching documentaries, visiting laboratories, and doing mini research projects together.
AS.001.256. FYS: Monuments and Memory in Asian History. 3 Credits.
Sites like the Forbidden City, the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, and Angkor Wat conjure images that often have more to do with fantasy than fact. Modern monuments like Yasukuni Shrine and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial similarly evoke history, memory, and myth. Why (and how) were these monuments built? How have their meanings changed over time and why? What forces have transformed them into symbols of national identity and cultural otherness? This First-Year Seminar will explore the ritual, political, historical, and religious significance of monumental sites in Asia. We will also examine their more recent role as sites for political mobilization, as signifiers of cultural and national identities, and as commodities in global and local tourism.
AS.001.259. FYS: Global Nude - The Art of the Human Body in the World. 3 Credits.
We are all born nude, but most of us wear clothes, at least when facing the public in our adult life. We are told nude is not the same as just “naked”: it is an art form. However, in grand museums, we see plenty of representation of nudes in the European wings. We gaze at a marble statue of a classical nude there, and when we go watch a film with nude scenes in a cinema with friends and strangers, we respond very differently in these two spaces. In this First-Year Seminar, we will go to museums, watch movies, and take a global, historical, and multimedia perspective to approach nude as art in the world. How is nude defined? What are the philosophical and scientific ideas that find nude as an ideal vehicle? What are the historical and cultural particularities of classical nude that have been taken for centuries as universal? How do other art traditions approach the representation of an unclothed nude body? How are nudes gendered, sexualized, classed, and racialized? How do modern media transform nude? These are among the questions that this class explores. The Truth is naked, as the saying goes. Nude is therefore a mirror reflecting both the foundations and aspirations of humanity.
AS.001.260. FYS: Whatever Happened to the Space Age? A Global History from Sputnik to SpaceX. 3 Credits.
Remember the moon landing? Of course you don't, but no one who watched it on television would have guessed that the last moon walk would be in 1972. Now some of us are ready to 'Occupy Mars'. This First-Year Seminar will explore the Space Age from the launch of the Soviet Sputnik in 1957 to the International Space Station, including military and civilian programs, unmanned and manned missions, and new competitors in our current space race, such as China, India, and the European Space Agency. We will read contemporary and historical accounts (October Sky and The Right Stuff) and screen some classic space age feature films and documentaries. We will pay particular attention to Johns Hopkins University's contributions, notably the Hubble and Webb Space Telescopes and the Applied Physics Laboratory's satellite program. We'll talk with experts at the Space Telescope Science Institute and APL, and tour the National Air and Space Museum collections with the curator of manned spaceflight. In groups, students will prepare future space mission proposals for NASA and SpaceX, and present them to a distinguished panel of Hopkins space scientists and engineers.
AS.001.273. FYS: The Long Civil Rights Movement in 20th-Century America. 3 Credits.
This seminar traces the development of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States over the course of the 20th Century. By exploring some of the major sites of conflict, activism, protest, opposition, and resistance in modern African American History, we will begin to complicate traditional understandings of Black freedom struggles in the United States. Why and how did African Americans mobilize and organize for their rights? How did they imagine citizenship, Black freedom, and equality within the United States? How did these events impact public life and public policy? What are the legacies of the movement? Students will analyze a broad range of primary and secondary source materials, including the writings of W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Fannie Lou Hamer, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and more. Additionally, students will watch a series of civil rights films related to the broad themes of the course and will visit local museums and archives as part of a larger experiential component, to better understand the significance of the modern Civil Rights Movement on contemporary American society and culture.
AS.001.276. FYS: Friends or Foes? US-European Relations since 1979. 3 Credits.
This First-year Seminar offers students the opportunity to better understand current debates through the lens of key documents and controversies that illustrate shared interests and disagreements between the US and Europe since the pivotal year 1979. Topics include but are not limited to: NATO, arms limitations and reduction, the Polish Crisis, Chernobyl, Gorbachev, German unification, collapse of the Soviet Union, 9/11 and the GWOT, the financial crisis of 2008-2012, Ukraine, the EU, the rise of China and climate change. The seminar includes a visit to the Delegation of the European Union in DC and other conversations with experts.
History
AS.100.144. Shopaholics: Consumer Revolution and the Material World, 1600-1850. 3 Credits.
We live in a world of global consumption. This course introduces students to the birth of global consumer culture in the period from the 1600s through to the American, French and Haitian revolutions. These revolutions were themselves sold to consumers through “revolutionary things”, and this period witnessed the first major consumer boycotts against slave-produced goods. Students will examine the histories of many key commodities involved in the “consumer revolution”, including fashion items such as shoes, wigs, clothing and accessories. A significant portion of the course will examine addictive stimulants like sugar, coffee, tea and tobacco, globalized and imperial goods which became common for the first time in this period. We shall see how production of these goods involved new forms of racialized exploitation; simultaneously, we shall explore the diversity of people involved in the consumer revolution, studying the consumption of important new goods by people living in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. By the end of the class, students will understand how the emergence of mass consumption affected the global politics of race, gender and class, with especially important consequences for women and non-elite men. Students will examine objects lauded for their politeness, decorative appeal, and cultural importance such as porcelain tea sets, snuffboxes, and fans. Students will choose their own objects for a student presentation and research project.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.333. Knowledge and Faith in U.S. History. 3 Credits.
How do we know the truth? Which beliefs are valid? What sources of intellectual authority should we follow? US history has been shaped by fierce disagreements over these questions. This course will explore many of the proposed answers, focusing on scientific and religious frameworks. As citizens, it is crucial to understand conflicts over truth, belief, and authority. Yet very few people have a sense of the history of these disputes or a language for discussing them constructively. This class provides both.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
History of Art
AS.010.235. Art, Medicine, and the Body: Middle Ages to Modernity. 3 Credits.
This course explores seven centuries of fruitful collaboration between physicians and artists, uncovering the shared discourses and therapeutic agendas that united the art of picture-making with the art of healing. Topics include understandings of the gendered body in ancient natural philosophy and Christian theology; astrological medicine; physiognomics and the visual diagnosis of mental and physical disease; medieval medical diagrams; the anatomical investigations of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo; depictions of pain and suffering in the art of Matthias Grünewald, melancholy in the prints of Albrecht Dürer, and the cross-cultural history of the therapeutic artefact; the spectacularization of the body in Enlightenment science, and the ethics of medical specimen display today -- all bringing into view the dynamic intersections of the history of medicine and the history of art.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.010.245. Netherlandish Painting in the Fifteenth Century: Broederlam to Bosch. 3 Credits.
This course explores the achievements and impact of the major painters working in the Burgundian Netherlands, especially the cities of Flanders, during the fifteenth century: Melchior Broederlam, Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden; the Master of Flémalle, Hans Memling, Hugo van der Goes, Hieronymus Bosch, and others.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.291. The Art of Ancient Greek Medicine. 3 Credits.
This course analyzes the role of artists and the visual arts in shaping ancient Greek medicine and the afterlife of these ideas. Grounded in the visual arts, we will explore class, gender, race, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality as they intersect with developments in ancient medicine and later interpretations of this history. Includes excursions to local museums.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.314. The Art and Architecture of the Gods in Ancient Greece. 3 Credits.
In ancient Greece, the visual arts were at the heart of human relations with the divine. Images of gods in various media were everywhere, from marketplaces to sanctuaries, from private homes to the coins in people’s pockets. Temples sacred to deities punctuated the landscape, from city-centers to remote mountain peaks. Alongside poets, artists were hugely influential in shaping ideas about gods. And by making objects for dedication, artists also provided worshippers with an essential means of divine veneration. In fact, much of what we call Greek art was made to honour deities.This course explores the relationship between the gods and the visual arts in ancient Greece, with a particular focus on the Archaic and Classical periods (ca. 700–300 BCE). What can art and architecture tell us about Greek attitudes to the gods? How and why were art and architecture important in divine worship? How did the visual arts contribute to human (mis)understanding of the divine? And what happened to the Greek gods in art after antiquity? The course tackles these questions by examining a wide range of primary material, including Greek architecture, sculpture, and painting, as well as relevant textual sources (in translation).Each week will focus on a different theme or case study, giving students the opportunity to investigate the many ways in which art’s interconnection with the gods featured in Greek culture. Topics include: the portrayal of divine myths in Greek sculpture and painting; the art and architecture of Greek sanctuaries, such as Delphi, Olympia, and the Athenian acropolis; Dionysos and the art of the symposium; Aphrodite and the emergence of the female nude in Greek art; the relationship between gods, art, and the natural landscape; and the artistic afterlives of the Greek gods, from the Renaissance to today. The course will include visits to the John Hopkins Archaeological Museum and the Walters Art Museum.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.322. Knowledge, Holiness, and Pleasure: The Illustrated Book in the Medieval World. 3 Credits.
The book was the primary source for the collection of knowledge in the Middle Ages. It was also the medium for the preservation and proliferation of the texts that underlay the three monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). It served as a source for elite entertainment, perhaps most importantly in Late Antiquity and the later Middle Ages. This course investigates the role of the illustrated book within the political, religious, and artistic developments that took place after the rise of Christianity from the end of the Roman Empire until the early modern period. We will examine how the different types of books, such as horizontal and vertical scrolls, large and miniature size codices influenced the placement, conception, and style of the illustrations. The class also addresses processes of manufacture, issues of materiality (i.e. precious multi-media book covers, papyrus, parchment, paper), and the relationship between text and image. The course will be taught exclusively with facsimiles of medieval manuscripts from Special Collections at Eisenhower Library and original manuscripts in the Walters Art Museum and other collections.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.330. Art of the Caliphates: Visual Culture and Competition in the Medieval Islamic World. 3 Credits.
Despite its modern-day association with a fringe extremist movement, the term “caliphate” was traditionally used to describe the Muslim world at large, the political and spiritual ruler of which bore the title of caliph. The original Islamic caliphate was established in the seventh century as a vast empire centered on the Middle East and extending deep into Africa, Asia, and Europe. It soon broke apart into a series of competing powers, until in the tenth century, three rival dynasties—the Baghdad-based Abbasids, the Spanish Umayyads, and the Fatimids of North Africa—each claimed to be the rightful caliphate. This course will examine how these fascinating political developments and conflicts played out in the realm of art and architecture between the seventh and thirteenth centuries. As well as palaces, mosques, and commemorative buildings, the course will look at media ranging from ceramics and metalwork to textiles and illustrated manuscripts, with many of the artifacts being viewed firsthand in local museum collections. These works will be considered in relation to such themes as patronage, audience, ceremony, and meaning. Particular attention will be paid to how the various caliphates—both in emulation of and competition with one another—used visual culture as a powerful tool to assert their legitimacy.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.010.336. Männer und Meister: Artistry and Masculinity in Sixteenth-Century Germany. 3 Credits.
Since the publication of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives (1550), in which the history of art was first conceived as the successive accomplishment of a select group of great men, the discipline of Art History has had a gender problem. Today, feminist scholars continue to grapple with this troubled legacy, working to redress the masculinist biases inherent in disciplinary methods and assumptions while at the same time fighting to recover the value of traditionally overlooked subjects and genres. In the early 1990s, the history of masculinity emerged as an adjunct to traditional feminist history. Aimed at addressing misconceptions about the nature and naturalness of male identity, this subfield has helped open masculinity to critical reevaluation. Drawing on the contributions of contemporary feminist scholarship as well as those of the history of masculinity, this course explores the ways in which a reconsideration of the nature of male identity in the historical past might help us rethink key art historical issues, for example, paradigmatic notions of the Renaissance artist, the nature of copying and competition, and the concepts of creativity, invention, and genius. The course will focus on developments in the German speaking world in the late fifteenth and sixteenth-centuries; as numerous historians have noted, the German speaking lands underwent a crisis of masculinity during this period, in part precipitated by the events of the Protestant Reformation. At the same time, the region witnessed profound changes in the status of the arts and of the artist. In this course, we will explore the ways in which these phenomena were related, and how they contributed to culturally specific notions of the relationship between masculinity and artistry. We will also consider the ways in which a close examination of masculinity in the German Renaissance opens up new avenues of art historical and cultural historical investigation with relevance beyond the period itself.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.339. Sex, Death, and Gender: The Body in Premodern Art, Medicine, and Culture, c. 1300-1600. 3 Credits.
To what extent was the body and its depiction a site of contestation, identification, or desire in the Middle Ages and Renaissance? If the body in the West since the 1800s is seen to have been shaped by the rise of photography and film, the institutionalization of biomedicine, and the establishment of techniques of surveyance and mechanization, then how was the body represented, disciplined, and experienced in the preceding centuries? In an age of unprecedented encounter with non-European bodies, what did it mean to describe and categorize bodies by race, region, or religion? These are some of the major questions this class seeks to answer, which is fundamentally interdisciplinary as it draws upon insights and methods from anthropology and the history of medicine and history of science to investigate how the body has been represented and imagined in the visual arts. The bodies of the suffering Christ, the female mystic, the dissected cadaver, the punished criminal, and the non-European ‘Other’ will loom large as we work to problematize notions of a normative body, whether in the premodern world or in the contemporary one. While most readings and lectures will concern the body and its representation in the Christian West during the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, students are encouraged to work on a topic of their choosing from any geographical area 1000-1800 CE for their research papers.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.358. The Art of Celebration in Early Modern Northern Europe. 3 Credits.
The lavish feasts and dynamic jousts associated with medieval and Renaissance celebrations have long been subjects of fascination in popular culture and will be familiar to anyone who has watched House of the Dragon or attended a modern “Renaissance” fair. But what did these celebrations mean in their original context? This course aims to take “play” seriously by examining the wide-ranging material culture of courtly and civic festivities in Germany and the Netherlands from 1400 to 1600. The art created for festive events ranges from panel paintings and tapestries to table fountains and drinking vessels made of expensive and “exotic” materials. Artists were also responsible for the design and construction of ephemeral architecture for triumphal entries as well as the festival books that commemorated them. But these works did more than just facilitate fun; they were tools of communication that made arguments about issues such as social class, identity, and power. They also engaged with the geopolitical and intellectual developments of the period. There are drinking vessels, for instance, made of nautilus shells, Seychelles nuts, or bezoars, whose materials and construction offer insight into global exploration and European colonialism as well as medicinal practices. Automata, machines akin to premodern “robots,” frequently provided entertainment for guests at aristocratic banquets by showing off the latest technological developments. While the study of any historical event faces the daunting task of recuperating what has been lost to time, this rings especially true for the study of festivities. In this course, we turn to these celebrations’ artistic and material traces to illuminate the past. As object-based learning is an important component of this course, we will visit several local collections including the Walters Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the National Gallery in Washington, and Johns Hopkins’ Special Collections.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.359. The Symbolic Mosque: A Political History of Islamic Architecture. 3 Credits.
From the 2008 Swiss referendum banning minarets and the opposition of the 2010 proposed construction of a mosque near the site of the September 11 attacks in New York City to the more recent reconversion of the Hagia Sophia in 2020, the mosque in modern times has incited significant controversy and sentiments of hostility among various political and religious groups. The mosque as a political battleground, however, has a much longer history, and the coopting of religious buildings and architectural elements as visual symbols deserves a more comprehensive historical analysis. With a focus on the Ottoman context, this seminar will explore the political dimensions of mosque architecture since the fifteenth century and will examine its transformations both visually and symbolically across spatiotemporal contexts. The historical investigation into the symbolic significance of the mosque and Islamic architecture in the first half of this course will lead to a broader discussion in the second half about the role of architectures of nationalism in politics and diplomacy starting from the nineteenth century until today. By focusing on the mosque itself as a symbol, this course aims to spark dialogue and reflection on the role of religious monuments in contemporary political encounters across different geographic contexts. This course encourages a multi- and inter-disciplinary approach to Islamic art and architecture by incorporating readings and topics from a variety of fields, such as cultural theory, political history, anthropology, and heritage studies. Case studies covered by this course include the Persianate and Byzantine influences in early Ottoman mosques, the establishment and continuation of the classical Ottoman architectural style of the sixteenth century, neo-Mamluk mosques in Egypt and the creation of architectural identities in Ottoman Arab lands, architectural afterlives of Ottoman heritage in modern Greece, and the use of neo-Ottoman architecture by the Turkish Justice and Development Party (AKP) today.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.369. The American Art Museum: Origins, Mission, and Civic Purpose. 3 Credits.
This course will explore the American art museum as a distinctive cultural and political idea. Tracing its origins to the ancient world, the American art museum was descended more immediately from institutions created during the European Enlightenment, but differing with regard to overall mission and civic purpose. This course will explore the various roles played by museums in American society, focusing on programmatic content, organizational design, funding and operating practices, and the particular issues that have arisen in recent years in the areas of cultural property restitution, collection development, special exhibitions, governance and funding, and the larger question of civic purpose.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.010.401. A Republic in Crisis: Florence 1490-1530. 3 Credits.
The era identified as the “High Renaissance” in Florence was one of the most dystopian in the history of the city, a period of terror and explosive political crisis beginning with the expulsion of the Medici, followed by the theocratic Savonarolan regime in 1494, the repressive Medici restoration of 1513 and concluding with the fall of the “Last Republic” in 1530. Much of the most distinctive cultural production associated with this period - the sermons of Savonarola, the writings of Machiavelli, and major works of art by Michelangelo and others, is concerned with the relocation of Florentine identity following an experience of rupture with history and tradition, leading to a fundamental revaluation of the past and of the significance of history and memory. We will examine cultural transformation under a succession of Republican and autocratic regimes, with a particular attention to the process of “image-making” on the part of the state, of factions within it, of writers and ideologues, and - not least - of artists.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.402. Mobility & Migration of the Artist in Early Modern Europe. 3 Credits.
How did artists define their identity in the era before fixed “nationalities” and setgeographies? This course investigates the art and personalities of the many Netherlandishpainters, sculptors, printmakers, and craftsmen who moved and migrated across early modern Europe, finding work and fortune in cities from Rome to London, and Madrid to Stockholm. Their mobility, as the Florentine merchant Lodovico Guicciardini remarked in1567, was “something no less wonderful than honorable.” But the reasons behind the unprecedented migrations of Dutch and Flemish artists from the Low Countries from c.1550 to 1700 were complex and varied. Many artists were driven by the political andreligious turmoil of the Eighty Years’ War with Spain, while others sought economic and professional opportunities abroad. While some artists undertook short-term migrations, others left their native soil permanently. How did artists adjust to new cultures, languages,and religious traditions? What strategies did they use to succeed in their new homes? And how did their mobility ultimately affect their artistic practice? Taking a wide and critical view, the course provides a framework for examining the full range of motivations, how artists navigated new artistic, cultural, social, and religious contexts, and how artistic identity itself emerges from a relationship to place beyond one’s own.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.407. Ancient Americas Metallurgy. 3 Credits.
This course addresses the technology, iconography and social significance of metals and draws on case studies from the Americas. Collections study in museums.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
AS.010.421. An Empire’s Diversity: Ottoman Art and Architecture beyond the Imperial Court. 3 Credits.
The established historiography of Ottoman architecture is dominated by the patronage of the sultans and their elites, particularly as it shaped the empire’s third and final capital, Istanbul. While this focus on the “center” and its leadership reflects the Ottoman state’s own hierarchical structure, it also obscures the larger network of places and people that enabled the imperial system to develop and acquire meaning in the first place. This course will explore Ottoman architecture and its patronage from the perspective of these neglected regions and actors, covering such examples as Christian vassal states along the empire’s European borders, Arab lands with existing traditions of Islamic art, the curious persistence of Gothic models in the former Crusader kingdom of Cyprus, and the distinctive architectural practices of non-Muslim minorities within Istanbul itself. Drawn primarily from the early modern and modern periods, our case studies will be treated not as imitations of or deviations from the metropolitan mainstream, but as vital expressions of Ottoman culture that assertively engaged with, and themselves contributed to, the better-known strategies of the sultan’s court. We will also go beyond issues of architecture and patronage and consider these buildings as lived spaces whose associated objects, furnishings, and social and ceremonial activities were no less constitutive of the empire’s diverse architectural landscape.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.010.428. Art & Culture in the Crusader Near East, ca 1000-1300. 3 Credits.
From the late eleventh century to the close of the thirteenth, European pilgrims, knights, foot soldiers, merchants, and travelers, visited, fought, colonized, and settled in the Holy Land, that is along the Mediterranean coast stretching from modern Turkey to Egypt, creating a principality known as the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem or what scholars have called the Crusader Near East. This territory became the location of fiercely contested borders, religious identities, and political alliances, but it was also the site of vibrant artistic and cultural production. This course will interrogate what scholars mean by crusader culture. We will analyze different types of sources and materials including texts, textiles, architecture, manuscript illumination, sculpture, metalworks, and ivory. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach – with the goal of coordinating the lives and experiences of people living in the Crusader Near East, with the documents, and visual and material culture they produced, consumed, and exchanged with western Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic world. One of the goals is to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation for the context of cultural production and to consider and critique the terminologies and narratives about crusading, including concepts of acculturation, translation, and hybridity.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.010.431. Obsessed with the Past: the Art and Architecture of Medieval Rome. 3 Credits.
In antiquity, Rome became the capital of an empire, its growing status reflected in its sophisticated urban planning, its architecture, and the arts. While an abundance of studies explores the revival of this glorious past in the Renaissance, this seminar discusses various ways of the reception of antiquity during the medieval period. We address the practice of using spolia in medieval architecture, the appropriation of ancient pagan buildings for the performance of Christian cult practices, the continuation of making (cult)images and their veneration, the meaning and specific visuality of Latin script (paleography and epigraphy) in later medieval art. We discuss the revival and systematic study of ancient knowledge (f. ex. medicine, astronomy, and the liberal arts), in complex allegorical murals. As we aim to reconstruct the art and architecture of medieval Rome, this course discusses ideas and concepts behind different forms of re-building and picturing the past, as they intersect with the self-referential character of a city that is obsessed with its own history.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.459. The illuminated charter: visual splendor, performance, and authenticity of medieval legal documents. 3 Credits.
This course investigates the complexities of medieval legal documents, their specific visuality and materiality, as well as practices of copying and forgery. We will address the aesthetics of legal documents, their graphic signs, seals, and paleography and the authenticating strategies used to corroborate their legitimacy. Another emphasis is set on the performative aspects of the medieval charters in court and church rituals. Comparison with contemporary illuminated sacred books will reveal the tight connections of monastic scriptoria and royal/imperial chanceries. The geographic focus is set wide, ranging from medieval Spain, to Carolingian and Ottonian chanceries in France and Germany, to the papal court in Rome and the imperial and monastic scriptoria in Byzantium.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.465. Renew, Reuse, Recycle: Afterlives of Architecture in the Ottoman Empire. 3 Credits.
Designed from the outset to be inhabited and used, works of architecture are inherently susceptible to changes in purpose, appearance, and meaning over time. This was particularly so in the Ottoman Empire (c. 1299–1922), a multiethnic and multireligious transcontinental polity whose territories were already marked by long and eventful architectural histories. Through such case studies as the Parthenon in Athens, the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople/Istanbul, the Citadel of Cairo, and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, this course investigates the ways in which buildings and sites have been appropriated, repurposed, transformed, and/or reconceptualized in response to changing sociopolitical and artistic conditions. Topics to be addressed include the conversion of places of worship, (re)decoration as a vehicle of ideology, and the phenomenon of spoliation—the recycling, whether for practical or symbolic reasons, of existing building materials. In addition to the monuments themselves, we will address the objects that filled them and the human activities they hosted. While our focus will be on the Ottoman context and its relationship to the past, the course will also consider comparable examples in other geographies as well as developments in the post-Ottoman era, including the current debate over the Parthenon marbles and the recent reconversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.467. The Renaissance in its Global Dimensions 1450-1650. 3 Credits.
A seminar focusing on recent scholarship that seeks to conceptualize a “global Renaissance,” beginning with Italy and the Mediterranean and then addressing exchanges between Europe and Southern/Eastern Asia. Case studies of the mobility of artists and artifacts, artistic adaptation and translation, materials as commodities and bearers of meaning.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.469. Quarried, Sculpted, Carved: Lifecycles of Mesoamerican Sculpture. 3 Credits.
Stelae, altars, colossal heads, thrones, figures, lintels. This course considers how artists created these stone monuments in Mesoamerica, the historical region that encompasses Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras, and El Salvador. Sculptors meticulously carved stone blocks to shape and then scribes expertly incised their surfaces with hieroglyphic text or iconography. These stone monuments were then transported and moved into position, their physical placements structuring social hierarchy and mediating interactions with the divine. In reviewing recent literature within the fields of art history and material studies, we will explore the full cycle of production for monumental works of art.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.497. Reply-All: Letter-Writing in Art and History. 3 Credits.
From embellished silver pens and abolitionist secretary desks to contemporary artists manipulating historical postcards and making fax collages, this course will explore the materiality, technologies, and aesthetics of written communications from the 18th century to the present. This research-centered course will engage directly with objects in the Baltimore Museum of Art collection, in preparation for an upcoming exhibition. Topics include the development of specific decorative arts and designs in conjunction with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century postal and bureaucratic history, letter-writing as a mode of resistance, strategic illegibility and asemic writing as a form of critical artistic practice, and the importance of mail art as conceptual and institutional critique. Includes hands-on work in the museum and class visits with BMA curator Dr. Leslie Cozzi.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.010.604. Contested Patterns: Islamic Art History and Its Challenges. 3 Credits.
Formed against the backdrop of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Orientalism and colonialism, the field of Islamic art history continues to grapple with the overwhelmingly Eurocentric assumptions, narratives, and approaches that shaped its emergence and development. These inherited perspectives and the debates they have sparked are the focus of this seminar, which critically examines the foundational characterizations of Islamic art—as ornamental, iconophobic, and timelessly other—together with the exhibitory, commercial, and scholarly contexts in which such ideas took root. Adopting a simultaneously thematic and chronological approach, the seminar will trace the ways in which diverse constellations of actors—including those from within the Islamic world itself—have variously established, consolidated, or challenged the field’s underlying concepts. We will explore how this discursive process has intensified in our own time, in which a spate of scholarly and popular treatments have laid bare the tension between calls to reevaluate the field and an enduring impulse to reinscribe its established contours. Alois Riegl, Oleg Grabar, Gülru Necipoglu, Yasser Tabbaa, and Wendy Shaw are among the authors whose writings will be assessed and compared. Throughout the seminar, we will ground our historiographical inquiry in discussions of specific works and categories of Islamic art—particularly those like carpets that traditional frameworks have fetishized as decorative—and consider more fruitful avenues for addressing such material, making use of local collections to the extent that we can.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.621. An Empire’s Diversity: Ottoman Architecture and Patronage beyond the Imperial Court. 3 Credits.
The established historiography of Ottoman architecture is dominated by the patronage of the sultans and their elites, particularly as it shaped the empire’s third and final capital, Istanbul. While this focus on the “center” and its leadership reflects the Ottoman state’s own hierarchical structure, it also obscures the larger network of places and people that enabled the imperial system to develop and acquire meaning in the first place. This course will explore Ottoman architecture and its patronage from the perspective of these neglected regions and actors, covering such examples as Christian vassal states along the empire’s European borders, Arab lands with existing traditions of Islamic art, the curious persistence of Gothic models in the former Crusader kingdom of Cyprus, and the distinctive architectural practices of non-Muslim minorities within Istanbul itself. Drawn primarily from the early modern and modern periods, our case studies will be treated not as imitations of or deviations from the metropolitan mainstream, but as vital expressions of Ottoman culture that assertively engaged with, and themselves contributed to, the better-known strategies of the sultan’s court. We will also go beyond issues of architecture and patronage and consider these buildings as lived spaces whose associated objects, furnishings, and social and ceremonial activities were no less constitutive of the empire’s diverse architectural landscape.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.665. Renew, Reuse, Recycle: Afterlives of Architecture in the Ottoman Empire. 3 Credits.
Designed from the outset to be inhabited and used, works of architecture are inherently susceptible to changes in purpose, appearance, and meaning over time. This was particularly so in the Ottoman Empire (c. 1299–1922), a multiethnic and multireligious transcontinental polity whose territories were already marked by long and eventful architectural histories. Through such case studies as the Parthenon in Athens, the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople/Istanbul, the Citadel of Cairo, and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, this course investigates the ways in which buildings and sites have been appropriated, repurposed, transformed, and/or reconceptualized in response to changing sociopolitical and artistic conditions. Topics to be addressed include the conversion of places of worship, (re)decoration as a vehicle of ideology, and the phenomenon of spoliation—the recycling, whether for practical or symbolic reasons, of existing building materials. In addition to the monuments themselves, we will address the objects that filled them and the human activities they hosted. While our focus will be on the Ottoman context and its relationship to the past, the course will also consider comparable examples in other geographies as well as developments in the post-Ottoman era, including the current debate over the Parthenon marbles and the recent reconversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.671. The illuminated charter: visual splendor, performance, and authenticity of medieval legal documents. 3 Credits.
This course investigates the complexities of medieval legal documents, their specific visuality and materiality, as well as practices of copying and forgery. We will address the aesthetics of legal documents, their graphic signs, seals, and paleography and the authenticating strategies used to corroborate their legitimacy. Another emphasis is set on the performative aspects of the medieval charters in court and church rituals. Comparison with contemporary illuminated sacred books will reveal the tight connections of monastic scriptoria and royal/imperial chanceries. The geographic focus is set wide, ranging from medieval Spain, to Carolingian and Ottonian chanceries in France and Germany, to the papal court in Rome and the imperial and monastic scriptoria in Byzantium.
Writing Intensive
AS.010.697. Reply-All: Letter-Writing in Art and History. 3 Credits.
From embellished silver pens and abolitionist secretary desks to contemporary artists manipulating historical postcards and making fax collages, this course will explore the materiality, technologies, and aesthetics of written communications from the 18th century to the present. This research-centered course will engage directly with objects in the Baltimore Museum of Art collection, in preparation for an upcoming exhibition. Topics include the development of specific decorative arts and designs in conjunction with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century postal and bureaucratic history, letter-writing as a mode of resistance, strategic illegibility and asemic writing as a form of critical artistic practice, and the importance of mail art as conceptual and institutional critique. Includes hands-on work in the museum and class visits with BMA curator Dr. Leslie Cozzi.
Distribution Area: Humanities
History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
AS.140.105. History of Medicine. 3 Credits.
Course provides an introduction to health and healing in the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. Topics include religion and medicine; medicine in the Islamicate world; women and healing; patients and practitioners.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.140.356. Man vs. Machine: Resistance to New Technology since the Industrial Revolution. 3 Credits.
This course analyzes various episodes of “luddism” in the history of science and technology, from the destruction of textile machinery in the early 1800s up to recent controversies about robots, vaccines, and AI chatbots. What explains why different groups of actors did (or did not) resist the introduction of new technologies, ranging from the bicycle and the automobile to the nuclear energy plant? What types of fears did these technologies arouse? What can history teach us about the recurring concern that technological innovation might destroy more jobs than it generates? These are some of the themes we will be examining in this seminar on the basis of research presentations and classroom discussions of primary and secondary historical sources.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Interdepartmental
AS.360.305. Introduction to Computational Methods for the Humanities. 3 Credits.
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.360.306. Computational Intelligence for the Humanities. 3 Credits.
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.360.410. Humanities Research Lab: The Dutch Americas. 3 Credits.
The Dutch East India Company, or VOC, is historically and art historically well documented and firmly understood. But the Dutch also had significant holdings to the west via the Dutch West India Company, or WIC. They operated and held outposts in the present-day United States (New York/New Amsterdam), Caribbean (Surinam, Curaçao, Bonaire), Latin America (Brazil), and West Africa. Despite the abundance of materials associated with the WIC from this wide geography, these have been scarcely assessed by art historians, and a defined and comprehensive corpus has never been assembled. This class will act as a research lab in which to do so. In research teams, students will map artworks and objects created from that broad, transnational cultural ambit—categories that might include maps, landscape paintings, still life paintings featuring American flora and fauna, botanical illustrations, plantation architecture, luxury objects made from precious raw materials gathered in the Americas, the urban environment of slavery—and develop individual research questions around them.The class will run with a partner lab in the form of a course led by Professor Stephanie Porras at Tulane University. The course will feature speakers; and there is potential for funded travel to conduct research. We will start at the ground level; no previous knowledge about the field is required. Students from all disciplines are welcome.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.360.412. Humanities Research Lab: Asian Diaspora in Baltimore and D.C.. 3 Credits.
In this humanities research lab, students will conduct original research on local histories of Asian American and Asian diasporic communities in the Baltimore area, inclusive of D.C. Students will think about how and why the histories and experiences of the region’s Asian American and diasporic communities, especially their interactions with other racialized and minoritized groups, continue to be erased from public conversation, and then engage in hands-on collaborative and reparative work in response to such erasure. The lab is organized around discussions and workshops with community collaborators, guest speakers, and scholars, as well as visits to archives, neighborhoods, and community organizations. This course requires at least four Friday group trips to 555 Penn in Washington D.C. (transportation provided).
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.360.420. Humanities Research Lab: Making Maps of Mexico. 3 Credits.
Learn the basics of ArcGIS, data management, and the history of maps and censuses as you help Prof. Lurtz build a digital historical atlas of Mexico. No experience necessary, graduate students welcome.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.360.605. Introduction to Computational Methods for the Humanities. 3 Credits.
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.
AS.360.606. Computational Intelligence for the Humanities. 3 Credits.
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.
AS.360.610. Humanitites Research Lab: The Dutch Americas. 3 Credits.
The Dutch East India Company, or VOC, is historically and art historically well documented and firmly understood. But the Dutch also had significant holdings to the west via the Dutch West India Company, or WIC. They operated and held outposts in the present-day United States (New York/New Amsterdam), Caribbean (Surinam, Curaçao, Bonaire), Latin America (Brazil), and West Africa. Despite the abundance of materials associated with the WIC from this wide geography, these have been scarcely assessed by art historians, and a defined and comprehensive corpus has never been assembled. This class will act as a research lab in which to do so. In research teams, students will map artworks and objects created from that broad, transnational cultural ambit—categories that might include maps, landscape paintings, still life paintings featuring American flora and fauna, botanical illustrations, plantation architecture, luxury objects made from precious raw materials gathered in the Americas, the urban environment of slavery—and develop individual research questions around them.The class will run with a partner lab in the form of a course led by Professor Stephanie Porras at Tulane University. The course will feature speakers; and there is potential for funded travel to conduct research. We will start at the ground level; no previous knowledge about the field is required. Students from all disciplines are welcome.
Writing Intensive
Islamic Studies
AS.194.230. African-Americans and the Development of Islam in America. 3 Credits.
Muslims have been a part of the American fabric since its inception. A key thread in that fabric has been the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants, some of whom were Muslims, and who not only added to the dynamism of the American environment, but eventually helped shape American culture, religion, and politics. The history of Islam in America is intertwined with the creation and evolution of African American identity. Contemporary Islam in America cannot be understood without this framing. This course will provide a historical lens for understanding Islam, not as an external faith to the country, but as an internal development of American religion. This course will explicate the history of early Islamic movements in the United States and the subsequent experiences of African-Americans who converted to Islam during the first half of the twentieth century. We will cover the spiritual growth of African American Muslims, their institutional presence, and their enduring impact on American culture writ large and African-American religion and culture more specifically.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.194.256. Museums, Communities, and the Sacred. 3 Credits.
This community-engaged course is co-created by a scholar and curator with expertise in religion, art, and material culture, and taught in partnership with the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), and centers how museums engage with the sacred. Recognizing that museums have traditionally been under-equipped to respond to the social concerns that animate their local communities, the BMA is rethinking how a twenty-first century civic museum engages the city in which it is located. Understanding the museum as a public space in which contemporary civic and social issues can be engaged, we will explore such questions as: how can a museum represent devotional objects while honoring a diversity of religious and spiritual perspectives and avoiding homogenous narratives about belief? How can a museum create relationships with religious communities to understand and interpret the objects in its collection, and navigate differences in faith-based communities with ethical care? How can a museum engage local communities in the process of writing labels for objects and in other acts of interpretation in a way that is not extractive and is genuinely value-aligned? In short, how can a museum truly become public? As a community-engaged course, students will build practically on their learning about museums, religion and public pedagogy to create and facilitate community listening circles at the BMA. The course will include visits to the BMA and other sites, guest visits on focused topics from museum professionals in other institutions, and training in listening and facilitation.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies
AS.361.623. LACLxS Reading Seminar: Caribbean Worlds. 3 Credits.
This interdisciplinary graduate seminar examines the Caribbean as a dynamic and multifaceted region shaped by its diverse populations, colonial entanglements, and enduring struggles for sovereignty and self-determination. Emphasizing the Caribbean’s role as a site of political, economic, and cultural innovation, the course engages major themes including indigeneity, slavery and colonial domination, race and racism, gender and sexuality, diaspora, and contested models of “development.” These issues will be analyzed through the writings and perspectives of Caribbean thinkers—both historical and contemporary—who have critically shaped regional and global discourses. Rather than positioning the Caribbean as simply “peripheral,” this course foregrounds the region as a generative space of intellectual, cultural, and political resilience with profound relevance to broader conversations in Latin America and the Global South.
AS.361.626. LACLxS Work-in Progress Seminar. 1 Credit.
The second in a two-semester graduate sequence, this course will be for graduate students and faculty to collaboratively workshop their own research and writing on topics related to Latin American studies.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Medicine, Science and the Humanities
AS.145.106. Health, Science, Environment. 3 Credits.
Environment has an inexorable effect on human health, and certain human activities have had outsized impacts on the natural world and the ability of forms of life to thrive. This course brings medical humanities, history of science, and science & technology studies into conversation with environmental humanities to ask: how have our conceptions of the natural world emerged, and how have these shaped our understandings of bodies, ecologies, and health outcomes? How do we know and measure the environment and health, and to what effects? How have human and ecological health affected environmental politics? How have writers and artists understood and depicted their environments and environmental questions? Can works of fiction shape ecological transformations? What can we learn from case studies of health and environment in Baltimore and the Chesapeake Bay as well as in global contexts? Course topics will include ecology, epigenetics, toxicity, agriculture and food, radiation, air quality, and more-than-human entanglements.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.145.300. Medicine and Conflict: The History and Ethics of Healing in Political Turmoil. 3 Credits.
“War is the only proper school for surgeons,” the Ancient Greek physician, Hippocrates, is quoted to have said. This saying has been used to show how medicine and war have been thought for millennia to shape each other. Medicine has played a major role in situations of political conflict ever since human societies engaged in war and started elaborating “just war doctrines” that determine how belligerent parties should conduct war as an attempt to “civilize” war and mitigate its scourges.Through an investigation of case studies from the modern and contemporary world, this course will examine the role played by medicine in situations of political conflict, as well as the role played by war and humanitarian crises in the history of medical thought and practice. It will explore how medical knowledge and expertise have been deployed in situations of political violence or tumult and will ponder some of the ethical dilemmas faced by medical professionals in those contexts. Covering cases ranging from surgery in the American Civil War to the provision of medical care in the Syrian refugee crisis, some of the themes discussed will include biomedical ethics in armed conflict, torture, trauma, contagion, and medical innovation in conflict contexts.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.145.318. The War Lab: Medicine, Science, and Conflict. 3 Credits.
This course explores how medicine, science, and technology intersect with war and conflict, shaping both the battlefield and society at large. It examines the medicine-science-war nexus by investigating the ways in which war and conflict have spurred scientific innovation and medical breakthroughs and, inversely, how scientific and medical innovations have enabled new forms of warcraft. From the development of antibiotics and prosthetics to the ethical dilemmas of weapons research and the use of artificial intelligence in combat, students will examine these entanglements and the profound moral and ethical questions they raise. Relying on case studies from historical and contemporary conflicts, historical documents, films, and literature, the course will investigate topics such as the technological frontiers of war, military funding of scientific research, post-conflict legacies of wartime technologies, and the long-term health outcomes of political and military conflict. Through a critical examination of these themes, students will gain a better understanding of the complex relationship between war and advancements in medicine, science, and technology and will be prompted to analyze the ethical, social, and political implications of the entanglements between war, science, and medicine.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.145.320. British Visual Culture and Medicine. 3 Credits.
In this class, we will reflect on the ethical, gendered, and societal implications of the creation and exchange of British medical imagery. What purpose did this visual culture serve for artists, practitioners, and patients? How are we meant to look at these images today, outside of their original contexts? We will examine a range of images and objects from Britain, expanding our definition of “art” and interrogating the colonialist roots and origins of artistic and medical material. Our objects of study will extend from oil paintings of renowned physicians to diagnostic photographs of unnamed patients and from prints of gynecological dissection to satirical cartoons of “quack” doctors. We will look not only at how practitioners have had their patients depicted, but also at how those with illnesses or with disabilities have taken back their bodily power to portray themselves. Questions of portraiture, likeness, and consent will be constant themes throughout this course, guiding students’ development of ways of thinking critically and writing thoughtfully about medical images.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1)
Writing Intensive
AS.145.323. Music as Laboratory. 3 Credits.
What is the relationship between the histories of music and scientific development? How is making music a kind of laboratory research? Musical instruments and aesthetics have always emerged in dialogue with developments in science, technology, and medicine. The first stethoscope borrowed from the design of flutes and challenged physicians to grapple with new concepts like "sound," "signal," and "noise." The automation of industrial machinery was influenced by earlier musical automata--technology that sought to mechanically synchronize, sequence and loop musical phrases. Concepts like logarithms, combinatorics, resonance and sympathetic vibration, melancholy and mania, etc., relied on the contributions of musicians, music theorists, and instrument-makers. This seminar looks at points of contact between music and histories of science, technology, and medicine through both scholarly and creative lenses. The course integrates creative and experimental music making with reading and short writing assignments. Familiarity with music notation and some basic musical skills will be helpful but are not strictly necessary. Limit 15 students.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.145.326. AI in History, Philosophy, and Fiction. 3 Credits.
Proclamations of an AI revolution are ubiquitous, with utopian visions from technological enthusiasts and dystopian predictions from skeptics growing in number and pathos. In this class, we will challenge the current focus on the transformative potential of machine learning by examining it through the broader historical lens of automation, mechanization, cybernetics, and computerization. Course materials include foundational works in AI as well as science fiction, allowing us to explore the concept of technological imagination as a bridge between public science, cultural production, and the development of scientific and engineering research programs. Spanning from Ancient Greece to modern Europe, from Cold War-era U.S. and Soviet Union to contemporary China, this seminar raises critical questions about the meanings of “intelligence,” “rationality,” and “mind.”
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.145.333. Money for Research: History, Policy, and Politics of Federal Funding. 3 Credits.
American dominance in the STEM fields since 1945 has rested on federal support. Both military and civilian agencies have poured money into academic research, remaking the economy and society as well as the armed forces. However, the political developments of 2026 pushed that system to the brink and promised to alter the relationships between researchers and government. This course begins by exploring the development, justification, and operation of federal research funding as it took shape in the late 1940s and 1950s. We will then trace shifts over time, including new federal spending patterns reflecting a quest for global economic competitiveness. Finally, we will examine the nature and possible outcomes of the current reconfiguration.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.145.403. Crusades, Plagues, and Hospitals: Medicine, Science, and War in the Medieval and Early Modern World. 3 Credits.
At the dawn of the twelfth century, armies marched from Latin Europe, heading for Jerusalem. They attacked and invaded large territories in Asia Minor and the Middle East and created Latin polities that ruled over the Levant for about two centuries. During this period, new societies' political and social orders took shape representing the connections, exchanges, and wounds of conflict. The Crusading project extended well beyond the Middle East: European Christian armies sought to convert Northern Europe, eradicate old polytheistic religions there, and reestablish Christian rule in the Iberian Peninsula. By the sixteenth century, a new wave of Crusades extended to include the wars against the Ottoman Empire, the colonial expansion in Africa, Asia, and the “New World.” At the same time, the colonial expansion involved the emergence of new chattel transatlantic slavery with the atrocities and destruction that it wrecked for centuries to come.Diseases, famines, and other natural disasters marched alongside the marching armies. Famines accompanied the first and second crusades in the twelfth century. By the end of the fourteenth century, the Black Death had spread throughout the world, claiming one-third of the world’s population. Similarly, leprosy and syphilis spread alongside the armies moving across the Atlantic and Indian oceans.This seminar investigates the place of science, medicine, and technology in medieval and early modern war, conflict, and slavery. Starting from the Crusades of the twelfth century to the colonial wars and slavery of the seventeenth century, the course will investigate how conflicts develop, the technologies involved in their pursuit—from military technology to navigation to architecture—how conflicts affect medicine and medical knowledge—from military medicine and surgery to the development of hospitals to epidemics—and how conflict, war, and enslavement impacted the movement of people, goods, and ideas.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Modern Languages and Literatures
AS.211.171. Brazilian Culture & Civilization: Colonial Times to the Present. 3 Credits.
Did you know that Brazil is very similar to the United States? This course is intended as an introduction to the culture and civilization of Brazil. It is designed to provide students with basic information about Brazilian history, politics, economy, art, literature, popular culture, theater, cinema, and music. The course will focus on how Indigenous, Asian, African, and European cultural influences have interacted to create the new and unique civilization that is Brazil today. The course is taught in English.No Prereq. THERE IS NO FINAL EXAM.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.211.224. Made in Italy: Italian style in context. 3 Credits.
Italy and the “Italian style” have become synonym of exquisite taste, class, and elegance thanks to the quality of Italian craftsmanship. This course will explore some of the major factors that contributed to the rise of Italian fashion and Italian industrial design as iconic all around the world. The classes will focus on the main protagonists and art movements that influenced the development of Italian style. We will analyze trends, clothing, and style not only in a historical context, but also through a critical apparatus that will include themes related to gender, culture, power, and politics.The course is taught in English. No knowledge of Italian is required, but those who can read in Italian will have an opportunity to do so. Everyone will learn some Italian words and expressions.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.211.314. Jewish in America, Yiddish in America: Literature, Culture, Identity. 3 Credits.
iddish was the language of European Jews for 1000 years. From the 19th century to the present day it has been a language that millions of Americans — Jewish immigrants and their descendants–have spoken, written in, conducted their daily lives in, and created culture in. This course will examine literature, film, newspapers, and more to explore how Jewish immigrants to America shaped their identities—as Jews, as Americans, and as former Europeans. What role did maintaining, adapting, or abandoning a minority language play in the creation of Jewish American identity—cultural, ethnic, or religious? How was this language perceived by the majority culture? How was it used to represent the experiences of other minoritized groups? What processes of linguistic and cultural translation were involved in finding a space for Yiddish in America, in its original or translated into English? The overarching subjects of this course include migration, race, ethnicity, multilingualism, and assimilation. We will analyze literature (novels, poetry, drama); film; comedy; and other media. All texts in English.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.211.315. The Meanings of Monuments: From the Tower of Babel to Robert E. Lee. 3 Credits.
As is clear from current events and debates surrounding monuments to the Confederacy, monuments play an outsize role in the public negotiation of history and identity and the creation of communal forms of memory. We will study the traditions of monuments and monumentality around the world – including statues and buildings along with alternative forms of monumentality – from antiquity to the present day. We will examine the ways that monuments have been favored methods for the powerful to signal identity and authorize history. This course will also explore the phenomenon of “counter-monumentality”, whereby monuments are transformed and infused with new meaning. These kinds of monuments can be mediums of expression and commemoration for minority and diaspora communities and other groups outside the economic and political systems that endow and erect traditional public monuments. The first half of the course will examine the theoretical framework of monumentality, with a focus on ancient monuments from the ancient Near East (e.g., Solomon’s temple). More contemporary examples will be explored in the second half of the course through lectures and also field trips. We will view contemporary debates around monuments in America in light of the long history of monuments and in comparison with global examples of monuments and counter-monuments. All readings in English.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.211.329. Museums and Identity. 3 Credits.
The museum boom of the last half-century has centered largely around museums dedicated to the culture and history of identity groups, including national, ethnic, religious, and minority groups. In this course we will examine such museums and consider their long history through a comparison of the theory and practice of Jewish museums with other identity museums. We will study the various museological traditions that engage identity, including the collection of art and antiquities, ethnographic exhibitions, history museums, heritage museums, art museums, and other museums of culture. Some of the questions we will ask include: what are museums for and who are they for? how do museums shape identity? and how do the various types of museums relate to one another? Our primary work will be to examine a variety of contemporary examples around the world with visits to local museums including the Jewish Museum of Maryland, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of the American Indian.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.211.399. Anonymity: The Art and Politics of Hidden Identity. 3 Credits.
Why do people choose to conceal their identities? This course investigates the multifaceted roles of anonymity and pseudonymity across literature, music, performance art, and activism. To be anonymous—literally “without a name”—can offer protection, enable more honest expression, serve as political resistance, function as deception, or arise from necessity. We will examine anonymity both as a strategy and as a performative act, considering how it challenges conventional notions of identity, authorship, and power. Key questions will include: How does anonymity function as a tool for resistance or control in different cultural and political contexts? How does it intersect with issues of race, gender, and sexuality? And how does it shape creative labor, from ghostwriting to collective production? Case studies span from Virginia Woolf’s modernist “philosophy of anonymity” and Italo Calvino’s postmodern desire for a literature beyond the self, to Elena Ferrante’s pseudonymous authorship. We will also investigate digital anonymity in the work of hacker collectives and artivists. By the end of the course, students will develop a critical understanding of how anonymity can both empower and erase, analyze the aesthetic and political possibilities it offers across media and cultural contexts, and apply these insights to their own research and experience.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.211.440. Literature of the Holocaust. 3 Credits.
How has the Holocaust been represented in literature? Are there special challenges posed by genocide to the social and aesthetic traditions of representation? Where does the Holocaust fit in to the array of concerns that literature expresses? And where does 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 — originally written in Yiddish, German, English, French and other languages (including works by Primo Levi and Isaac Bashevis Singer). A special focus will be works written during and in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. All readings in English.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.211.706. Bees, Bugs, and other Beasties: Insects in Literature and Philosophy. 3 Credits.
Ants, bees, beetles, fleas and flies, caterpillars and butterflies: as the earth’s most abundant animals, insects are arguably the most important player in our interactive environment. In this seminar, we will explore the diverse world of insects and other arthropods in philosophy, literature, and the sciences in order to gain a new perspective on current trends in animal and environmental studies in the US and Europe. Reading our way from John Donne’s “The Flea” and Robert Hooke’s “Micrographia” to Bernard Mandeville’s “The Fable of the Bees,” Barthold Heinrich Brockes insect-poems, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s infamous novel “The Flea,” to Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” Heidegger’s contentious bee-example, Uexküll’s biosemiotics, Deleuze and Guattari’s “A Thousand Plateaus” (they characterize our industrial time as “the age of insects”) and Donna Haraway’s “tentacular thinking,” we will ask how concepts and stories of insects and the insectile reflect and shape the ways we imagine our cultural as well as ecological milieus. We will look more closely at how entomological imaginaries evolved over time and shed light on different forms of interaction with the environment, politics, and (cultural, biological) diversity. This course covers a wide range of sources from different European languages (made available in English translations) and gives a survey of major junctures in the history of literary forms, scientific practices, and philosophical concepts.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.212.378. Reading Caribbean History through Literature. 3 Credits.
The Caribbean occupies a central place in the history of the modern world, yet it is frequently portrayed as peripheral. Conventional narratives of its past are framed through the perspective of European empires, depicting the region as a sequence of colonial episodes that illustrate Europe’s expansion. This course explores the history of the French-speaking Caribbean through nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, examining how these works challenge colonial narratives, give voice to silenced perspectives, and reimagine the past. Readings include works by Émeric Bergeaud, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Jacques Stephen Alexis, Edwidge Danticat, Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant, and Patrick Chamoiseau, paired with critical scholarship. The course will be conducted in English, with all texts available in English or English translation.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.213.325. Revolution, Power, and Poetic Justice: From Peasant Revolts to Workers Revolts in Literature and Phi. 3 Credits.
Political thinkers from Ernst Bloch and Carl Schmitt to Reinhard Koselleck and Theodor W. Adorno have long been drawn to Heinrich von Kleist’s novella “Michael Kohlhaas” because of the questions it raises about what a just political order would be when, in the context of this story, only the threat of violence enables the powerless to be heard. The novella takes place in the latter half of the sixteenth century as the feudal era is coming to an end, and Kohlhaas’s struggle to rectify the damage done to his property reveals the vulnerability of the then emerging merchant class to the still unchecked power of the nobility. Yet Kohlhaas’s response to the situation proves to be as arbitrary as the injustice he faces, and the only solution the novella can find for this impasse is a fairy tale that embodies—in all senses of the phrase—poetic justice. This course will examine the novella in its historical context (Reformation, doctrine of natural law, Prussian land reform) and with an eye toward modern thought on state violence, terror, liberalism, and the power of art. All texts and discussion in English.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.213.332. Literature and the Visual Arts. 3 Credits.
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.213.364. Truth and Lies in the Languages of Politics. 3 Credits.
Fake facts, conspiracy theories, outright lies: have we entered a new era of “post-truth”? Some claim that deception has always been a part of political processes, that objectivity is an illusion, that every “fact” is made, formed, fashioned, constructed (“fact” comes from the same Latin root as “fiction”). Others insist that without a distinction between truth and lie, all politics is a farce, and look to fact-checking and evidence for guidance. Who is right? And what assumptions are at the basis of this perhaps overly-simple binarism? In order to get a grasp on these questions, we will explore the theme and the concept of lying in literature, philosophy, and current media, with an emphasis on political language. We will read literary texts by Heinrich von Kleist, Herman Melville, Thomas Mann, the much-discussed GDR novel “Jacob the Liar,” political philosophy by Plato, Machiavelli, Kant, Nietzsche (“On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”), Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, and Nina Schick’s 2020 exposé “Deep Fakes: The Coming Infocalypse.” We will apply what we learn from these readings to fake news and social media in order to develop new skills of dealing with manipulative language. Taught in English (with the option of a section in German).
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.213.384. Artificial Intelligence, Consciousness, Mind: Thinking in the 21st Century. 3 Credits.
The advent of artificial intelligence has brought to the fore how much we have taken the idea of thinking for granted in the past fifty years. This course will trace the development of the notion of mind in ancient Greece through the exploration of consciousness in eighteenth-century German thought and physiological explanations of thought beginning with Nietzsche in the nineteenth century. We will compare these historical accounts to the statistical models and neural network theories that dominate today. We will also read a selection of short(er) literary works in which the question of who, or what, is speaking brings the traditional aesthetic concept of mimesis into contact with mimetic theory in machine learning.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.213.386. Panorama of German Thought. 3 Credits.
This course introduces students to major figures and trends in German literature and thought from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. We will pay particular attention to the evolution of German political thought from the Protestant Reformation to the foundation of the German Federal Republic after WWII. How did the Protestant Reformation affect the understanding of the state, rights, civic institutions, and temporal authority in Germany? How did German Enlightenment thinkers conceive of ethics and politics? How do German writers define the nation, community, and the people? What is the link between romanticism and nationalism? To what degree is political economy, as developed by Marx, a critical response to romanticism? What are the ties that bind as well as divide a community in this tradition? We will consider these questions through a careful reading of selected works by Luther, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Weber, and Arendt.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.213.398. Speaking Truth to Power: From Martin Luther to Audre Lorde. 3 Credits.
“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.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.213.425. From Peasant Revolts to Artistic Revolts: Heinrich von Kleist's "Michael Kohlhaas". 3 Credits.
Who has a monopoly on violence? What is the relation of the individual to the state? Is there a right to resistance? Who determines what is just or unjust, arbitrary or rational? Is there a power peculiar to art? We will consider these perennial questions of political theory through a careful examination of Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas (1810) and theoretical works by Martin Luther, Hobbes, Rousseau, & Marx.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.214.241. How To Do Just About Everything: Renaissance Guides to Living Well. 3 Credits.
How do I make money,?gain?and keep?power,?find love,?live long, strengthen my memory, avoid depression, cook well, write beautifully, fence, mix?paint, counteract poisoning, and?create coded messages?? The Renaissance had answers to these and many other questions. This course explores a large sampling?of advice from the Italian Renaissance. Readings include?Machiavelli’s?Prince, Della Casa’s?Galateo of Manners, Maestro Martino's?Art of Cooking, and selections from Cornaro's?Art of Living Long, Manciolino's?Guide to Swordsmanship, Cennini's?Craftsman's Handbook, Della Porta’s?Natural Magic,?Castiglione’s?Book of the Courtier,?Ficino’s?Book of Life,?as well as religious sermons, humanist treatises,?and?books of “secrets.”?Secondary literature will provide historical context for the primary?texts and tools for recognizing and unpacking?the persuasive devices used in these early examples of self-help. Students will become familiar with Italian Renaissance thought and develop analytical and critical skills to examine advice in its cultural and temporal context. The course as a whole will focus on the notion of “core values” and what is at stake when you propose help or seek help. We will also experience some of these "how-to's", such as calligraphy, oration, creating codes, and more.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.214.362. Italian Journeys: Medieval and Early Modern. 3 Credits.
The supernatural is often described as the disruption of universal coherence. It becomes an aggression that challenges the stability of a world in which the natural laws were, until then, intact. The Impossible suddenly happens in a world in which it was banished.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.214.417. Galileo in Dialogue: Science, Literature, and Gender in Early Modern Italy. 3 Credits.
This seminar investigates the contours of scientific dialogue in early modern Italy through the figure of Galileo Galilei and his intellectual milieu. We will examine how literary culture shaped the circulation of new ideas, and how women—whether as poets, patrons, or correspondents—participated in the exploration and communication of scientific knowledge. Readings include selections from Galileo’s scientific writings and extensive correspondence, alongside literary and artistic texts that illuminate the cultural contexts in which his ideas were produced, debated, and disseminated. By situating Galileo within academic, courtly, and cultural networks, the seminar considers the reciprocal relationship between scientific inquiry and literary production, with particular attention to how gender shaped access to, and participation in, intellectual life.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.214.479. Dante Visits the Afterlife. 3 Credits.
One of the greatest works of literature of all times, the Divine Comedy leads us down into the torture-pits of Hell, up the steep mountain terrain of Purgatory, through the “virtual” space of Paradise, and then back to where we began: our own earthly lives. We accompany Dante on his journey, building along the way knowledge of medieval Italian history, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion. The course also focuses on the arts of reading deeply, asking questions of a text, and interpreting literary and scholarly works through discussion and critical writing. Conducted in English. For undergraduate students only.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.214.626. Sacred/Subversive: Gender, Authority, and Devotion in Early Modern Italy. 3 Credits.
This graduate seminar examines how women in early modern Italy used devotional language to negotiate questions of literary voice and authority, community and critique. We will approach devotion not only as a spiritual practice informed by the developments of the sixteenth- and seventeenth century (the intensified religious fervor of the Counter Reformation, the reassessment of female Biblical figures, the imposition of strict enclosure on convents), but as a framework through which to shape intellectual agency, claim authority, experiment with hybrid genres, and resist gendered cultural constraints. Close readings include a range of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women writers, with particular attention to Arcangela Tarabotti, whose work allows for powerful reflection on the tensions between piety, authority, and dissent. As we consider how the literary strategies of these early modern women maneuver between the sacred and subversive, we will draw on theoretical readings on voice, enclosure, and literary authority. Some familiarity with Italian is recommended.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.215.406. Novelist Intellectuals. 3 Credits.
What does a novelist’s op-ed about economics have to do with her literary writing? In what ways does a fiction writer’s essays on the environment inform how we read her novels? What happens when we find the political opinions of a writer objectionable? This undergraduate seminar will consider what the Spanish writer Francisco Ayala termed “novelist intellectuals,” that is, literary writers who actively participate in a society’s public sphere. Considering writers from Madrid to New York, from London to Buenos Aires, we will ask how one should hold a novelist’s fictional and non-fictional writings in the balance and explore ways of reading that allow us to consider the public intellectual side and the aesthetic side of a novelist together.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Near Eastern Studies
AS.130.119. Medicine in Ancient Egypt. 3 Credits.
A survey of medicine and medical practice in Egypt and, to a much lesser extent, the ancient Near East in general. The abundant sources range from magical spells to surprisingly "scientific" treatises and handbooks. Readings are mainly selected from translations of primary sources in the writings of ancient Egypt. Topics will include the sources of our knowledge; the nature and position of medical practitioners, medical treatment, and surgery; beliefs about disease and the etiology of illness; concepts of contagion and ritual purity.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.130.126. Gods and Monsters in Ancient Egypt. 3 Credits.
A basic introduction to Egyptian Religion, with a special focus on the nature of the gods and how humans interact with them. We will devote particular time to the Book of the Dead and to the "magical" aspects of religion designed for protective purposes.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.130.136. History of Hasidism. 3 Credits.
Although it appears to be a relic of pre-modern Judaism, Hasidism is a phenomenon of the modern era of Jewish history. This course surveys the political and social history of the Hasidic movement over the course of the last three centuries. Students will also explore basic features of Hasidic culture and thought in their historical development. Cross-listed with Jewish Studies.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.130.153. A (Virtual) Visit to the Louvre Museum: Introduction to the Material Culture of Ancient Egypt. 3 Credits.
This course will present the Egyptological collections of the musée du Louvre in Paris, room by room, as in a real visit. From the Predynastic period, in the 4th millennium BC, to Roman time, the iconic “masterpieces” of this world-renowned art museum, as well as its little-known artifacts, will allow us to explore the history and material culture of ancient Egypt. We will also learn to observe, describe and analyze archaeological objects, in a global manner and without establishing a hierarchy between them, while questioning their place in the museum and its particular language. The objective will be to go beyond the objects themselves and answer, in fine, the following questions: What do these objects tell us about the men and women who produced them, exchanged them, used them, and lived among them in antiquity? What do they also reveal about those who discovered them in Egypt, several millennia later, about those who collected them and sometimes traded them, and what does this say about the relations between Egypt and the Western countries over time?
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.130.317. Akhenaten, Nefertiti and the Armana Period. 3 Credits.
This course examines the visual expressions of the revolutionary pharaoh Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti. The artistic changes that this reign introduced will be discussed through art historical, religious, political, and sociological lenses. Who was the king's sole god Aten and how did he and his visual appearance impact Egypt and the ancient world 1350 to 1330 BCE?
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.130.352. History of Hasidism. 3 Credits.
Although it appears to be a relic of pre-modern Judaism, Hasidism is a phenomenon of the modern era of Jewish history. This course surveys the political and social history of the Hasidic movement over the course of the last three centuries. Students will also explore basic features of Hasidic culture and thought in their historical development. Cross-listed with Jewish Studies.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.130.420. Research Methods: Arts of the Mesopotamian World: Crafters & Consumers. 3 Credits.
This hybrid seminar examines in depth a series of artistic case studies over a 3000 year period in the region of what is today Iraq, Syria, and southeastern Turkey, from c, 3500-500 BCE. Discussion will focus on processes of making and contexts of using myriad forms of art and architecture. Topics will include the invention of writing and complex imagery; portraiture and ritual practice; the symbolic value of materials; visual narration; and the uses of space for expressive purposes. We will approach these and other topics through critical engagement with existing scholarship, as well as by direct study of objects in nearby museum collections.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.132.609. Research Methods: Arts of the Mesopotamian World: Crafters & Consumers. 3 Credits.
This hybrid seminar examines in depth a series of artistic case studies over a 3000 year period in the region of what is today Iraq, Syria, and southeastern Turkey, from c, 3500-500 BCE. Discussion will focus on processes of making and contexts of using myriad forms of art and architecture. Topics will include the invention of writing and complex imagery; portraiture and ritual practice; the symbolic value of materials; visual narration; and the uses of space for expressive purposes. We will approach these and other topics through critical engagement with existing scholarship, as well as by direct study of objects in nearby museum collections.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.133.418. Egyptian Art & Material Culture: Principles, Materiality and Challenges. 3 Credits.
This course is dedicated to the study of the art and material culture of ancient Egypt, spanning from the 5th millennium BCE to the Roman period. The objective of the course is to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of Egyptian art, with a focus on materiality, effective methods of description and analysis, and a command of bibliography. It will also enable students to practice two fundamental aspects of their future professional life: presenting a paper at a conference and submitting an article to an academic journal. In the initial sessions, we will examine the fundamental principles and conventions that define Egyptian art. We will then investigate the natural resources available to Egyptian craftsmen and artists, including nature, origin, networks, and uses. We will analyze the production of works of art through several case studies, focusing on materiality. Finally, we will reflect on the presence of Egyptian works of art in museums around the world. Moreover, the course will provide an opportunity for discourse on professional matters pertaining to engagement with Egyptian antiquities and works of art. The course will be structured around: lectures by the professor or by guest researchers, with the students participating in a dialogue with the lecturers; sessions dedicated to discussions of articles to be read (with two/three articles per session); oral presentations by the students, with the aim of reproducing the conditions of a colloquium or conference. These will include formal presentations and question-and-answer sessions, with all students taking part.At the conclusion of the semester, students will be required to submit a paper in connection with the oral presentation they have prepared. This paper will be presented as a scientific article, and the instructor will evaluate it in the same manner as an anonymous referee.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.133.618. Egyptian Art & Material Culture: Principles, Materiality, and Challenges. 3 Credits.
This course is dedicated to the study of the art and material culture of ancient Egypt, spanning from the 5th millennium BCE to the Roman period. The objective of the course is to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of Egyptian art, with a focus on materiality, effective methods of description and analysis, and a command of bibliography. It will also enable students to practice two fundamental aspects of their future professional life: presenting a paper at a conference and submitting an article to an academic journal. In the initial sessions, we will examine the fundamental principles and conventions that define Egyptian art. We will then investigate the natural resources available to Egyptian craftsmen and artists, including nature, origin, networks, and uses. We will analyze the production of works of art through several case studies, focusing on materiality. Finally, we will reflect on the presence of Egyptian works of art in museums around the world. Moreover, the course will provide an opportunity for discourse on professional matters pertaining to engagement with Egyptian antiquities and works of art. The course will be structured around: lectures by the professor or by guest researchers, with the students participating in a dialogue with the lecturers; sessions dedicated to discussions of articles to be read (with two/three articles per session); oral presentations by the students, with the aim of reproducing the conditions of a colloquium or conference. These will include formal presentations and question-and-answer sessions, with all students taking part.At the conclusion of the semester, students will be required to submit a paper in connection with the oral presentation they have prepared. This paper will be presented as a scientific article, and the instructor will evaluate it in the same manner as an anonymous referee.Restricted to: Near Eastern Studies, Museum Studies, History of Art, or Archaeology students.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.133.717. Akhenaten, Nefertiti and the Armana Period. 3 Credits.
This course examines the visual expressions of the revolutionary pharaoh Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti. The artistic changes that this reign introduced will be discussed through art historical, religious, political, and sociological lenses. Who was the king's sole god Aten and how did he and his visual appearance impact Egypt and the ancient world 1350 to 1330 BCE?
Distribution Area: Humanities
Political Science
AS.190.385. Urban Policy. 3 Credits.
An analysis of public policy and policy-making for American Cities. Special attention will be given to the subject of urban crime and law enforcement, poverty and welfare, and intergovernmental relations. Cross listed with Africana Studies.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.190.411. The Politics of Political Surveillance. 3 Credits.
Mass political surveillance is a hallmark of modern life. All contemporary regimes practice some form of surveillance. Yet the politics of surveillance vary. This seminar investigates the technologies, purposes, and significance of political surveillance in the 20th century in different polities. We will explore perspectives on surveillance from various approaches—historical, sociological, anthropological, and in political science.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.190.415. Political Arts: Dada, Surrealism, and Societal Metamorphoses. 3 Credits.
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.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.001.193 OR AS.190.613 are not eligible to take AS.190.415.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.190.471. The University and Society. 3 Credits.
In the 20th century, American universities became the envy of the world, leading in most categories of scholarly productivity and attracting students from every nation. In recent years, though, American higher education has come to face a number of challenges including rapidly rising costs, administrative bloat, corporatization and moocification. We will examine the problems and promises of American higher education, the political struggles within the university and the place of the university in the larger society. Upper classes and Grad Students only.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Program in Museums and Society
AS.389.140. Antiquity and Its Afterlives: Books, Art, and Culture from Ancient Greece and Rome to the Modern Era. 3 Credits.
This course explores the surviving “objects” of the ancient Greco-Roman world, and the histories of their excavation, organization, and preservation in museum and library collections. From ancient objects and sculptures, ancient Greek papyri, scrolls, and late-antique and medieval books, to the revival of Greek and Roman traditions in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, we will learn how these objects help shape and transform our understanding of the ancient world over two millennia, up to the formation of the great antiquities museums of the modern era. This hands-on course will take advantage of ancient objects and texts in Baltimore, at the Walters Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, as well as the Archaeology Museum at JHU and the rare book and manuscript collections of the Sheridan Libraries at JHU.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.389.155. The History of "Fake News" from The Flood to The Apocalypse. 3 Credits.
A sweeping historical engagement with fakes, lies, and forgeries from the ancient world to the digital age, explored through JHU’s Bibliotheca Fictiva collection of rare books and manuscripts—the largest research collection on this subject in the world. Topics include ancient papyri, biblical apocrypha, medieval manuscript forgeries, archaeological and textual forgeries of the Renaissance, false travelogues of the Age of Exploration, pecuniary forgery in the 19th century, art forgery, and the advent of “fake news” in the digital era.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.389.201. Introduction to the Museum: Past and Present. 3 Credits.
This course surveys museums, from their origins to their most contemporary forms, in the context of broader historical, intellectual, and cultural trends including the social movements of the 20th century. Anthropology, art, history, and science museums are considered.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.389.220. Queer Sixties. 3 Credits.
Introduction to U.S. queer and trans politics and culture in the period building up to the gay liberation movement. The course highlights the significance of homophile organizing, drag and leather communities, trans activism, bar- and street-based publics, experimental film, and subcultural practices. It examines how we, as a culture, have come to narrate queer and trans history and investigates the ways archival practices shape those narrations. Students will learn to conduct historical research in online and analog archives, finding and integrating primary and secondary sources to write original research about the past.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
AS.389.233. Exhibiting Cultures. 3 Credits.
This course critically examines the role of exhibitions in shaping cultural narratives and public understanding of people and places across the globe. Students will explore the history, theory, and practice of exhibiting cultures in museums, galleries, and digital platforms. Topics include curatorial ethics, representation and identity, postcolonial critiques, audience engagement, and the impact of emerging technologies on exhibition design. Through case studies and hands-on projects, students will analyze how cultural heritage is displayed and interpreted, considering issues of appropriation, authenticity, and inclusivity. The course culminates in a final project where students conceptualize and design their own cultural exhibition proposal.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.389.265. Hopkins History Through the Archives. 3 Credits.
Archives are where history is documented, and archives have tremendous power over whose stories get told. This course will critically examine the relationship between archival practice and public history by using John Hopkins University as a case study. We will work closely with archivists in the Special Collections Department and archives across Baltimore to get a firsthand look at how local archives shape public history, collective memory, and institutional silences. Students will learn how public historians, archivists, community activists, and students themselves can work together to do reparative research that advances social justice in their own communities.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.389.303. A World of Things. 3 Credits.
This course aims to make the object a focus point for understanding museums and what they do, and to consider the museum as a site for investigating the interaction between humans and things. At the center of the course is a tension between the idea that things are subject to human will, on the one hand, and indications that things can and do evade human attempts to control them, on the other. Readings from scholars across many disciplines, from anthropology to political science, will stimulate our looking, thinking, and discussion. Every session includes hands-on activities to help us think through the key concepts of the readings.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.389.305. Oral History: Recording Voices Today for the Archives of Tomorrow. 3 Credits.
Oral Histories are a means by which history is both generated and preserved. Talking to and recording people in their own voices is immensely valuable but also brings challenges. This course equips students with the theoretical framework, methods and an awareness of the ethics of making and interpreting oral histories and provides hands-on experience researching, designing and creating an archival record of our time to professional standards. Our project focuses on Baltimore's Confederate monuments. We will interview key stakeholders in debates that led to their removal and in ongoing conversations about what to do with them now.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.389.313. Data and the Digital in Museums. 3 Credits.
Digital media play an increasingly significant role in museums from how museums share and narrate their collections online to the use of AI to catalog things and create metadata about them. This class explores critically how digital tools work to tell stories and invites students to unpack the resulting museum narratives. Students will learn by doing, creating a digital exhibit of five museum objects using Omeka and later transforming their exhibits by creating data of their own design to tell a new story about their objects. This new narrative will apply critical perspectives considered in the course such as, but not limited to, repatriation, critical cataloging, and geo-politics.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.389.314. Researching the Africana Archive: Black Cemetery Stories. 3 Credits.
This course addresses the historic role of the African American cemetery as sacred and political space, with important links to other Black institutions. Operating in partnership with Mount Auburn Cemetery in Baltimore, owned and operated by the Sharp Street Memorial United Methodist Church, we will visit the cemetery and related locations in Baltimore throughout the semester. Our collective goal is to research and share stories that further the interests of these important and vulnerable sites.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.389.315. Ancient Color: The Technologies and Meanings of Color in Antiquity. 3 Credits.
What role did the colorful surfaces of sculptures, vessels and textiles play in the ancient world? We examine historical texts and recent scholarly and scientific publications on the technologies and meanings of color in antiquity, and use imaging and analytical techniques to study polychromed objects from the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.389.322. Tigers to Teapots: Collecting, Cataloging, and Hoarding in America. 3 Credits.
This course examines material culture through the lens of personal collecting. Focusing on the United States, students will explore how collectors influenced the holdings of the nation’s museums, including JHU’s Evergreen and Homewood Museum, and contemplate how collecting, for public and private purposes, shapes status and taste in America. This course will also address how collections are organized, displayed, and conserved and will delve into psychological and environmental aspects of collecting and hoarding.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.389.325. Women of the Book: Female Miracle Workers, Mystics, and Material Culture, 1450-1800. 3 Credits.
From psycho-spiritual autobiographers to mystical bi-locating nuns, convent crèche-keepers to choristers of sacred music, from rock-star-status mystics to the hidden careers of women printers, engravers, and miracle-makers, this course will explore the remarkable intellectual, cultural, and imaginative contributions of women who found refuge, agency, and power within alternative lives.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.389.333. The Curator is on the Case: Museum Research Methods in Practice. 3 Credits.
How do art curators solve the puzzles posed by the collections they care for? This course invites students to work hands on with a collection of early modern paintings recently donated to the university. Students will learn to investigate art like a curator, from material and technical examination through provenance research and the reconstruction of object contexts. Students will share their research findings with public audiences in the form of an exhibition to be installed in the renovated MSEL library.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.389.341. Museum Education for Today's Audiences. 3 Credits.
Go behind the scenes of the Baltimore Museum of Art's Education Department and develop and implement programs for college students in conjunction with an exhibition about women and art in early modern Europe.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.389.347. Landscaping Baltimore: Interpreting the City through its Parks, Campuses, and Neighborhoods. 3 Credits.
This course will explore the landscape history of Baltimore City, including JHU’s Homewood campus, Evergreen Museum, and surrounding areas. Special attention will be paid to the role of the Frederick Law Olmsted, and the Olmsted design firm, who played an important role in the development of several Baltimore parks and neighborhoods. This class will culminate in either small student exhibition or creation of a public-facing tour.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.389.350. Greening Museums in Times of Climate and Ecological Crisis. 3 Credits.
Museums across the globe are rewriting their infrastructure, energy use, waste management, and exhibitions and conservation policies and practices to respond to our ecological crises. Students will conduct field research and analyze data; investigate “next” practices, case studies, and the challenges particular to museums; and write a white paper; all with an eye towards contributing to the BMA’s Turn Again to the Earth initiative - an eco-challenge, sustainability planning, and suite of art exhibitions dedicated to environmental themes.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.389.380. Museums on Campus: Creative Approaches to Audience Engagement. 3 Credits.
This course will engage students in the fundamentals of museum audience engagement through creating and marketing a series of mini-installations around campus related to Homewood Museum. By “busting out” of the actual museum building, participants in this course will be charged with creating exciting opportunities for the museum to better connect with students, faculty, and the larger JHU community. The course will offer students real-world immersion in museum work and will use as its jumping off point a recently written report on how Homewood Museum could improve its public perception and grow its visitor base.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.389.405. Visualizing Africa. 3 Credits.
Examines the history of African art in the Euro-American world, focusing on the ways that Western institutions have used African artworks to construct narratives about Africa and its billion residents.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.389.410. Public Humanities & Social Justice. 3 Credits.
Investigates collaborative humanities methods that foster democratic participation among publics more broadly conceived than the academy, including participatory action research, collaborative oral history, indigenous research methods, interactive theater, participatory archival practices, and cooperative models for connecting art, artists, and audiences. Course focuses on queer, trans, and Black histories in Baltimore, includes excursions to local cultural institutions, and is co-taught by prominent public humanists, artists, and activists from Baltimore and beyond.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.389.420. Curatorial Seminar: European Art. 3 Credits.
Working in collaboration with staff from the Baltimore Museum of Art, students assess the opportunities and challenges of the European collections; research select objects; contribute to the department's collections development plan; and conceptualize new, more global and more inclusive approaches to the displays.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.389.445. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies. 3 Credits.
Taking its name from the work of scholar Katherine Verdery, who investigates why and how certain corpses took on a political life in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, this course examines ways that human bodies have been collected, displayed, concealed and disappeared across cemeteries, museums, universities and other sites. We will trace various valuations (and devaluations) imposed on bodies across the life course and examine how some bodies are made to matter more than others in both life and death. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives across anthropology, Black studies, history of medicine and more, we will engage with case studies from across the globe, from the 18th century to the present day.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Sociology
AS.230.377. Health disparities in America. 3 Credits.
This course evaluates contemporary health disparities in the United States through a sociological lens. In particular, this course examines how social positions, such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic status, shape health patterns in the U.S. population. Students will learn how health disparities are defined and measured, potential causes, and strategies to mitigate observed health inequities.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality
AS.363.201. Introduction to the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. 3 Credits.
This course will serve as an intensive introduction to contemporary approaches to theories of gender and sexuality, and their relationship to cultural production and politics. Students will develop a historically situated knowledge of the development of feminist and queer scholarship in the 20th and 21st centuries, and consider the multiply intersecting forces which shape understandings of sexual and gender identity. We will consider both foundational questions (What is gender? Who is the subject of feminism? What defines queerness?) and questions of aesthetic and political strategy, and spend substantial time engaging with feminist and queer scholarship in comparative contexts. Students will be introduced to debates in Black feminism, intersectionality theory, third world feminism, socialist feminism, queer of colour critique, and trans* theory. We will read both canonical texts and recent works of scholarship, and the final weeks of the course will be devoted to thinking with our theoretical and historical readings against a selection of feminist and queer literature and cinema. No prior familiarity with the study of gender and sexuality is necessary.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.363.346. Queer Performativity. 3 Credits.
Introduces students to the intersections of queer theory, performance studies, and LGBTQ history with a focus on “queer worldmaking:” the ways in which performances—both theatrical and everyday rituals—have the ability to establish alternative views of the world. Case studies include the ballroom scene in Baltimore and beyond, migratory street youth subcultures, and queer nightlife. This course also offers a unique lens on the archive and historical research by approaching embodied memory, gestures, and ritual as systems for learning, storing, and transmitting cultural knowledge.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)