HSS Courses (2026-27)

Ec 1 will provide a window into economics, covering a "greatest hits" curriculum in economic theory, empirical economics and experimental economics. Topics will include: game theory, the theory of auctions, information design and mechanism design, the analysis of voting rules, experiments in economics, macroeconomic growth, and data science. This course satisfies the menu requirement of the Caltech core curriculum.

This course will survey the evolution of Mediterranean and European civilization from antiquity through the end of the Middle Ages. It will emphasize the reading and discussion of primary sources, especially but not exclusively literary works, against the backdrop of the broad historical narrative of the periods. The readings will present students with the essential characteristics of various ancient and medieval societies and give students access to those societies' cultural assumptions and perceptions of change.

The term “automaton,” often used today as a near-synonym for “robot,” derives from the Greek α ὐ τόματον ( automaton ), meaning “self-moving.” This course examines the cultural and social history of automata from antiquity through the medieval and Renaissance periods, focusing on how the imitation of lifelike motion contributed to the development of mechanical technologies. Challenging modern assumptions shaped by cybernetics, robotics, and artificial intelligence, the course situates automata within their historical contexts, exploring their multiple meanings as both technical and symbolic objects. Field trips to the Huntington Library will be included.

This course offers a focused introduction to the practices of reading, thinking, and writing that characterize academic writing. More specifically, the course teaches students how to articulate a position, situate writing within specific contexts, engage with the work of others, locate and provide convincing evidence, and understand the expectations of different types of academic readers. Students will take several writing projects through multiple stages of revision, improving their work with feedback from seminar discussions, workshops, and frequent one-to-one conferences with the instructor. Students are placed in Wr 2 based on a writing assessment that is required of all incoming students; successful completion of the course is required before taking first-year humanities courses. Enrolled students may be required to take Wr 3, 4, and/or 50 in subsequent quarters.

This course offers an introduction to the key questions, methods, and sources in the field of environmental history. We will ground our study of environmental history in place-based case studies drawn from across areas over which the United States has claimed sovereignty, throughout North America, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and the Arctic. Drawing examples from across what has sometimes been called “the Greater United States,” the course explores how nature, people, and environmental change transcend and trouble the boundaries of the nation-state. By thinking transnationally and comparatively beyond the traditional bounds of U.S. environmental history and the continental United States, we will consider the environmental and social impacts of the far reach of U.S. empire and colonialism. Over the course of the semester, we will focus on themes such as conservation, extraction, science, and migration as we consider the history of how various agents of U.S. empire and communities living in U.S. territories and colonies have thought about and interacted with nature and state power at large and small scales.

This course builds on Wr 2 for students who need additional instruction in both the core concepts and practices of academic writing before beginning their first-year humanities coursework. The course will focus on developing critical reading skills and composing successful academic essays. By taking several writing projects through multiple stages of revision, students will develop a deeper sense of their strengths and limitations as writers, and seminar discussions, workshops, and frequent one-to-one conferences with the instructor will equip students to address those limitations. Not available for credit toward the humanities-social science requirement. Enrolled students may be required to take Wr 4 and/or 50 in subsequent quarters.

This course follows Writing 2 and offers an opportunity for more focused study and discussion of core concepts in academic writing, such as audience, genre, argument, working with sources, and process. Weekly readings offer concrete guidance on these topics, and class discussions expand on that guidance, providing insights into common challenges college writers encounter. Not available for credit toward the humanities-social science requirement.

When the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great founded his city, Constantinople, as a new Rome in 330 CE, he could hardly have dreamed that his great empire would endure for yet another millennium. During this long millennium, the Roman Empire, also known to historians as the Byzantine Empire, underwent profound cultural, religious, political, and legal transformation. This course will examine that history from the foundation of Constantinople in 330 to the Ottoman conquest in 1453. It will focus on the changing meaning of ‘Rome,’ both within the empire and without, the dynamic cultural production of the Roman people, and how the political and legal history of the Empire was intertwined with both Western Europe and the Islamic world. The emphasis of the course will be on learning to read and analyze primary sources—histories, hagiographies (the lives of saints), poetry, and legal texts—and how to deploy these sources as evidence in historical writing.

Over the past two centuries, human uses of life as technology have intensified tremendously. During this period, hybridizations of industrial capitalism and university life science yielded a cornucopia of innovations, altering essential features of life and engendering unusual life forms. Modern biotechnology, epitomized in entities like in vitro cell cultures and transgenic organisms, rearranged nature’s order while simultaneously driving scientific efforts to understand living nature. This course pores over ways in which users of biotechnology refashioned life, as well as the serendipitous ramifications these undertakings had. Ultimately, the history of biotechnology reflects the protean place of humanity in nature, providing an unsettling perspective on the instability of our current ways of life.

Pomatto's section (second term) An introduction to economic methods, models, and institutions. The course focuses on a set of foundational questions: what prices represent, how they are determined, and how they function to allocate goods and resources. The class emphasizes abstract reasoning and formal arguments. Students seeking a wide-ranging introduction to economic institutions may prefer Professor Druckenmiller’s section. This version of the course is concentrated on a narrower set of topics.  Druckenmiller's section (third term): This course provides a rigorous introduction to microeconomic theory at a level comparable to an intermediate course, using calculus to analyze how individuals and firms make decisions and how these decisions shape markets. Students develop demand from consumer optimization and supply from firm cost minimization and profit maximization, then study competitive markets, general equilibrium, and welfare. The course emphasizes applying theory to real-world problems and policy questions, while also examining departures from perfect competition, including market power, uncertainty, incomplete property rights, and asymmetric information. Students seeking an introduction to economics based in first principles may prefer the section taught by Professor Pomatto.

Introduction to the tools and concepts of analytical political science. Subject matter is primarily American political processes and institutions. Topics: spatial models of voting, redistributive voting, games, presidential campaign strategy, Congress, congressional-bureaucratic relations, and coverage of political issues by the mass media.

This course traces the origins of modern racism and, perhaps surprisingly, of human rights advocacy itself, to a seminal moment in global history sometimes called the Age of Discovery. At this time, two small European kingdoms, Spain and Portugal, first conducted trade and conquest in Atlantic Africa, the Americas, and the Indian and Pacific Oceans, forging the world's first truly global empires. We study the legacy of racism and humanitarianism in eye-witness accounts, maps, images and other materials attesting to Spain's seminal encounters with the Americas.

This course will provide an introduction to what we know about the fascinating link between the brain, the mind, and behavior. We will start with a basic review of the brain as a biological organ, its evolution, development, and its basic operations including visual and others' senses. Next, we will discuss how the brain gives rise to a wide variety of complex behaviors, memory, social and emotional behaviors. The course will finally introduce students to the wider neurophilosophical questions concerning freewill, death and morality.

It took less than seven years from the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938 to the ignition of the first atomic bomb in the summer of 1945 and its subsequent use against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this course, we will take a deep dive into this development, which forever changed the dynamics of global politics — as well as our views on science. In addition to the Manhattan project, the course will also cover the nuclear weapon programs in other countries, in particular Nazi Germany. We will place the rapid development of the war years in a wider historical context, from the first anticipations of atomic weapons to the rise of “big science” in the postwar years. In this way, we will be able to address the pressing ethical questions (and their continuing relevance to scientists today) in a nuanced, historically informed way.

This course offers an introduction to environmental history with a particular focus on the field's intersection with the histories of science and knowledge. We will discuss how historians write about the environment in the past, how they approach the interactions of states and societies with the environment, as well as examining what and how people in the past knew about their environments. The course will stretch chronologically and geographically and cover a broad range of topics from Graeco-Roman Antiquity in the Mediterranean, through the early modern Atlantic world, to the early nineteenth-century United States. We will examine people's interactions with climate, forests, waterways, wildlife, and natural disasters, to name just a few themes, and learn how societies understood, described, and managed the natural world in premodern times.

Why do some people believe in Bigfoot, crystal healing, or red-light therapy? What distinguishes science from pseudoscience? This course begins with classic cases of pseudoscientific belief, from homeopathy to conspiracy theories, and moves on to issues like climate denialism and vaccine misinformation. But our goal isn’t to laugh at bad ideas. We ask deeper questions: Why should science be trusted? What does the replication crisis reveal about the scientific method? How do corporate interests—like those of Big Pharma or fossil fuel companies—shape what gets published, funded, or believed? How should non-experts evaluate scientific claims in a world of information overload? We’ll explore philosophical tools for evaluating evidence, identifying biases, and distinguishing reliable authority from manufactured doubt.

In this class, we will explore the meanings and challenges of environmental communication. Engaging an interdisciplinary approach to ecology, we will address the nuances of environmental perception, the complexities of ecosystems, and the difficulties of translating scientific knowledge into persuasive storytelling, particularly in relation to politicized issues like climate change. The course will pair theories from the environmental humanities with diverse examples of ecological media: from literature, comics, and film to interactive art and video games to GIS mapping and data visualization. We will consider the affordances and limits of these cultural forms and ask what they can contribute to environmental debates.

This class studies a sample group of social hierarchies and explores whether they are natural or artificial, real or perceived, just or unjust. Topics from past years have included covid-19 vaccine inequality; IT worker inequality; happiness inequality; animal inequality; and inequality between humans and generative AI chatbots. We will treat the idea of inequality not as an abstract concept but as a heuristic question that can help us compare and analyze concrete readings.

The relationship between patients and doctors, the ill and the well, involves a constant exchange of stories. In this course we will look more closely at the relationship between medicine and narrative through a selection of fiction, essays and poems that investigate the interplay between doubt and diagnosis, the idea of the case study, the problem of medical responsibility, and the language of pain and illness. Authors covered may include Sontag, Mantel, Conan Doyle, Freud, Woolf, Dickinson, Ishiguro and Shelley.

Spanning roughly The Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement this course will look at a range of Black writing from that time, and ask what it tells us about both the specificity of Black art and thought as well as politics in the United States. In a country constituted by the histories of slavery and segregation, work during this period reckoned with that history while imaging new forms of freedom. Alongside literature, the course will consider how literature was in dialogue with visual arts and music, the period’s political movements, and look at the relationship between race, gender, class, colonialism, and other questions of social difference.

Language and literature in the Middle Ages runs like a network between different political entities sharing and exchanging new cultural protocols. In Medieval Networks, we will look at how English medieval literature is the product of a series of contacts with the Celts, Germanic mercenaries, Norse Vikings, Latin scholars and French fashion all for the making of a new kind of literature. Medieval England is always in flux. No period remains stable, forms and genres change. In this class, you will watch the English language, and its literary fashions, change in startling ways when in contact with other languages. Two ideas will be fruitful when thinking about this class: translatio or “translation,” the literal movement of an object—usually a precious relic—from one location to another, and rejuvinatio or “rejuvenation,” the act of making an old image or idea fresh by moving it from an expected literary locale to an unexpected one. We will watch not only how authors dealt with a changing language, in a variety of seemingly stable genres, like lyric poetry, narratives and drama, but also how they adopted to new trends, often from foreign sources, and altered old ones, to create exciting new texts. Our reading will include a Danish king with monster problems (Beowulf) to a supernatural knight crossing the threshold into King Arthur’s court looking for a fight (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), as well as selections from a new kind of love lyric and comical dramas rooted in the Bible. By the end of the course, you will not only be comfortable reading Old and Middle English literature, but you’ll also discover how enjoyable older literature can be.

This course offers an introduction to reading and writing about modern poetry in English. At the heart of the course is the practice of close reading—learning to pay careful attention to words, sound, and form—but we will also work to situate these poems in their literary, social, and historical contexts. Students will develop the skills to make sense of so-called “difficult” poetry and discover why that difficulty is so often worth the effort. Poets covered may include Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Mina Loy, Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Hart Crane, and Gwendolyn Brooks.

Studies of American aesthetics, genres, and ideas from the birth of the nation to the present. Students will be introduced to the techniques of formal analysis. We will consider what constitutes evidence in relation to texts and how to develop a persuasive interpretation. Topics may include Nature's Nation, slavery and its aftermath, individualism and the marketplace, the "New Woman," and the relation between word and image.

This course surveys a number of literary destinations you would never want to visit in real life: places with near-unsurmountable political and environmental threats where individuality is crushed and where happy endings are hard to come by. Given that life in a dystopia is so awful, what makes this genre of fiction so popular? And what can fictional dystopian societies teach us about our own? We will look for answers to these questions in the work of some of the greatest writers of the past century, including Franz Kafka, Shirley Jackson, Philip K. Dick, Cormac McCarthy, and Ursula K. Le Guin, among others.

Is there such a thing as an ideal friend? What responsibilities do friends have to each other? How can friendship negotiate differences, and what are its limits? To explore these enduring questions, we will read texts that both theorize the nature of friendship and put these theories to the test. As our course material will draw from philosophy and literature, we will also consider how these disciplines each approach the pursuit of knowledge. Authors read may include Aristotle, Cicero, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Austen, and Shelley.

This course introduces students to philosophical thinking about the nature of reality and the limits of knowledge. It is structured around three topics of perennial philosophical importance: 1. Skepticism. How much can I know about the world? Can I be certain of anything? Is it possible that most of what I believe is false? 2. The Mind-Body Problem. What is the nature of the mind? How is the mind related to the body and to the physical world more generally? 3. Personal Identity. What is the nature of a person? Am I the same person today that I was yesterday and will be tomorrow? If so, what makes me the same person? Readings will include both classical and contemporary sources such as Plato, Zhuangzi, Descartes, Locke, and Russell.

This course will provide a broad introduction to philosophy using examples from science fiction to make abstract philosophical problems vivid. Topics may include: time travel and the reality of the past and future; teleportation and what makes someone the same person over time; fictional tales of extended deception and Cartesian skepticism; futuristic utopias and the question of what make a life good; the moral status of aliens and animals; intelligent robots and the relation between mind and body; parallel universes and the philosophical foundations of quantum physics.

How do we reconcile the possibilities of modern machine learning with ethical and moral demands of fairness, accountability and transparency? This course will cover several challenges at the interface of algorithms and human values. By exploring existing debates on algorithmic bias, explainable AI and data ownership, students will be exposed to the relevance of ethical systems of thought to modern social questions.

"The knowledge of photography is just as important as that of the alphabet," wrote artist László Moholy-Nagy in 1928. "The illiterate of the future," he warned, "will be the person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as the pen." Almost a century later, this pronouncement rings as true as ever in a world so profoundly shaped not just by photography but also films, advertisements, and video games, cartoons and comics, molecular graphics and visual models. In this course we will explore how visual culture shapes our lives and daily experiences, and we will learn to find wonder in its rich details. In doing so, we will develop the visual literacy that Moholy-Nagy envisioned: essential skills in reading, analyzing, discussing, and writing about visual materials and their circulation through the physical and virtual networks that structure our world.

This course examines the historical development of film as a popular art and entertainment medium from the 1880s to the present, with a focus on the American and European contexts. Students will learn how to watch a film - how to pay attention to significant visual details and to the ways films construct meaning from the language of images - and will develop the skills to write fluently about what they see. The course covers some of the most influential genres and movements from the earliest actuality films, through the French New Wave, to the Disney/Marvel Universe. Films covered may include short comedies from Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, M , It Happened One Night , The Seven Samurai , The Battle of Algiers , and Black Panther .

By permission only. Individualized tutorial instruction in writing and communication for students who benefit from weekly discussions about their work as writers. Not available for credit toward the humanities-social science requirement.

This course will take us from the ancient caves of Indonesia to the caravan trades of Medieval Sahara, the mines of early modern Afghanistan, the codices of colonial Mexico City, the gardens of the Incan empire, the alchemical recipes of China, and, finally, the pink "rouge" makeup on the French queen Marie Antoinette's cheeks. We will examine color across geographies and cultures in history with a thematic approach, exploring each week a different facet of color as it relates to visual culture, art, and architecture: from environmental cultivation and extraction to alchemy, magic, chemistry, technology, commerce, anthropology, literature, physics, medicine, psychology, race studies, culture, and aesthetics. This class will emphasize visual analysis, the reading of primary and secondary sources, and the crafting of original research and writing. We will have on-site visits to the Huntington Museum, Library, and Botanical Gardens, and discussions with contemporary color-makers and artists.

In the middle of the seventh century, the tribal followers of a new religion called Islam burst out of the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula and rapidly overwhelmed the armies of the ancient Byzantine and Sassanid Empires. By the middle of the next century, they had conquered much of the western Eurasian world, from the Central Asian steppe to the Straits of Gibraltar. The Muslims' extraordinary achievement bound together lands formerly ruled by two ancient empires-the Roman and Persian-and transformed the cultures, societies, economies, and laws of the diverse peoples now subject to their rule. This course explores the political, social, and institutional history of the Islamicate world from its origins in seventh-century Arabia to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. It will pay particular attention to relations between Islam and the other cultures of the Mediterranean as they are revealed in episodes such as the conquest of Spain, the Crusades, and repeated conflicts with the Byzantine Empire. It will also explore internal political, cultural, and religious conflict among the followers of Islam themselves.

This course will provide an introduction to English poetry in the 16th and 17th centuries, with an emphasis on exploring how poems served as vehicles to make sense of the political and social contradictions of early modern England. How do Sir Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare's sonnets blend themes of unrequited desire with political critique? How does Hester Pulter develop early ideas of physics through her lyrics, like imagining the apocalypse through the dissolution of atoms? Other authors covered in the course may include Katherine Philips, John Donne, Margaret Cavendish, and John Milton.

This sequence of humanities courses will introduce students to political philosophy and ethics, historical research, and literary analysis, in conjunction with themes treated in other parts of the integrated core. Key topics will include the ethics of space travel, the history of Caltech energy research, and contemporary climate fiction. All three terms together count as the equivalent of a single 9-unit first-year humanities class; students may choose their other first-year humanities class from any area of humanities instruction.

This course will count as a first-year humanities course in English. It is usually taught by new or visiting faculty. This course is not repeatable. Limited to 15 students. See registrar's announcement for details.

This course will count as a first-year humanities course in history. It is usually taught by new or visiting faculty. This course is not repeatable. Limited to 15 students. See registrar's announcement for details.

This skills-based course introduces students to the fundamentals of Western music theory. Considering a broad range of musical styles, we will explore the basic structures and relationships that have shaped music in the West through past centuries and into the present day. Through analysis, listening, practical exercises, and creative projects, we will gain fluency with the materials of music and develop a strong musical vocabulary. With these skills, we will be able to consider how different kinds of music are constructed and what makes them sound the way they do. Major topics for study include music notation, rhythm and meter, scales and tonality, intervals, triads and seventh chords, and basic harmonic relationships. This class is suitable for students with little or no musical background, or for students with a performance background but no prior experience with music theory. Students do not need to be able to read music before taking this class.

This course will count as a first-year humanities course in philosophy. It is usually taught by new or visiting faculty. This course is not repeatable. Limited to 15 students. See registrar's announcement for details.

This course introduces the language and structure of tonal music, from the most basic musical phrase to the form of short pieces. Through this study, we will learn how harmonic relationships can create the sensation of movement, surprise, tension, or rest within a musical phrase, and we will especially consider how composers have used those tendencies to expressive effect. Course activities encompass both written work and aural skills: students will work with theoretical concepts through singing and aural analysis and well as through written analysis and composition exercises.

This course will count as a first-year humanities course in visual culture. It is usually taught by new or visiting faculty. This course is not repeatable. Limited to 15 students. See registrar's announcement for details.

This course builds on the frameworks developed in Mu 58 to explore elements of chromatic harmony in tonal music. Beginning with tonicization and modulation, we will develop the skills we need to analyze large musical forms, such as complete symphony or sonata movements. We will also delve into the harmonic language of the Romantic era and seek to understand the chromatic techniques that make this repertoire so colorful and expressive. Course activities include written and aural analysis, short composition exercises, and a final composition project.

Reading in history and related subjects, done either in connection with the regular courses or independently, but under the direction of members of the department. A brief written report will usually be required. Graded pass/fail. Not available for credit toward humanities-social science requirement.

A practice-based course taught by a visiting artist in residence.

Data visualization can be the key to understanding complex data patterns. Data visualization is an amalgamation of computer science, cognitive science, art, graphic design, interaction and user-centered design, and communications. In this project-based course, students will learn and employ principles from these fields to develop rich interactive visualization tools for the public and scientific research to foster better understanding of the data. Students will gain experience designing, working, and developing prototypes directly with scientists to enable meaningful exploration and analysis of their data. Pre-requisites are CS 1 and CS 2 or equivalent.

A course on a specialized topic in some area of the humanities, usually taught by new or visiting faculty. Recent offerings have included courses on film-making, poetry writing, speculative fiction, and the difference between humans and other animals. The course may be re-taken for credit except as noted in the course announcement. Class size is normally limited to 8-15 students. See registrar's announcement for details.

Weekly seminar by a member of the Caltech humanities faculty or a visitor to discuss a topic of their current research at an introductory level. The course can be used to learn more about different areas of study within the humanities. For those interested in (or who become interested) in pursuing a second option in the humanities, the course will introduce students to the kinds of research carried out by members of the humanities faculty and help them find faculty advisers.

This course offers instruction in writing and speaking about science and technology for non-expert audiences. Instruction focuses on how to convey complex technical information in clear, engaging prose and speech in a variety of contexts. Readings in different genres (e.g., the newspaper discovery story, the op-ed, the personal narrative, the explainer talk) raise issues for discussion and serve as models for assignments in these genres. The workshop-style nature of this course relies on drafting and revision in response to peer and instructor feedback. Satisfies the Institute scientific writing requirement and the option oral communications requirement for humanities majors.

When William Blake wrote "to see a World in a Grain of Sand," he tapped into poetry's power to model the universe. For instance, once we set up a simile between "world" and "grain of sand", we can test this hypothesis of sameness. How is sand like the world? Where will the model fail? And what might that tell us? Imagery, sensory language, arguments, ideas, and verse form itself can lead poetry toward power and discovery. This pursuit can reach from the page into one's own life. We will work hard together on poems, our own and one another's. With permission of the instructor students may repeat the course for credit.

The class is conducted as a workshop of fiction writing. Contemporary short stories and novel excerpts are discussed, as well as the art and craft of writing well. The course covers the essential elements of fiction writing, including character, voice, setting, world building, scene, summary, plot, and dialogue. Each week, we discuss a particular craft element, analyze published fiction, and provide feedback on student writing. Near the end of the course, students critique the work of their peers in small-group workshops.

This class is a seminar about the reading and writing of creative nonfiction. Contemporary personal essays, profiles of public figures, and other examples of this vibrant form will be read and discussed, as well as the art and craft of writing well. The course covers the essential elements of the genre such as characterization, dramatization, voice, and the ethics of writing about real life. Each week, we will analyze published nonfiction and practice writing with in-class prompts; out of class, students will complete short exercises for feedback. Near the end of the course, students will turn in one long piece of creative nonfiction (10-15 pages) to showcase what they've learned.

Students attend four lectures, featuring speakers from outside Caltech, on topics in the history and philosophy of science. Students may choose from a variety of regularly scheduled HPS lectures, including HPS seminars, Harris lectures, and History seminars (history or philosophy of science only). Graded on attendance. Not available for credit toward the humanities-social science requirement. Graded pass/fail.

Required of students taking the philosophy option. To be taken in any two consecutive terms of the senior year. Students will research and write a thesis of 10,000-12,000 words on a philosophical topic to be determined in consultation with their thesis adviser. Limited to students taking the philosophy option.

An individual program of directed reading in Visual Culture, in areas not covered by regular courses. VC 90 is intended primarily for Visual Culture minors. Interested students should confer with a Visual Culture faculty member and agree upon a topic before registering for the course.

This course explores the relationship between art and science in early modern Europe. We will pay particular attention to the role of perception in the making, reception, and theory of art. Topics include (but are not limited to): the senses – smell, touch, sight, hearing, and taste – proprioception, cognition, ideas, memory, color theory and optics, mesmerism, psychology, machines, technology, and theories of aesthetics, gender, race, criminality, and the animal world.

This course is a cultural history of astronomical observation and interpretation, with an emphasis on the enduring artistic, cultural, and religious fascination with the sun and moon. Topics may include: the ancient worship of celestial objects; early celestial drawings, engravings, and atlases; key developments in telescopic technology and astronomical photography from the seventeenth century to the digital age; case studies of key figures and events in the history of astronomical observation; and a wide range of artistic representations of astronomers and astronomical objects.

This course offers advanced undergraduates the opportunity to pursue research on a business problem individually or in a small group. Graded pass/fail.

This course offers advanced undergraduates the opportunity to pursue research in Economics individually or in a small group. Graded pass/fail.

This course offers advanced undergraduates the opportunity to pursue research in political science individually or in a small group. Graded pass/fail.

Senior economics majors wishing to undertake research may elect a variable number of units, not to exceed 12 in any one term, for such work under the direction of a member of the economics faculty.

An individual program of directed reading in English or American literature, in areas not covered by regular courses. En 98 is intended primarily for English majors and minors. Interested students should confer with an English faculty member and agree upon a topic before registering for the course.

An individual program of directed reading in history, in areas not covered by regular courses.

An individual program of directed reading in history and philosophy of science, in areas not covered by regular courses.

An individual program of directed reading in philosophy, in areas not covered by regular courses.

Students will study research methods and write a research paper. Required of students in the English option.

Students will work with the instructor in the preparation of a research paper, which will form the basis of an oral examination.

This course will examine the interrelationships between the concepts of causation, moral responsibility, and legal liability. It will consider legal doctrines of causation and responsibility, as well as attempts within philosophy to articulate these concepts. Questions to be addressed include: Can you be morally or legally responsible for harms that you do not cause? Is it worse to cause some harm, than to unsuccessfully attempt it? Is it justified to punish those who cause harm more severely than those who attempt harm? When, if ever, can the ends justify the means? What constitutes negligence? Is it worse to cause some harm, than to allow it to happen (when you could have prevented it)?

This course examines the question of what it means to have free will, whether and why free will is desirable, and whether humans have free will. Topics may include historical discussions of free will from writers such as Aristotle, Boethius, and Hume; what it means for a scientific theory to be deterministic, and whether determinism is compatible with free will; the connection between free will and moral responsibility; the relationship between free will and the notion of the self; beliefs about free will; the psychology of decision making; and the insanity defense in law.

Topics determined by instructor.

Topics to be determined by instructor.

City-dwellers invented the concept of wilderness, as a space apart from human laws and culture. This course takes a critical look at the different values attributed to that space as it has been colonized by the human imagination. Our discussions will focus on the emergence of the perception of wilderness in European literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but we conclude with the question: what meaning do we invest the concept of "wilderness" with today? Readings will include works by Buffon, Toqueville, Chateaubriand, Byron, Thoreau, Wells, and London.

This course focuses on preparing non-native speakers of English with the communication skills necessary to organize, present or exchange information in a clear, concise manner to a variety of audiences. ESL 101 a will provide instruction on the development of pronunciation, intonation patterns and stress, grammar and verb tense, listening comprehension, and fluency in speaking. Aspects of American culture as well as come current events will be discussed. ESL 101 b is a continuation of ESL 101 a, and covers a variety of oral presentation skills. Students will be asked to paraphrase, summarize, and synthesize information from a journal article or in-class discussions and communicate ideas to the class. The class will discuss information from readings and other media sources in small groups to collect and organize ideas for discussion. ESL 101 ab is open to all first-year graduate students and may be required for some students designated by the ESL interview process during Orientation. A passing grade will satisfy the Institute English proficiency requirement for candidacy. Graded pass/fail. Open to international graduate students only.

This course combines accounting and finance in a dynamic, user-oriented approach. The goal is to enable students to understand what financial statements are (sources of information about a company), what they are not (facts devoid of interpretation or management influence), and how to critically understand and analyze them. The course will utilize actual SEC filings for several companies, across a variety of industries, through which the students will be exposed to important accounting concepts.

Introduction to the computations made by the brain during economic and social decision making and their neural substrates. Part b: History and mechanisms of reinforcement. Memory and valuation. Neural repurposing. Mentalizing and strategic thinking. Neural bases of prosociality, risky choice and delay discounting. Mathematical economic-style theories of neural circuits.

Offered in any two consecutive terms, by arrangement with HPS faculty. Under the guidance of an HPS faculty member, students will research and write a focused research paper of 15,000 words (approximately 50 pages). Work in the first term will comprise intensive reading in the relevant literature and/or archival or other primary source research. In the second term, students will draft and revise their paper. Open to seniors in the HPS option and to others by special permission of an HPS faculty member.

The course uses a multimedia program and emphasizes the acquisition of fundamental skills: oral ability, comprehension, writing, and reading. Students are evaluated based on quizzes and compositions (1/3), midterm and final (1/3), and class participation (1/3). The course is mainly designed for students with no previous knowledge of French. Students who have had French in secondary school or college must consult with the instructor before registering.

Finance, or financial economics, covers two main areas: asset pricing and corporate finance. For asset pricing, a field that studies how investors value securities and make investment decisions, we will discuss topics like prices, risk, and return, portfolio choice, CAPM, market efficiency and bubbles, interest rates and bonds, and futures and options. For corporate finance, a field that studies how firms make financing decisions, we will discuss topics like security issuance, capital structure, and firm investment decisions (the net present value approach, and mergers and acquisitions). In addition, if time permits, we will cover some topics in behavioral finance and household finance such as limits to arbitrage and investor behavior.

Economic policy questions increasingly depend on novel measurement: satellite imagery to track deforestation, digitized historical maps to study long-run development, and neural networks to predict poverty. This course surveys how economists build new spatial data from computational methods and deploy it for credible policy evaluation. Topics are organized as self-contained modules covering remote sensing and land use classification, digitization of historical maps, and deep learning for prediction. Data science is presented as an input to spatial causal inference techniques: boundary discontinuities, market access approaches, and spatial instrumental variables. Each module pairs a methodological introduction with a recent application from development, trade, or environmental economics. Students will complete hands-on assignments and develop an original policy evaluation proposal that leverages one of these modern measurement tools.

Students attend four lectures, featuring speakers from outside Caltech, on topics in the history and philosophy of science. Students may choose from a variety of regularly scheduled HPS lectures, including HPS seminars, Harris lectures, and Munro seminars (history or philosophy of science only). Graded on attendance. Not available for credit toward the humanities-social science requirement. Graded pass/fail.

The first two terms feature an extensive grammar review and group activities that promote self- expression. Op-Ed articles and a series of literary texts provide a basis for classroom discussion and vocabulary expansion. Several short-written compositions are required. The third term is designed to further develop an active command of the language. A variety of 19th- and 20th-century short stories are discussed in class to improve comprehension and oral proficiency. Students are expected to do an oral presentation, to write three short compositions, and a final paper.

Examines the theory of financial decision making and statistical techniques useful in analyzing financial data. Topics include portfolio selection, equilibrium security pricing, empirical analysis of equity securities, fixed-income markets, market efficiency, and risk management.

This course is an introduction to the wide, fast-moving range of ways in which AI methods are being used in social science, and how social science is used to understand AI impacts (e.g., in labor markets). The focus will be mostly on LLMs and machine learning, with one example from CLIP. Topics include: AI agents as substitutes for people in political and economic surveys and experiments; alignment: sycophancy, possible AI harm; machine learning for prediction in small (experiments) and large data sets (e.g., bail-setting), and AI used in analysis of financial data. Students will be graded on (1) in-class contributions, (2) two homework sets, (3) a class project either extending (or reproducing) a recent paper or doing an original analysis, and (4) an in-class final. Some funds will be available for computing power.

An introduction to option pricing theory and risk management in the discrete-time, bi-nomial tree model, and the continuous time Black-Scholes-Merton framework. Both the partial differential equations approach and the martingale approach (risk-neutral pricing by expected values) will be developed. The course will cover the basics of Stochastic, Ito Calculus. Since 2015, the course is offered in the flipped format: the students are required to watch lectures online, while problem solving and case and paper presentations are done in class.

A study of how technology affects issues of market structure and how market structure affects observable economic outcomes, such as prices, profits, advertising, and research and development expenditures. Emphasis will be on how the analytic tools developed in the course can be used to examine particular industries-especially those related to internet commerce-in detail. Each student is expected to write one substantial paper.

This course introduces students to the principles and practice of data science in economics and finance. The goal is not only to learn technical tools, but to understand how empirical researchers design, evaluate, and interpret data-driven analyses. The course is structured around the data science pipeline: formulating questions, constructing datasets, representing data, estimating models, evaluating predictions, and translating results into decisions. Along the way we develop a framework for distinguishing prediction from causal inference, understanding heterogeneity in economic data, and evaluating models critically rather than treating them as black boxes. Students will learn how to work with structured and unstructured data, including text, and will gain exposure to modern machine learning methods. The course also introduces large language models and their role in modern empirical workflows, including how they can be used for data construction, labeling, and analysis. The course emphasizes verification, reproducibility, and critical evaluation of model outputs. Students are expected to attend all classes, actively participate in discussions, and complete two in-class exams in addition to problem sets.  Course open only to juniors and seniors.  This is not a writing intensive course.

The goal of Elementary Japanese is to develop the ability to communicate in Japanese and to enable you to attain an elementary level of language proficiency in Japanese. You will have learned the Japanese writing systems, hiragana, katakana and kanji. Students who studied Japanese prior to this course must consult with the instructor before registering.

Why do firms exist? What determines the boundaries of the firm? How are firms governed? How are firms financed? How do firms contract with employees and contractors? Do firms have a moral responsibility to society, or to shareholders? In this course, we develop a rigorous framework for understanding the logic of the firm. Building on a foundation of economic theory, we will analyze historical and contemporary corporate leaders, the decisions they faced, and the repercussions of those actions. The aim of this course is to equip students with a rigorous framework for understanding the way the business world works, and to help them navigate their careers.

This course aims to provide a strong scientific writing foundation for multilingual or international graduate students through guided instruction in academic STEM writing. More specifically, it teaches graduate students about composing texts in scientific English for various audiences, focusing on issues of clarity, as well as grammar and usage. It helps familiarize writers with the features of clear and effective STEM writing, and it teaches writers about the style and genres of U.S. academic STEM writing, helping them learn to read and write about the work of others in their field. Students are encouraged to take ESL/Wr 107 in the first or second year of graduate school.

Continued instruction and practice in conversation, building up vocabulary, and understanding complex sentence patterns. The emphasis, however, will be on developing reading skills. Recognition of approximately 1,000 characters.

In this course we will examine behavioral economics models in several key decision-making contexts: choice over time, choice under uncertainty, choice in market settings (i.e., buying and selling), and others. In each topic area we will begin by providing the standard neoclassical account for behavior, building from assumptions (axioms) to corresponding utility models. We will then ask whether critical axioms of neoclassical models are plausible by calling upon psychological insights and empirical data. Rejection of neoclassical axioms will lead to new models, behavioral economics models, in each setting. These models, mechanisms and their testable predictions will be discussed.

Developing overall language skills. Literary and newspaper readings. Technical and scientific translation. Improvement of listening and speaking ability so as to communicate with Japanese people in real situations. Recognition of the 1,850 general-use characters. (Part c not offered in 2026-2027)

In this course we will develop a deep understanding of the institutional foundations of Chinese finance, and we will use this framework to study the strengths and weaknesses of the Chinese economic system through the lens of finance. We will start from a historical overview of Chinese finance and will study the institutions that drive financial market development. Next, we will focus on the unique economic features of the three main channels of Chinese finance: capital markets (including the stock and bond markets), bank- and fund-based intermediation (including the banking sector, shadow-banking, and private equity, and venture capital), and informal finance. Finally, we will study the opportunities and challenges posed by Chinese-style finance for the future development of the global financial system.

This course will study topics in behavioral economics demonstrating departures from the classic economics assumptions of rationality and pure self-interest. We will study evidence of these departures, models that have been designed to capture these preferences, and applications of these models to important economic questions. Topics will include biases and heuristics, risk preferences, self-control, strategic uncertainty, and social preferences, among others. The course will be based in readings from both classic and modern research. Methodologically, the course will combine both theoretical and empirical evidence of the mentioned above topics.

This course introduces students to the artistic style and the social, historical, and political content of French films, starting with Méliès and the Lumière brothers and working through surrealism and impressionism, 1930s poetic realism, the Occupation, the New Wave, the Cinema du look, and some critically acclaimed auteurs of the end of the century. The class teaches students to look at film as a medium with its own techniques and formal principles. Conducted in English.

This course focuses on strategies for composing an academic journal article in a STEM field. The rhetorical purpose and form of each section of the journal article will be considered in depth. The course is intended for graduate students who are prepared to be a lead author on a manuscript. While the course will cover strategies for collaborative writing, students will be asked to draft sections of an original journal article based upon their own research. The course will also provide guidance for preparing a manuscript for submission and responding to feedback from peer reviewers. Clarity in scientific writing and creating effective figures will also be discussed. Course enrollment is limited to 15 students.

Our world depends on rules. Some, like the laws of physics, are universal; others were made by humans. This course examines how people designed, negotiated, and established a variety of rules to govern their social, cultural, religious, artistic, or intellectual practices. It cuts across time and space. Topics range from religious codes through technical conventions to landscape management and include the Ten Commandments, the length of the Roman foot, Egyptian obelisks, clocks, calendars, screws, printing, diplomatic protocols, and the founding of National Parks. Each week we will analyze how people agreed and disagreed about the creation of standards governing measurement, description, and conduct. Readings combine contemporary primary source texts with recent academic literature.

Correlation may not imply causation, but what does imply causation? This course covers accounts of causation and offers an introduction to the causal graphical modeling framework. The course will consist of a mixture of philosophical analysis and the introduction of statistical and algorithmic techniques to infer causal relations from data.

Grammar fundamentals and their use in understanding, speaking, reading, and writing Spanish. Exclusively for students with no previous knowledge of Spanish.

This course looks at the implications of the fact that investors demand reward for taking risk. Concepts of Knightian risk and uncertainty; risk preference (risk-neutral Q vs. real-world P probability measures); coherent risk; and commonly used metrics for risk are explored. The integration of risk and reward in classical efficient portfolio construction is described, along with the drawbacks of this approach in practice and methods for addressing these drawbacks. The leptokurtic (fat-tailed) nature of financial data and approaches to modeling financial surprises are covered, leading to inherently leptokurtic techniques for estimating volatility and correlation. Scenario analysis, and regime-switching methods are shown to provide ways of dealing with risk in extreme environments. Fixed income portfolio factors including interest rates and credit are examined. The class also considers hedging techniques. The text for the class includes python code segments in Jupyter Notebooks.

This course provides an introduction to Bayesian Statistics and its applications to data analysis in various fields. Topics include: discrete models, regression models, hierarchical models, model comparison, and MCMC methods. The course combines an introduction to basic theory with a hands-on emphasis on learning how to use these methods in practice so that students can apply them in their own work. Previous familiarity with frequentist statistics is useful but not required.

By contrast to ancient epics, which for modern tastes are strange and difficult to read, ancient tragedies seem easy.  That's because these very dramas set down the rules of plot, character, suspense, and expressive language that we still find in novels, movies, and even comics today.  Yet even if ancient tragedies strike us as "good stories," their actual events are as different from anyone's real life as speculative fiction or fantasy.  We will explore how these fascinating works might have been understood by their original audiences: as moral teaching?  As religious worship?  As contributions to a long tradition of mythology?  What irreducible literary kernel remains alive after we've accounted for those potential social functions?

Grammar review, vocabulary building, practice in conversation, and introduction to relevant history, literature, and culture. Literary reading and writing are emphasized in the second and third terms. Students who have studied Spanish elsewhere must consult with the instructor before registering.

This course combines elements of business, economics, engineering, financial statement analysis, strategy, and law to provide students interested in entrepreneurship with a practical understanding of the mechanics of growing a 'post-idea' company. The class will explain how prospective investor’s view entrepreneurs and their ideas, teach students about types of capital, sources of capital, and term sheets, and generally delve into the timing and financial alternatives and trade-offs facing entrepreneurs seeking capital in order to launch or grow a company. As such, this class is a complement to E/SEC 102 (Scientific and Technology Entrepreneurship).

Field experiments are widely used in academia, government and industry to evaluate the effectiveness of changes in social policy, business models, and medical interventions, among others. The course provides an introduction to the design and analysis of field experiments, with applications in each of these domains. The course has an emphasis on hands-on learning in order to build practical skills in real research scenarios. A previous course covering linear regression is a prerequisite for the class.

This course is for students who have already learned some Latin and are ready to tackle great Latin poetry with all available aids:  dictionary, textbook, reference grammar, and English translation.  Each week, you'll be responsible for reading a long selection in English, then being ready to translate 100 to 200 lines on your own in class.  We will read Lucretius 'De Rerum Natura,' an idiosyncratic but fascinating Latin scientific poem advocating an atomic theory of matter and human life.  We will discuss the scientific arguments while also paying intensive attention to language: what is different because this is Latin poetry, with its great flexibility and capacity for surprise?

This course introduces topics and methods in the history of the book and reading. It focuses on the representation of knowledge in early modern printed materials across contemporary disciplines, which include natural history, technical arts, geography, music, and philology. We will examine in detail how scholars, editors, and printers translated new discoveries in sciences and humanities to text and images, thus learning about the communication and reception of knowledge in early modern Europe. We will study books, maps, and broadsheets, asking questions about the advantages and limits of print as a method of knowledge dissemination as well as the objectivity of the representation of research findings. The course focuses on the period between 1500-1800, with a final foray into the nineteenth and twentieth century to investigate the development and characteristics of scientific photography.

This course is an in-depth study of the hedge fund industry. We will study hedge fund trading strategies, the business model of hedge funds, hedge fund investors, as well as the institutional and regulatory framework in which hedge funds operate. The course will evaluate and analyze popular hedge fund trading strategies, including equity strategies (activist, market-neutral, long/short, event-driven, etc.), arbitrage strategies (derivatives, convertible, fixed-income, currency and global macro, etc.), and fund of hedge funds. The course will also analyze the hedge fund business model, including: performance evaluation and risk management; fund compensation and contractual features; transaction costs and market impact; as well as fund raising and marketing. In addition, the course will study the institutional relationships hedge funds have with service providers (prime brokers, custodian banks, etc.) and with regulators. We will also discuss public policy implications and the value of hedge funds in society. This course is designed to provide students with the skills necessary to evaluate hedge fund strategies, and to develop, manage, and successfully grow a hedge fund business.

Few professions have shaped the modern world as profoundly as engineering. Engineers do not merely solve problems: they devise, construct, and replicate ingenious machines that amplify human power over nature and, not infrequently, over other human beings. This course traces the emergence and evolution of the engineer in Europe, examining how a craft without formal training became a central and authoritative profession. Through case studies, the course explores engineering in its social, political, and cultural contexts, highlighting the tensions between innovation, power, and control. Students will engage in hands-on learning, including field trips (such as to the Huntington Library), 3D printing, and analysis of historical case studies.

Offered concurrently with L 115. This course introduces students to narrative film and literature from the Hispanic world, with an emphasis on the hero figure. It also takes up hybridization and transculturation in the Americas, specifically in Mexico, Peru, and Cuba, as well as film and narratives of Spain from the Civil War to the present. Conducted in Spanish. (a) Basics of Hispanic films and narratives, and their socio-cultural roots (b) Hybridization and mestizo cultures in the Hispanic world (c) The last century in Hispanic film and narrative. Each term can be taken independently. Students who write papers in Spanish may enroll in this class as L 115.

Offered concurrently with Hum 115. This course introduces students to narrative film and literature from the Hispanic world, with an emphasis on the hero figure. It also takes up hybridization and transculturation in the Americas, specifically in Mexico, Peru, and Cuba, as well as film and narratives of Spain from the Civil War to the present. Conducted in Spanish. (a) Basics of Hispanic films and narratives, and their socio-cultural roots (b) Hybridization and mestizo cultures in the Hispanic world (c) The last century in Hispanic film and narrative. Each term can be taken independently. Students who write papers in English may enroll in this class as Hum 115, which satisfies the advanced humanities requirement.

This course examines the meaning, practice, and religious significance of marriage in both the Christian and Islamic worlds during the Middle Ages. It focuses on the diverse religious, cultural, and social meanings of marriage as expressed in literary texts like hagiographies and histories, as well as the contested legal and doctrinal aspects of matrimony argued over by lawyers, jurists, and theologians. Particular attention will be paid to analysis of archival legal sources like marriage contracts and disputes which shed light on marriage practices, gender dynamics, and family relationships in the medieval world.

Offered concurrently with L 116. Hum 105 and Hum 116 given in alternate years. The course focuses on contemporary France. Topics may include France and the European Union; political parties and elections; family life; social protection; religion; education; media and technology. Conducted in French. Students who write papers in French may enroll in this class as L 116.

Offered concurrently with Hum 116. L 105 and L 116 given in alternate years. The course focuses on contemporary France. Topics may include France and the European Union; political parties and elections; family life; social protection; religion; education; media and technology. Conducted in French. Students who write papers in English may enroll in this class as Hum 116, which satisfies the advanced humanities requirement.

We will tackle the fundamental question of how to allocate resources and organize exchange in the absence of prices. Examples includes finding a partner, allocating students to schools, and matching donors to patients in the context of organ transplantations. While the main focus will be on formal models, we will also reason about the practical implications of the theory.

Starting in the early 1950s, the New York School of poets challenged the stuffy orthodoxy of mid-century American poetry by adopting the experimental tactics of European avant-garde movements such as Dadaism and Surrealism. This course offers a critical exploration of this influential group's varied body of work, with special attention to its extensive connections to the visual arts. Throughout the course, we will think about the New York School's activities in the context of Cold War American culture, emergent forms of queer sociality, and the rapidly changing urban environment of postwar Manhattan. Writers and artists covered may include Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, Joe Brainard, Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, and Eileen Myles.

Medieval law can seem strange from a modern perspective. Why was trial by battle acceptable? Why were forgery and murder both crimes punishable by death? How did religion impact law? The strangeness of medieval law reminds us that our ways of thinking about the law-our assumptions about why it exists and how it should work-are conditioned by our contemporary cultural and social values. In this course we will examine the diverse legal traditions of the medieval Mediterranean-European, Byzantine, and Islamicate law-to better understand law as a dynamic aspect of medieval societies and cultures. The course will introduce students to the methodology and theory of legal history and encourage them to consider from this perspective the political, social, and cultural factors which influence our modern attitudes towards law.

Why did the Greeks and Romans remain fascinated with the same stories of gods and heroes for more than a thousand years? On the other hand, how did they adapt old stories to fit new times and places? Our aim is to explore the history of classical poetry as a history of reading even older classical poetry. The course is also an excellent introduction to ancient literature in general. Readings might include Homer's 'Odyssey,' Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Ovid, and Seneca.

This is an advanced humanities course on a specialized topic in some area of the humanities. It is usually taught by new or visiting faculty. The course may be re-taken for credit except as noted in the course announcement. Limited to 15 students. See registrar's announcement for details.

The use of large data sets and innovative statistical methods has revolutionized professional and intercollegiate sports. This course introduces students to the academic and professional world of contemporary sports science. The course will meet biweekly with instructor lectures on sports science and with guest speakers from collegiate and professional sports. Students will be introduced to the primary data sources for sports science, to methods used to collect sports performance and outcomes data, and to the statistical tools used for sports analytics (for example, logistic regression, regression trees and random forest, network models, time series, and natural language processing). Students will be responsible for weekly writing or homework assignments based on readings and speaker presentations, as well as a quarter-long sports analytics research project. Students should have some background in econometrics, statistics and probability, data science, or machine learning.

An introduction to fundamental philosophical problems concerning the nature of science. Topics may include the character of scientific explanation, criteria for the conformation and falsification of scientific theories, the relationship between theory and observation, philosophical accounts of the concept of "law of nature," causation, chance, realism about unobservable entities, the objectivity of science, and issues having to do with the ways in which scientific knowledge changes over time.

This course will provide the student with a unique insight into the skills used by successful scientists in the social sciences, with the focus being on psychology and cognitive neuroscience (although this is interesting for any type of science career). The course promotes active (hands on) learning, to enhance skills such as creative idea formation, theory, science communication including presentation and writing skills for the public. The class will also provide discussion on practices and expert opinions on what departments looks for when recruiting students and hiring faculty. Enrollment limited to 14 students.

A rigorous treatment of microeconomic theory, serving as a bridge to graduate-level courses in general equilibrium theory. Topics include consumer choice theory—preferences, utility maximization, and demand; tools for welfare analysis, including compensating and equivalent variation; the theory of the firm—production, cost minimization, and profit maximization; and partial equilibrium analysis—market equilibrium, the effects of taxation, and market failure due to monopoly. Through theoretical models and applications, the course develops the analytical skills needed for advanced work in economics. Ec 150 (Mathematical Methods for Economics) is useful preparation but is not required.

This course focuses on the considerable influence Edgar Allan Poe's works have had on other writers. Authors as diverse as Charles Baudelaire, Vladimir Nabokov, Shirley Jackson, Ralph Ellison, and Mat Johnson have used Poe's stories as departure points for their own work. We shall then explore how and why Poe's stories have been so important for authors, despite the fact that his reputation as a great American writer, unlike Hawthorne's and Melville's, for example, is a relatively recent phenomenon.

The application of statistical techniques to the analysis of economic data.

This course will examine the historical origins of several regulatory agencies and trace their development over the past century or so. It will also investigate a number of current issues in regulatory politics, including the great discrepancies that exist in the cost-effectiveness of different regulations, and the advent of more market-based approaches to regulations instead of traditional "command-and-control." Not offered on a pass/fail basis.

Statistical inference in the social sciences is a difficult enterprise whereby we combine data and assumptions to draw conclusions about the world we live in. We then make decisions, for better or for worse, based on these conclusions. A simultaneously intoxicating and sobering thought! Strong assumptions about the data generating process can lead to strong but often less than credible (perhaps incredible?) conclusions about our world. Weaker assumptions can lead to weaker but more credible conclusions. This course explores the range of inferences that are possible when we entertain a range of assumptions about how data is generated. We explore these ideas in the context of a number of applications of interest to social scientists.

This course will focus on questions about the nature of space and time, particularly as they arise in connection with physical theory. Topics may include the nature and existence of space, time, and motion; the relationship between geometry and physical space (or space-time); entropy and the direction of time; the nature of simultaneity; and the possibility of time travel.

This course will focus on philosophical and foundational questions raised by quantum physics. Questions may include: Is quantum mechanics a local theory? Is the theory deterministic or indeterministic? What is the role of measurement and observation? Does the wave function always obey the Schrödinger equation? Does the wave function give a complete description of the state of a system? Are there parallel universes? How are we to understand quantum probabilities?

This course examines the macroeconomic growth of the United States over the past 125 years, with an emphasis on the economic theories and analytical methods used to study long-run development. It is organized around major thematic topics rather than chronology, with each topic covered over two lectures and focused on the key economic phenomena that have shaped the U.S. economy. Topics include the measurement of economic growth; the roles of institutions, geography, and technology in shaping productivity; migration and local labor markets; schooling and human capital accumulation; the spatial distribution of industry; market failures and financial crises; role of government in economic growth; and income and wealth inequality. Students will engage with a range of empirical research methods and theoretical frameworks used in modern economic analysis. Familiarity with introductory economics and econometrics is strongly encouraged. Students are expected to attend all classes, actively participate in discussions, and complete two in-class exams in addition to problem sets. Course open only to juniors and seniors.  This is not a writing intensive course.

How can literature and art make social worlds? In this survey, we will look at select geographies of 20th-century U.S. literature, considering writers and writing in context. We will engage important works of fiction, poetry, and art and highlight the role of community in establishing, sustaining, and disseminating culture. In addition to close-reading texts, we will explore questions of friendship, correspondence, space, and place—in short, the role of the “scene” in cultivating new ideas and forms of expression. We will consider: the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s, the post-WWII poetic avant-garde, the confluence of poetry and performance in 1980s L.A., and Internet collectives of the 1990s and 2000s.

Partisan polarization has been at the forefront of American politics for years. Its negative social effects seem clear, and many voters and political elites appear to agree that unchecked partisan polarization causes harm to our democratic institutions. However, it also feels like these social divisions are not on track to improve anytime soon. If most people agree that Republicans and Democrats just need to get along, then why are we still so divided by partisanship? Why did this divide emerge in the first place? And if polarization is a defining problem of American politics today, then what can be done to alleviate or at least mitigate its effects? This course will explore these questions by discussing relevant literature on American political parties, voter partisanship, and partisan polarization. By the end of the course, students will have an improved understanding of American partisanship and how it impacts many of today's most pressing policy issues.

Grammar fundamentals and their use in aural comprehension, speaking, reading, and writing. Students who have had German in secondary school or college must consult with the instructor before registering.

In this course, we will study the global economy and how it is shaped by the interaction between market forces and government policy. We will build a foundational understanding of the economics of international trade and finance and examine the incentives that drive the behavior of firms, investors, and governments. Topics will include comparative advantage, factor endowments, and the gains from trade; tariffs, industrial policy, and regional trade agreements; exchange rate regimes, interest rate parity, sovereign debt, and financial crises. Throughout the course, we will frame our analysis within a broader institutional and historical context, examining how global economic systems have been organized through periods of colonialism, globalization, and geoeconomic rivalry.

This course focuses on the prose, poetry, and literary criticism of Edgar Allan Poe, inventor of detective fiction, author of "The Raven," and writer of many essays about other writers' works, as well as his own. We will begin by reading some of Poe's s classic short stories, including "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Gold-Bug," and others. We will also read his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. In addition to examining poems, such as "The Raven," "Annabel Lee," and "The Bells," we will turn our attention to "The Philosophy of Composition" and "The Philosophy of Furniture." The course will also watch film and television versions of some of Poe's greatest works.

Humans are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction-the first to be caused by human activity. Extinction has been viewed in changing ways over the past 200 years, and this course takes an interdisciplinary approach to learning about the extinction process from a historical as well as a modern perspective. Our focus will be on the extinction of biological entities, but we will also touch on other systems that have disappeared: languages, technologies, habitats, and ways of living. Central to our endeavors will be asking what it means to live in this time of loss: Should we mourn? And if so, how do we mourn for what many or most of us do not see, but only read about? Finally, we will scrutinize what the practical effects of extinction have been, are, and will be. We will also make at least one visit to a natural history museum to view some extinct species behind the scenes.

This course examines historical and contemporary visual representations of the natural world and resources in art and science through a political, economic and social lens. We will draw upon theory and practices from art, science, geography and landscape studies to critically analyze how artists, scientists, corporations, government agencies, activists, and local inhabitants use environmental imagery for diverse purposes with sometimes conflicting interests. Each term will center on a specific theme related to California and climate change, for example, water or energy. The course includes projects, lectures, readings, discussions and a 2-day field trip. Students will learn to think critically while developing creative, culturally complex approaches to observing, recording, and representing the natural world.

An examination of the role of political and economic forces in shaping the development of the Chinese economy during the Qing and Republican periods.  The class emphasizes the use of simple economic models to understand how the Chinese economy grew and where it failed to do so. We will also discuss how this history helps explain China’s performance in the last half century. Students are expected to read research papers and discuss them in class.

Humans' conceptions of nature have changed dramatically over time. Ecological systems influence human culture, politics, law, and many other spheres, and in turn, humans influence those systems. This class introduces students to the field of humanistic ecology-a discipline that looks to a number of cultural, political, historical and economic elements to better understand the role of ecology in a larger sphere outside of its scientific structure and uses. Humanistic ecology is designed to provide context for the study of ecology, and in a fundamental way, focuses on the appropriate role of humanity in its relationship to nature: what is ethical, or not, what is useful, or not, and a variety of other matters that should be considered when taking a fully three-dimensional view of ecological science.

Reading of short stories and plays, grammar review, aural and oral drills and exercises, expansion of vocabulary, and practice in reading, writing, and conversational skills. Second and third terms will emphasize written expression, technical/ scientific translation, and literary readings. Students who have studied German elsewhere must consult with the instructor before registering.

Introduces students to some of the central formal models used in modern political economy. The course examines formal approaches to negotiation, legislative politics, electoral competition, war, and revolution. Its broader aim is to show how formal theory can simplify complex political situations, identify key mechanisms, and sharpen causal arguments. By the end of the course, students will be able to use a formal model to analyze a real-world political setting and conduct original theoretical research.

This course takes as its starting point the literature and arts of the Harlem Renaissance. However, instead of treating it as solely a movement of Black artists in the United States, following Alain Locke and others, we will look at how it was also connected to the emergence of anti-colonialism globally. The course will put writers like Hubert Harrison, Claude McKay, and Zora Neale Hurston in dialogue with, for example, Aimé Césaire and the Négritude movement, and James Joyce. It will also examine the Harlem Renaissance alongside Home Rule in India, debates about the post-WWI “national question,” as well as the rise of communism and fascism. In doing so, the course will ask students to think about what constituted “modernism” and how formal experiments were connected to political issues.

Throughout its history, the piano has occupied a somewhat contradictory role as both a complex machine and an expressive musical instrument. Initially developed in response to a musical desire for greater expressive potential in keyboard instruments, the piano has at other times been derided as a merely mechanical vehicle for unmusical displays of virtuosity. This course examines the complicated history of the piano from its invention around 1700 through the later-20th century. We will explore the technological evolution of the instrument itself alongside its changing social roles, and seek to understand how these factors influenced the development of piano techniques and repertoire at various points in history. Considering specific works for the piano, individual pianists of the past, and broader cultures of pianism, we will engage with core questions of gender and musicality, virtuosity and musical expression, amateurism and professionalism, and musical composition. This course is suitable for both students who have a musical background and those who do not.

An analysis of the effects of uncertainty and information on economic decisions. Included among the topics are individual and group decision making under uncertainty, expected utility maximization, insurance, financial markets and speculation, product quality and advertisement, and the value of information.

Charles Dickens and London have perhaps the most famous relationship of any writer and city in English. In this course, we will investigate both the London Dickens knew, and the portrait of the city that he painted, by reading one of Dickens's great mid-career novels alongside a selection of contemporary texts and images and secondary historical sources. We will think about the gap-or overlap- between history and fiction, the idea of the novelist as alternative historian, and the idea of the novel as historical document. Historical topics covered may include: the development of the Victorian police force; plague and public health; Victorian poverty; colonialism and imperialism; Dickens and his illustrators; Victorian exhibition and museum culture; and marriage and the cult of domesticity, among others. Students will practice both textual and visual analysis skills. In addition to written work, students should expect to be responsible for making a short research presentation at some point in the term.

The oceans constitute more than 70% of the planet, and have their own complications and fascinations. With each passing decade, they also become more important to our well-being. Although fully half of the world’s peoples now live within a hundred miles of an ocean, few today have a working knowledge of the sea. Yet scientists, historians, artists, and others have assembled an astonishing series of stories that cross centuries and push up to the present day. This science-forward humanities course tells some of these stories, offering up a thorough overview of how our relationships with the oceans have evolved, what elements of society are affected by its many facets, and why its cultural aspects are vital to our futures. We will also have a field trip to the Huntington to view related materials in the archives.

This course traces the history of the concerto genre, beginning with its origins in the late Renaissance and continuing into the 20th century. We will investigate how the form and structure of the concerto has changed over time, evolutions in the role of the concerto soloist, and the variety of functions the concerto has played in concert culture. We will consider individual concertos through musical analysis, as well as theoretical writings on concerto composition and historical records related to concerto performance. Students will be encouraged to nominate their favorite concertos for study in class.

This course will look at the Oxford scholar and author J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973), not solely as author of The Hobbit , The Lord of the Rings , and The Silmarillion , but more specifically from the perspective of his day job: as a medievalist, especially of England and the European North. It will focus above all on Tolkien’s first and primary love: languages – from Latin to Finnish to Old Norse, but especially Old and Middle English and particularly the dialect of his beloved English West Midlands – both as a vehicle for recovering lost pasts and worldviews and as a means for creating them anew when they can be retrieved only incompletely or not at all.

This course surveys European music in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, from the origins of Western musical notation to the intricate and complex works of the late-sixteenth century. We will investigate how musicians across this era conceptualized, wrote, and performed music, considering how these early innovations laid the groundwork for music in centuries to come. We will also explore how developments in musical style were often mediated by political and religious pressures as well as aesthetic concerns. Course activities center around listening, analysis of primary sources, and writing about music.

Latin America and the Caribbean occupy a central role in global discussions about our current global ecological crisis, and it is also a region with a long history of contesting colonialism and inequality. This course examines the intertwined histories of environmental change and movements for social and environmental justice in the region from the colonial period to the present. We will analyze how diverse peoples have historically thought about, lived with, and transformed the environment in what is today Latin America. Blending multiple theoretical and disciplinary traditions, the course will expose students to a growing body of scholarship that analyzes how cultural, political, and economic factors have shaped natural and social landscapes in the region. We will explore human and non-human relationships to Latin America’s landscapes, as well as how people have contested environmental injustice through topics ranging from mining, food, conservation, climate, and energy.

Beginning with earliest Filipino and Japanese arrivals in Mexico at the dawn of globalization and concluding with the “parachute” children and “astronaut” parents crossing the Pacific now, the course will examine Asian American lives, communities, and movements from the 16th Century to the present. Using a combination of secondary literature and primary sources, we will explore key moments in Asian American history, such as: the establishment of ethnic enclaves, anti-Asian movements, World War II, the Asian American movement, and the growth of the model-minority myth.

This class will examine budgetary conflict at key junctures in U.S. history. Topics include the struggle to establish a viable fiscal system in the early days of the Republic, the ante bellum tariff, the "pension politics" of the post-Civil War era, the growth of the American welfare state, and the battle over tax and entitlement reform in the 1980s and 1990s.

Social networks, the web, and the internet are essential parts of our lives, and we depend on them every day. CS/EE/IDS 143 and CMS/CS/Ec/EE/IDS 144 study how they work and the "big" ideas behind our networked lives. In this course, the questions explored include: What do networks actually look like (and why do they all look the same)?; How do search engines work?; Why do epidemics and memes spread the way they do?; How does web advertising work? For all these questions and more, the course will provide a mixture of both mathematical analysis and hands-on labs. The course expects students to be comfortable with graph theory, probability, and basic programming.

This course will equip students to engage with active research at the intersection of social and information sciences, including: algorithmic game theory and mechanism design; auctions; matching markets; and learning in games.

Provides the mathematical foundations for graduate-level economics, with applications illustrating each set of tools. Topics include real analysis and linear algebra (sequences, compactness, eigenvalues, quadratic forms, concavity, convexity); constrained and unconstrained optimization (Lagrange multipliers, Kuhn–Tucker conditions, constraint qualification) together with the implicit function and envelope theorems for comparative statics; separating and supporting hyperplane theorems and the theorem of the alternative (Farkas’ lemma); and correspondences, hemicontinuity, the theorem of the maximum, and fixed point theorems (Brouwer, Kakutani). These tools provide a foundation for studying graduate microeconomics, macroeconomics, and econometrics.

An advanced humanities course on a special topic in music. Topics may include specific genres of music, the music of particular eras or geographical regions, or the relationship between music and other aspects of culture. The course may be re-taken for credit except as noted in the course announcement. See registrar's announcement for details.

Read and examine the selected Medieval to pre-modern Japanese literature and its traditions from 11th to 18th century from the perspectives of women, anti-heroes, and religions. A comparative analysis is applied to many genres such as oral traditions, performing arts, films, picture scrolls, comics, and anime to understand how Japanese think, and how Shinto, Buddhism, Neo-Confucianism, as well as the social systems, have formed their ways of life, ethics, and concepts of life and death. Read "The Princess Who Loved Insects" from "The Tsutsumi-Chunagon Monogatari", selected chapters of "The Tale of The Heike", "The Konjyaku Monogatari", and "Otogizoshi". Also read "The Double Suicide at Sonezaki" and "The Double Suicide at Amijima."

This course introduces students to the French novel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the realist masterpieces of Stendhal (The Red and the Black), Balzac (Old Goriot), and Flaubert (Madame Bovary/Sentimental Education) to Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Topics include the literary representation of reality, historical and social contexts (the Bourbon Restoration, 1848 Revolution, the Third Republic), and the decline of the French nobility. Covers 1814-1918. Conducted in English, but students may read the French originals.

This course introduces students to Hollywood films and filmmaking during the classical period, from the coming of sound through the '50s. Students will develop the techniques and vocabulary appropriate to the distinct formal properties of film. Topics include the rise and collapse of the studio system, technical transformations (sound, color, deep focus), genre (the musical, the melodrama), cultural contexts (the Depression, World War II, the Cold War), audience responses, and the economic history of the film corporations. Terms may be taken independently. Part a covers the period 1927-1940. Part b covers 1941-1960. (Part a not offered 2026-27.)

The United States made an astonishing transition from scientific backwater to superpower over the course of just one century, culminating in the atomic bomb. This course will track the development of peculiarly American conceptions of scientific methodology in the context of this rapid transition. American conceptions of science tend to privilege the practical over the theoretical. We will focus on two such conceptions: operationalism and behaviorism. Operationalism was developed to reconcile a practical conception of physics with radical theoretical changes due to relativity and quantum mechanics. Behaviorism extended this account of the theory and practice to the domain of psychology. Special attention will be given to class discussion and reading primary texts: Major figures include Peirce, Bridgman, Boring, Stevens, and Skinner.

This is an advanced humanities course on a specialized topic in History. It is usually taught by new or visiting faculty. The course may be re-taken for credit except as noted in the course announcement. Limited to 15 students. See registrar's announcement for details.

The development of quantum mechanics in the years 1900-1927 was one of the greatest conceptual transformations in the history of modern science. In this course, we still study this development, from Max Planck's first papers on black body radiation to the debates between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr at the 1927 Solvay conference. The course will take a holistic view of this development, covering experimental breakthroughs, the development of mathematical formalism and physical concepts, as well as the broader philosophical and historical context of early 20th century Europe. Students will acquire an understanding of a scientific revolution that goes beyond well-worn stories of sudden heroic epiphanies.

This course examines algorithms and data practices in fields such as machine learning, privacy, and communication networks through a social lens. We will draw upon theory and practices from art, media, computer science and technology studies to critically analyze algorithms and their implementations within society. The course includes projects, lectures, readings, and discussions. Students will learn mathematical formalisms, critical thinking and creative problem solving to connect algorithms to their practical implementations within social, cultural, economic, legal and political contexts. Enrollment by application. Taught concurrently with CS/IDS 162 and can only be taken once as VC 162 or CS/IDS 162.

This is an advanced humanities course on a specialized topic in HPS and Philosophy. It is usually taught by new or visiting faculty. The course may be re-taken for credit except as noted in the course announcement. Limited to 15 students. See registrar's announcement for details.

One of the last great challenges to our understanding of the world concerns conscious experience. What exactly is it? How is it caused or constituted? And how does it connect with the rest of our science? This course will cover topics related to consciousness in the philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience in a mixture of lectures and in-class discussion. Limited to 20.

This is an advanced humanities course on a specialized topic in HPS and History. It is usually taught by new or visiting faculty. The course may be re-taken for credit except as noted in the course announcement. Limited to 15 students. See registrar's announcement for details.

An introductory course in standard Chinese (Mandarin) designed for students with no previous knowledge of the language. The course introduces the fundamentals of Chinese, including pronunciation, grammar, and Chinese characters, emphasizing the four basic language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. By the end of the three-term sequence, students will have acquired knowledge of basic rules of grammar and the ability to converse, read, and write on simple topics of daily life, and will have command of more than 800 Chinese compounds and 700 characters.

An advanced humanities course on a special topic in visual culture. Topics may include art history, film, digital and print media, architecture, photography or cartography. It is usually taught by new or visiting faculty. The course may be re-taken for credit except as noted in the course announcement. Limited to 15 students. See registrar's announcement for details.

A streamlined course designed for students who have acquired some speaking, writing, or reading skills, either from home or school. The course aims at consolidating and developing the students' ability in listening, conversation, reading, and writing. By the end of the three-term sequence, students should have command of 2000 Chinese compounds and 1500 characters, and be able to live or work in a Chinese speaking environment. Students who completed L 171 abc can advance to L 173 ab (Advanced Chinese) (Part c not offered in 2026-2027).

An examination of the impact of Buddhism on the arts and cultures of India, Southeast Asia, China, Korea, and Japan from its earliest imagery in the 4th century B.C.E. India through various doctrinal transformations to the Zen revival of 18th-century Japan. Select monuments of Buddhist art, including architecture, painting, sculpture, and ritual objects, will serve as focal points for discussions on their aesthetic principles and for explorations into the religious, social, and cultural contexts that underlie their creation.

What makes an old building, artifact, or custom "historic"? Which historic things are worth preserving? This course explores the aesthetic, political, social, and environmental dimensions of cultural heritage. We will examine the narratives and values associated with heritage conservation at the local level as well as within national and global contexts. From Caltech's own campus and the Watts Towers, to the national parks, UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and the culinary legacy of the Atlantic slave trade, our class will grapple with the theories, practices, and debates as they determine what gets preserved and which stories get told. Readings/screenings will be supplemented with field trips to heritage sites in Pasadena and Los Angeles.

A course designed to meet the personal interests and future professional goals of students who have had one year of elementary modern Chinese. Students will learn new vocabulary, sentence patterns, idiomatic expressions, and proverbs, as well as insights into Chinese society, culture, and customs.

This course is an introduction to non-cooperative game theory, with applications to political science and economics. It covers the theories of normal-form games and extensive-form games, and introduces solutions concepts that are relevant for situations of complete and incomplete information. The basic theory of repeated games is introduced. Applications are to auction theory and asymmetric information in trading models, cheap talk and voting rules in congress, among many others.

In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates famously described the virtues of two ways of looking at the world. The first entailed "seeing together things that are scattered about everywhere and collecting them into one kind," while the second was the skill "to cut up each kind according to its species along its natural joints, and to try not to splinter any part, as a bad butcher might do." In a similar sentiment, Darwin wrote in 1857, "It is good to have hair-splitters and lumpers." How have scientists and laypeople perceived similarities and differences in the living world? How have they divided nature into distinct kinds and individuals? How have they distinguished between parts and wholes? Where have they positioned human beings within nature's order? What were the consequences of finding different kinds of order in nature? This course explores these and related questions historically. We will consider different approaches to making sense of nature, and how a multitude of perspectives have been brought to bear on this ordering project. Topics covered include taxonomy and classification, race science and scientific racism, gender and sex differences, disease categories and immune selfhood, and symbioses and biogeochemical cycles.

A course designed as a bridge between language and content courses. It provides the opportunity to further develop overall language proficiency through reading essays on Chinese culture, stories, and news editorials. Multimedia is included. By the end of this course, students should have acquired the basic skills to read and research about Chinese culture and society. Classes are conducted primarily in Chinese.

Offered concurrently with L 174. Reading and discussion of representative Chinese written work throughout Chinese history, including philosophical texts and literary works in different genres. Students are expected to examine these works in light of their sociopolitical and historical contexts. Students who write papers in Chinese may enroll in this class as L 174. This course can be repeated for credit when the course content changes.

Offered concurrently with Hum 174. Reading and discussion of representative Chinese written work throughout Chinese history, including philosophical texts and literary works in different genres. Students are expected to examine these works in light of their sociopolitical and historical contexts. Students who write papers in English may enroll in this class as Hum 174, which satisfies the advanced humanities requirement. This course can be repeated for credit when the course content changes.

The cornerstone of current progress in understanding the mind, the brain, and the relationship between the two is the study of human and animal cognition. This course will provide an in-depth survey and analysis of behavioral observations, theoretical accounts, computational models, patient data, electrophysiological studies, and brain-imaging results on mental capacities such as attention, memory, emotion, object representation, language, and cognitive development. Given in alternate years; offered 2026-27.

Training in oral expression, pronunciation, vocabulary, listening comprehension and fluency. The class is designed for students who have learned one year of Chinese and plan to incorporate it into their future professional or social lives. News, guest talks and discussion forums will be included. Can be repeated for credit as content changes every year.

This seminar explores the intersection of the environment with art and architecture from a material point of view, charting their entangled relationship from the age of exploration to the dawn of the Anthropocene, ca. 15th-19th c. In addition to examining how the environment has inspired (and challenged) art and architecture, we will especially focus on the raw and critical resources that made art and architecture possible: tracing a material's journey from its literal roots in a garden to its extraction, production, trade, materials science, and use in art and architecture. We will also consider the ecological aftermath of these processes, learning to interrogate what underpins visual culture's beauty: from environmental impact, toxicity, global expeditions, colonization, enslaved labor, the history of science, and the political economy. This class will have hands-on 'historical materials' workshops as well as on-site visits to the Huntington Museum, Library, & Botanical Gardens and to the Norton Simon Museum.

Climate change has already begun to impact life on the planet, and will continue in the coming decades. This class will explore particular causes and impacts of climate change, technologies to mitigate or adapt to those impacts, and the economic and social costs associated with them - particular focus will be paid to distributional issues, environmental and racial justice and equity intersections. The course will consist of 3-4 topical modules, each focused on a specific impact or sector (e.g. the electricity or transportation sector, climate impacts of food and agriculture, increasing fires and floods). Each module will contain lectures/content on the associated climate science background, engineering/technological developments to combat the issue, and an exploration of the economics and the inequities that exacerbate the situation, followed by group discussion and synthesis of the different perspectives.

This is an advanced humanities course on a specialized topic in English. It is usually taught by new or visiting faculty. The course may be re-taken for credit except as noted in the course announcement. Limited to 15 students. See registrar's announcement for details.

This course explores late medieval European understandings of the origins, structure, and workings of the cosmos in the realms of theology, physics, astronomy, astrology, magic, and medicine. Attention is given to the position of humans as cultural creatures at the intersection of nature and spirit; as well as to the place of Christian Europeans in relation to non-Christians and other categories of outsiders within and beyond Europe. We will examine the knowledge system that anticipated racializing theories in the West.

This course will introduce students to the series of religiously motivated European invasions of the Middle and Near East that began at the end of the eleventh century and that led to the creation of Latin Christian principalities in Palestine. Though the crusading movement came to embroil much of Europe itself, the course will focus strictly on the military expeditions to what the Crusaders called the Holy Land, and the history of the Crusader states up to the point of their destruction at the end of the thirteenth century. The course will be guided by the following questions: how did medieval Christianity justify wars of aggression against foreign peoples and religions? What motivated western Europeans to leave their homes and march into a hostile environment, where they often faced impoverishment if not death and where maintaining a Christian presence was a constant struggle? How did they manage to erect stable political entities in alien territory that lasted as long as they did, and how did they have to adapt their own culture to do so? Finally, how did the native peoples of the regions the Crusaders invaded and conquered-Muslim but also Christian and Jewish - perceive the Crusaders? How did the Crusaders' presence affect life in a region whose populations had their own ancient histories and patterns of life?

Studies Cervantes's literary masterpiece, Don Quixote, with a view to the great upheavals that shaped the early modern world: Renaissance Europe's discovery of America; feudalism's demise and the rise of mass poverty; Reformation and Counter-Reformation; extermination of heretics and war against infidels; and the decline of the Hapsburg dynasty. The hapless protagonist of Don Quixote calls into question the boundaries between sanity and madness, truth and falsehood, history and fiction, objectivity and individual experience. What might be modern, perhaps even revolutionary, in Cervantes's dramatization of the moral and material dilemmas of his time? Conducted in English.

Dreams, projections, simulacra, literary fantasy, and - more recently - VR headsets: they all tap into the notion of a virtual reality, one whose relation to the "real" world is not always easy to discern. What does it mean for something to be "virtually" or "nearly" real? In this course, we take a broad look at this question and consider virtual reality from various historical perspectives (including Plato's Cave Allegory, Descartes' Meditations, and Calderon's Life is a Dream) before focusing on more recent literary approaches within the context of the rapidly changing technological environment. Further readings will likely include Borges, Baudrillard, Le Guin, Bateson, and Hayles. Students will also complete a short project on a fantasy novel of their choice.

This course will provide an introduction to Asian American literature and theory. We will explore literary productions as a site to interrogate the aspirations and contradictions of the rubric of 'Asian America'. What does it mean to be Asian American? How can we think about the racial politics of Asian America in relation to class, gender, and other social determinants? Course readings will feature a mix of classic and contemporary Asian American fiction, poetry, and theory. Authors may include Maxine Hong Kingston, Karen Tei Yamashita, Solmaz Sharif, and Franny Choi.

This course focuses on how to read Shakespeare and how to analyze film. As we study three plays alongside their diverse cinematic adaptations, we will discuss Shakespeare’s great subjects, such as love, tyranny, revenge, and redemption, and consider how the page, the stage, and the screen mediate our experience of his drama. To develop skills in thinking critically and creatively about the relationship between text and performance, we will learn about the theatrical conventions of Shakespeare’s time, examine interpretive choices in our selected films, and make analyses and proposals of our own. Plays may be Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Macbeth.

This course covers the fundamentals of experimental economics, used to study traditional questions (e.g., equilibration of supply and demand) and newer behavioral economics questions. We start with some early history of experimental economics. Methodological discussions include principles of randomization, internal validity, statistical power, between- and within-subject designs, generalizability, field experiments, and reproducibility. Applications include testing theories of risk and time preference, non-cooperative games, market trading, auctions, and AI. Open to Social Science graduate students only. Part a and b not offered 2026-27.

Course will introduce the student to the central problems of political theory and analysis, beginning with the essential components of the democratic state and proceeding through a variety of empirical topics. These topics will include the analysis of electoral and legislative institutions, legislative agenda processes, voting behavior, comparative political economy, and cooperation and conflict in international politics. The student will be sensitized to the primary empirical problems of the discipline and trained in the most general applications of game theoretic reasoning to political science. Open to Social Science graduate students only.

This is a graduate course in the fundamentals of economics. Topics include comparative statics and maximization techniques, the neo-classical theory of consumption and production, general equilibrium theory and welfare economics, public goods and externalities, the economic consequences of asymmetric information and incomplete markets, and recursive methods with applications to labor economics and financial economics.

Mathematical theories of individual and social choice applied to problems of welfare economics and political decision making as well as to the construction of political economic processes consistent with stipulated ethical postulates, political platform formulation, the theory of political coalitions, and decision making in political organizations. Part a and c not offered 2026-27.

May be repeated for credit. Advanced work in a specialized area of economic theory, with topics varying from year to year according to the interests of students.

This three-quarter sequence is designed for advanced Social Science Ph.D. students with the aim of introducing students to the methodology of modern experimental economics and to provide an in-depth overview of the contributions of experimental methods to a wide variety of fields. The specific topics covered, which will vary from year to year, include but are not limited to individual decision making, preference and belief elicitation, game theory, social learning, bargaining, labor economics, public finance, auctions, voting and elections, competitive markets, networks, matching, mechanism design, coordination/communication, and information aggregation. The focus will be on theory-based experiments and how the dialog between theoretical analysis and laboratory data feeds each other, thereby leading to new avenues of theoretical and experimental research.

A course on pricing financial derivatives, risk management, optimal portfolio selection, financial markets equilibria, and optimal compensation of managers using mathematical models. Students will be introduced to methods of Stochastic, Ito Calculus for models driven by Brownian motion.

Introduction to the use of multivariate and nonlinear methods in the social sciences.

The courses in this sequence cover advanced methods and tools in econometrics, as well as their applications to a variety of topics in economics, including industrial organization, dynamic choice, information economics, political economy, market design, and behavioral economics.

This course provides broad coverage of empirical methods in the social sciences. This includes both methods of data collection and practical aspects of data analysis, as well as related issues of survey design, experimental design, techniques for handling large datasets, and issues specific to the collection and analysis of field and historical data. This course also provides students with hands-on experience with data. Open to Social Science graduate students only.

May be repeated for credit. Introduction to modern quantitative history. The tools of economic and political theory applied to problems of economic, social, and political development in a historical context. Second and third terms will be graded together. A pass/fail will be assigned in the second term and then changed to the appropriate letter grade at the end of the third term.

Emotions are at the forefront of most human endeavors. Emotions aid us in decision-making (gut feelings), help us remember, torment us, yet have ultimately helped us to survive. Over the past few decades, we have begun to characterize the neural systems that extend from primitive affective response such as fight or flight to the complex emotions experienced by humans including guilt, envy, empathy and social pain. This course will begin with an in-depth examination of the neurobiological systems that underlie negative and positive emotions and move onto weekly discussions, based on assigned journal articles that highlight both rudimentary and complex emotions. The final weeks will be devoted to exploring how the neurobiological systems are disrupted in affective disorders including anxiety, aggression and psychopathy. In addition to these discussions and readings, each student will be required to write a review paper or produce a short movie on a topic related to one of the emotions discussed in these seminars and its underlying neural mechanisms.

Only open to advanced graduate students in social science. How can social scientists write in a style that makes someone actually want to read their papers? This seminar combines writing exercises with help in planning a professional social science paper and with extensive comments on drafts.

Course for graduate students in social sciences. Students present their research and lead discussion of material relevant to their research program. Open to Social Science Graduate Students only.

The course involves student presentations of their research, reading and discussion of recent research in social and decision neuroscience, and development of professional skill such as scientific writing and speaking, research ethics, writing grants and peer review. This course is only open to graduate students in the Social and Decision Neuroscience, Computational and Neural Systems and Social Science PhD programs. Part ab not offered; only c in spring.

The goal of this course is to introduce graduate students to current research questions in cognitive sciences, political science, and economics. Select faculty will present their research background, methods, and a sampling of current studies. Background readings and pdf of presentation will be provided.

This course is designed for students to improve their ability for written expression in the English language. This course is only open to graduate students in the Social Decision Neuroscience and Social Science Ph.D. programs.