Filtered HSS Courses (2026-27)

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.