Courses

Learn how to better understand the rich and complex ways that religions function in historic and contemporary contexts.

Discover what makes your brain tick in this third course in our introductory series in neuroscience.

Explore the Maoist period of China, from the Communist Party to the death of Mao and the reopening of China.

Explore the birth of modern China with a focus on the time between the fall of the Qing and the end of World War II.

Explore acts of storytelling in Shakespeare’s Othello alongside world-class artists who interpret Othello’s story in new forms and contexts today.

Apply tools of single-variable calculus to create and analyze mathematical models used by real practitioners in social, life, and physical sciences.

Learn about China’s origins, its integral early thinkers, and competing states and schools of thought.

Explore the impact of the conquest dynasties and the world of the Ming.

Learn the fascinating history of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, one of the most challenging and rewarding ballets ever written.

Discover Handel’s Messiah in this installment of First Nights, which will explore five masterpieces of western music.

The culmination of the MicroBachelors® program.

Learn about the Earth, life, and how we can search for life elsewhere in the universe.

Learn about the Qin and Han dynasties, and how Buddhism and ideas of self-realization influenced the medieval period.

Join Harvard faculty in this online course to discover the physical history of the Jewish bible.

Learn probability, an essential language and set of tools for understanding data, randomness, and uncertainty.

An in-depth look at the 1854 London cholera epidemic in Soho and its importance for the field of epidemiology.

Learn about the Quran, the central sacred text of Islam, through an exploration of the rich diversity of roles and interpretations in Muslim societies.

An exploration of the haunting figure at the heart of one of William Shakespeare’s most famous plays.

Learn skills and tools that support data science and reproducible research, to ensure you can trust your own research results, reproduce them yourself, and communicate them to others.

Examine how great modern writers capture the intricacies of our globalized world and how their works circulate within that world to find their own audiences.

Learn about Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, one of the first operas ever written.

Why should we care about Confucius? Explore ancient Chinese philosophy, ethics, and political theory to challenge your assumptions of what it means to be happy, live a meaningful life, and change the world.

Learn to forecast the weather just by looking out your window.

Learn how American women created, confronted, and embraced change in the 20th century while exploring ten objects from Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library.

Explore the underlying structures of everyday arguments and develop the tools to communicate effectively.

This introduction to biochemistry explores the molecules of life, starting at simple building blocks and culminating in complex metabolism.

Examine how cultures of the ancient world defined themselves through literature and how their vision of literature contributes to our understanding of civilization, culture, and literature today.

Gain an understanding of history, museum studies, and curation by looking at, organizing, and interpreting art, artifacts, scientific curiosities, and the stuff of everyday life.

Explore China’s imperial period, with a focus on the Song dynasty and the role of the exam system in government.

Learn how the Manchus conquered the Qing and established the last of the imperial dynasties.