Courses
Explore the University. Engage with people. Empower yourself. Chart your expedition at Hopkins. In this course for new and those returning from an LOA, students will explore Hopkins’ academic resources and opportunities to integrate their academic, career, and personal goals for college and beyond. Students will be exposed to topics including learning strategies, academic planning, and campus culture. Students will develop a personalized plan for success and make some new friends.
Topics vary. Please see the specific semester and section for current offerings. Please see "Special Notes" under each section. Please refer to the section level information for applicable Foundational Abilities when registering.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Students attend lectures by an interdepartmental group of Hopkins faculty and meet for discussion in smaller seminar groups; each of these seminars is led by one of the course faculty. In lectures, panels, multimedia presentations, and curatorial sessions among the University's rare book holdings, we will explore some of the greatest works of the literary and philosophical traditions in Europe and the Americas. Close reading and intensive writing instruction are hallmarks of this course; authors for Fall 2020 include Homer, Plato, Dante, John Donne, George Herbert, Christina Rosetti, Mary Shelley, Friederick Nietzsche, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Frederick Douglass.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
In the midst of a global pandemic that has shifted the ways in which we move, work, and interact with others around the world, it is more important than ever to have a deeper understanding of how outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics have evolved. You’ll review select communicable (COVID-19, Ebola, Zika, and HIV) and non-communicable (diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, injury, and mental health) diseases in public health around the world. Examine the global burden of these diseases and the various forms of prevention efforts undertaken by global and national organizations. This program will use a combination of lecture, discussion, and student presentation format to encourage broad participation.
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
This course invites students to explore and express their personal stories through the creation of a compelling personal statement—an essential component of the college admissions process. Centered around the prompt, "How has your life experience contributed to your personal story—your character, values, perspectives, or skills—and what do you hope to pursue at Hopkins?," students will learn how to craft a successful, authentic college admissions essay that reflects their unique voice and purpose. Blending introspective writing with collaborative exploration, the course is designed to help students become more self-aware of their values, strengths, and goals. Participants will engage in daily reflections, analyze meaningful texts, map formative experiences, and complete a strengths assessment to gain deeper insight into who they are and how to effectively tell their story. The course also features interactive sessions on wellness, the college application process, student life, and financial aid—each aimed at fostering self-discovery and preparing students for the transition to college. Panels with current Johns Hopkins University students will provide firsthand perspectives on aligning personal purpose with academic and career aspirations. With an emphasis on holistic wellness, students will be guided to set personal goals across emotional, physical, and social dimensions—promoting a balanced, intentional approach to both personal growth and college readiness. By the end of the course, students will have a draft of their personal statement, a clearer sense of self, and the confidence and tools to navigate their future with purpose.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1)
This class could help you become a rockstar neurosurgeon, using music to help dementia patients reconstruct the tunes to their lives. Or you could learn about Siren songs potent enough to lure back the aquatic life needed to revive our dying coral reef. Or maybe you’d just like to know how, in your dream café, to choose music to encourage diners (<$/customer) to depart and drinkers (>$/customer) to delay. Simply asking, “What Can Music Do?” students in this class pursue these sorts of possibilities by researching links between music and their other interests. Structured in three parts—Brain, Body, and Soul—the course begins by investigating groundbreaking uses of music in neuroscience. We then follow the music-laden neurons out to our limbs to see how they move us and others: emotionally, politically, and especially physically. At end, we consider the outer limits of our understanding – how music really only exists inside our heads (out there it’s just a bunch of longitudinal waves) and yet there seems to be no more powerful and transformative art than music, leaving little unaffected. So, to at least hint at some of these possibilities, at the beginning of each course sections and before students focus on their own research, we’ll investigate together model sources, have discussions, and examine paradigms for how to teach and to learn about music. Then students will flip the script, taking over leadership of the course to assign texts, direct discussions, and collaborate on “blue skies” projects where the dream is encouraged to be bigger than the reality.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Great Books and Conversations” engages students across all disciplines in critical reading of and writing on foundational texts of the Western tradition (and beyond), from Homer’s The Odyssey to Dante’s Inferno, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, Virginia Wolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and others. The course encompasses lectures by JHU professors and guest speakers, group discussions, and an introduction to the library’s exceptional collection of rare books. Guided by a team of Humanities professors from different departments, students will learn how to read closely, analyze, and converse on great literature. This course fulfills three foundational abilities: (1) Writing and Communication; (3) Culture and Aesthetics; and (5) Ethics and Foundations.
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
This course will introduce students to basic concepts in economics, political science and sociology relevant to the study of social problems and the programs designed to remedy them. It will address the many inequalities in access to education and health care, unequal treatment in the criminal justice system, disparities in income and wealth, and differential access to political power. The focus will be on designing effective policies at the national and local level to address these pressing issues. This course is open to all students, but will be required for the new Social Policy Minor. The course is also recommended for students who are interested in law school, medical school, programs in public health, and graduate school in related social science fields. This course does not count as one of the required courses for the Economics major or minor, but it is required for the Social Policy Minor. Cross list with Sociology, Economics and Political Science. Freshman, Sophomore and Juniors only.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
This course introduces students and researchers from humanities disciplines to ideas and practices from the computational sciences. The course aims to provide the understanding needed for self-sufficient exploration and well-informed criticism of how computational methods relate to traditional scholarship. The semester begins with a history of computational research, then covers three major aspects of computational inquiry for the humanities: 1) representing primary sources, domains, and scholarly knowledge, 2) interacting with such representations via basic computer programming, and 3) introducing data-driven machine learning ("AI") to complement existing humanistic practices. Lectures and labs will also cover specific methods that immediately assist the scholar with practical tasks, such as regular expressions for pattern-based information retrieval and topic modeling for unsupervised primary source exploration. No prior experience with computation or programming is needed, and the course is particularly suited for advanced undergraduate and graduate students pursuing applied research in the humanities.
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2)
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 Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
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 Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
This course will focus on the policies that frame human service programs and the methods that are used to deliver them. Course content focuses specifically on child welfare and provides an opportunity for students to study why it is so hard to get good work done by government for vulnerable populations. Students will be given the opportunity to review the challenges of implementing programs and reforms in government and to consider the impact human services have on the population served. This unique course is taught by Professor Tierney, who spent 25 years in the public sector in Chicago, DC and most recently at the helm of the social services agency in Baltimore.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
This multidisciplinary course explores the origins of life, planet formation, Earth's evolution, extrasolar planets, habitable zones, life in extreme environments, the search for life in the Universe, space missions, and planetary protection. Recommended Course Background: Three upper level (300+) courses in sciences (Biophysics, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy, Math, or Computer Science).
Prerequisite(s): Students may not register for this class if they have already received credit for AS.020.334 OR AS.020.616 OR AS.171.333 OR AS.171.699 OR AS 270.335 OR AS.360.671
Distribution Area: Natural Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
This course is designed for students who have completed either the Baltimore intensive semester of the Social Policy Minor. The students will make presentations and pursue joint projects based on what they have learned during the intensive semesters concerning key social policy issues.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
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
Prerequisite(s): AS.360.406
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This class will be a hands-on experience for students to be involved in the early stages of a documentary’s making. Students will be working with the professor on researching, planning, and writing the treatment for a documentary about a forgotten feminist play (1927) from pre-Holocaust Vienna, where diversity and progressive thought were still possible. This romantic comedy centers around a self-determined matriarch, Therese, helping her three daughters navigate the expectations of rigid, societal beliefs – often leading by example – as they find their way into adulthood. Moving back and forth between the archive of its time both through the re-appropriation of Nazi newsreels and propaganda films, as well as ephemeral films of the time and the the new staging of the play, the film will take the audience inside a theater space where a vibrant environment of escapism smashes against the harsh reality of its time, which is as vivid as it was 80 years ago.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
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
Trade and exchange, and the social interactions they foster, are long-standing center-points of interest to archaeologists. For the ancient Near East, trade has been proposed as a key factor in the rise of the world’s earliest cities in southern Mesopotamia. During their earliest stages of development, cities in southern Mesopotamia were destination points for exotic raw materials and high-value trade goods, including copper and softstone (chlorite) from ancient Magan (present day Oman and the United Arab Emirates). This course will examine theories and methods for studying ancient trade, with a specific focus on copper and chlorite from Oman. Students will learn some of the key methods archaeologists use to analyze ancient metal and stone, and will conduct some of their own analysis in laboratories at Johns Hopkins, including the Spatial Observation Lab for Archaeological Research (SOLAR) in Gilman Hall 135.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
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)
The Commons is Hopkins’ newest arts and culture magazine, responding to Hopkins’ annual Common Question. Our course will collaboratively design and produce an issue of The Commons over the course of the semester. Composing The Commons takes a hands-on, lab-based approach to writing technologies, media archeology, and accessibility studies. This Humanities Research Lab will examine print and digital media, explore physical and digital archives, and experiment with methods of intermedia composition and translation. Students will write a peer-reviewed article and create photo essays, short stories, poems, games, and print and digital ephemera. Our aim is to publish and translate a well-researched, well-considered magazine in both print and digital formats, for many publics. All first-year students who have taken Reintro and all students at the sophomore level or above are welcome.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
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
In this research seminar, students learn research methodologies while pursuing their own lines of inquiry. The course will be taught by faculty with active research agendas relevant to the semester’s theme. Students will work to address common research challenges and to strengthen their own and each other’s projects via discussion, thus enabling the cohort to have research method conversations and workshop drafts in a supportive group setting. Innovative and productive research requires intellectual community, and the seminar would provide it. Research projects, while tailored to students’ interests, will intersect in a meaningful way with the semester’s topic.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
In this course, students learn from experts in the field as connected to the semester’s theme. The practitioners will present on their field of expertise thus providing students substantive engagement with a variety of perspectives relating to the central theme. Discussions with Hopkins Semester faculty will provide connection and framing for engagements with external stakeholders. Additional skills potential for development in this course include enacting policy in the world (networking, negotiations, public speaking, project management, (Political) Risk Analysis, Lobbying and Advocacy, Applying for Federal Jobs, Consulting), and others relevant to subsequent themes.
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
This course involves a specially designed project related to the student’s connection with the Hopkins Semester DC theme. On completion of this course, the student will be able to discuss how their work contributes to the advancement of the substantive theme explored in the semester. The student-designed project may be related to each student´s current employment context or developed in agencies or organizations that complement student’s research and experimental background.
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), Projects and Methods (FA6)
This course focuses on a monetary approach to national income determination and the balance of payments. Money and banking, as well as commodity and financial markets, are dealt with under both central banking, as well as alternative monetary regimes. Particular emphasis is placed on currency board systems. Students learn how to properly conduct substantive economic research, utilizing primary data sources, statistical techniques and lessons from economic history. Findings are presented in the form of either memoranda or working papers of publishable quality. Exceptional work may be suitable for publication through the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise. Advanced excel programming skills are required and students are expected to be pre-screened for research at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.. Bloomberg certification is a requisite.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Projects and Methods (FA6)
This course involves a specially designed project related to the student’s connection with the Hopkins Semester DC theme. On completion of this course, the student will be able to discuss how their work contributes to the advancement of the substantive theme explored in the semester. The student-designed project may be related to each student´s current employment context or developed in agencies or organizations that complement student’s research and experimental background.
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), Projects and Methods (FA6)
This course introduces students and researchers from humanities disciplines to ideas and practices from the computational sciences. The course aims to provide the understanding needed for self-sufficient exploration and well-informed criticism of how computational methods relate to traditional scholarship. The semester begins with a history of computational research, then covers three major aspects of computational inquiry for the humanities: 1) representing primary sources, domains, and scholarly knowledge, 2) interacting with such representations via basic computer programming, and 3) introducing data-driven machine learning ("AI") to complement existing humanistic practices. Lectures and labs will also cover specific methods that immediately assist the scholar with practical tasks, such as regular expressions for pattern-based information retrieval and topic modeling for unsupervised primary source exploration. No prior experience with computation or programming is needed, and the course is particularly suited for advanced undergraduate and graduate students pursuing applied research in the humanities.
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.
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.
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
An interdisciplinary seminar on Latin America’s role in wider cultural, economic, and political processes, from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Please see class search for semester topic description.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
You do not need to register for any course in SIS. Within six weeks after course completion, the following entry will appear on your JHU transcript: “AS.360.624 – Responsible Conduct of Research (Online)"
Through a discussion-based curriculum, the Responsible Conduct of Research course introduces students to key research issues: academic ethics, animal subjects, conflict of interest, data management and authorship, and human subjects.Attendance to all meetings is required to receive credit for the course.
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
In modern times, wars become sites of race making. In turn, racializations become projects of war, violence, and extraction. This seminar explores this mutual implication of race in war and war in race. It attends to the entwinement of dehumanization and humanization in race war across specific historical contexts. These include the eras of European expansion; the world wars; US-American hegemony; and contemporary ecological crisis. We shall investigate settler-colonial racializations of Indigenous peoples; racializations of Afro-Diasporic and Asian peoples; the constitution and transformation of the White races, as well as those of humanity and the Human race, all in contexts of war and extractive violence. The course takes a “history and theory” approach, one attentive to the ways in which the events, practices and theories of race war emerge and develop together in co-constitutive ways over time. Notably, alongside practitioners of race war and their theorizations, race war has been a key site for the development of critical theory, anti-colonial thought, Black radical thought, and other traditions of critique and resistance. In these and other ways, the course explores the contours of race war in modern political and social thought, amid empire building and world-ordering projects, total wars and genocides, and capitalist and ecological crises.
This multidisciplinary course explores the origins of life, planet formation, Earth's evolution, extrasolar planets, habitable zones, life in extreme environments, the search for life in the Universe, space missions, and planetary protection. Recommended Course Background: Three upper level (300+) courses in sciences (Biophysics, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy, Math, or Computer Science).
Prerequisite(s): Students may not register for this class if they have already received credit for AS.020.616 OR AS.020.334 OR AS.171.333 OR AS.171.699 OR AS.270.335 OR AS.360.339.
Distribution Area: Natural Sciences
In this course, we will explore some of the biggest challenges involved in teaching college courses and students--and develop ways to solve them. Through a combination of readings, discussions, case studies, and observations of other teachers, we will identify and evaluate different approaches to designing engaging courses, stimulating student interest and motivation, and giving and receiving feedback to improve student learning and our own practice. We will also apply these approaches to create materials we can use in our own courses, including informal exercises, lesson plans, assessments, and syllabi.All grad students interested in teaching, including current or future TAs and instructors, are welcome.
Students will be introduced to the value of educational research for their teaching, professional career, and disciplinary field. Students will learn how to apply reflective, analytical, and iterative approaches to examining their teaching practices that are grounded in educational research methods. Students will learn how to use action research to improve their teaching and examine best practices for sharing results of these research inquiries with other professionals. Students will develop an educational research project proposal that they may submit for consideration to the JHU Teaching-as-Research Fellowship program. Course is graded P/F.
Practical learning experience under the supervision of a faculty advisor.