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.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
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)
Memoir is an adept genre for expressing the sociological through the personal; this course will use memoirs to examine health care disparities. The course materials will be interwoven with visits from guest speakers who are either practicing clinicians or research scientists grappling with these same inequities. For example, when we address gender and concepts of masculinity and sexuality, we will have a discussion with a gender-reassignment surgeon. Every text will have a corresponding professional speaker. There will be a particular emphasis on medical memories, contemporary debates, and experiences that critically examine how factors such as race, gender identity, and ability impact our humanity and our health outcomes.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
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), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
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)
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)
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 course will introduce students to quantitative methods for studying social policy problems. Topics to be covered include descriptive statistics and sampling, correlation and causation, simple and multiple regression, experimental methods, and an introduction to cost-benefit analysis. The emphasis will be on the selection, interpretation and practical application of these methodologies in specific policy settings, rather than with formal proofs. Skills will be reinforced by hands-on exercises using statistical software. Over the course of the semester, students will critically analyze policy reports and empirical research in a range of policy areas and learn how to present this research to a non-specialist audience. Finally, we will discuss the pros and cons of quantitative vs. qualitative methodologies. The course will conclude with group presentations that draw on all these skills. Enrollment restricted to Social Policy minors only.
Distribution Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, 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)
This workshop is designed to hone the analytical and communications skills necessary for effective formulation and advocacy of public policy. Topics include how to develop op-ed pieces and other forms of advocacy journalism, memoranda, position papers, and grant proposals. The workshop puts special stress on how to make a clear and persuasive exposition of complex or counter-intuitive policy arguments in the market place of ideas, including the challenges of writing for popular journals and communicating to specific audiences both in and out of government. Students receive intensive individual instruction, including close editing of their work and advice on how to publish or promote it in the public sphere. Enrollment restricted to Social Policy minors only.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
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)
"When the Spanish unleashed their regime of colonization of what is present-day Mexico, their primary justification was the religious salvation of Indigenous people. Spaniards, along with other Europeans, arrived by the boatload to impose colonial order, taking up bureaucratic and ecclesiastical positions. The result was far from smooth—the sixteenth-century saw widespread disease, missionary violence on behalf of salvation, crop destruction and the recultivation of land, urban plans that radically altered the environment, the resettlement of entire populations, among other dramatic social and environmental events. This course investigates the complex and dynamic elements of colonial New Spain (as Mexico was called) from an interdisciplinary perspective. It tries to make sense of the chaotic landscape of the first century of Spanish colonial rule in New Spain. It is a research and writing intensive course that serves as an introduction to both the history and art history of this place and moment. Our meetings will act as a springboard for a group trip to Mexico during the January intersession to study objects and spaces in situ. Final projects will relate to materials viewed in person in Mexico. The costs for this trip are included for all students, no fees required. Knowledge of Spanish preferred but not required.
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)
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)
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)
The Commons is Hopkins’ newest arts and culture magazine, responding to the annual Common Question (in 2023-24: “What is repair?”). 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 writing methods course 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.
Distribution Area: Humanities
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: Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
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.
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.
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 Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
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: Science and Data (FA2)
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.
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
This course will engage with 20th century critical theory and social inquiry that wrestles with the idea that new mediations have profoundly altered the character of human experience and subjectivity, and it will consider the questions that these theorists pose for our disciplines. How have modern subjectivity, gender, affect, reason, and politics been shaped by the technologies and structures of representation that mediate them? Among figures of interest: Marx, Freud, Eisenstein, Benjamin, Bakhtin, Adorno, Deleuze, Guy Debord, Haraway, Stuart Hall, Teresa de Lauretis, Kitterer, Sobchack, Berlant, Latour, Linda Williams, Ranciere, Orit Halpern.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
An interdisciplinary seminar on Latin America’s role in wider cultural, economic, and political processes, from both historical and contemporary perspectives. In Fall 2024 we will take up the themes of aesthetics, epistemic pluralism, and the question of reality.
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
Full-time A&S Graduate Students only. This course will prepare graduate students to teach at the university level. Topics covered include large and small class teaching, characteristics of student learning, syllabus construction, grading students, and developing a teaching portfolio.
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.