Culture Courses

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 Chinese history and culture from the perspective of the individual through philosophical texts, literary works, and art.

Use the case study method to study China from the rise of Deng Xiaoping to the present.

Learn how to read William Shakespeare's plays through his biography, Elizabethan and Jacobean history, and modern performance.

Learn the music and cultural impact of three canonical operas from the 1800s: Les Huguenots, Das Rheingold, and Otello.

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

Develop skills in digital research and visualization techniques across subjects and fields within the humanities.

Study Japanese scroll art as text and as "little movies" that immerse the viewer through visual narration. 

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

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

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

An overview of modern Chinese history, including the fall of the Qing and the end of imperial China.

Traces Albert Einstein’s engagement with relativity, quantum mechanics, Nazism, nuclear weapons, philosophy, the arts, and technology.

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

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.

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.

Explore the reunification of China under the Tang with a focus on aristocratic culture — from poetry to calligraphy to literature.

Embark on a global journey to explore the past, present, and future of world literature.

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

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