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.

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 .

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 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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.