Humanities 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.

Gain a foundational knowledge of American constitutional democracy while crafting your own civic voice and identity.

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

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.

An introduction to the study of bioethics and the application of legal and ethical reasoning.

Build a foundational understanding of AI concepts with this course from Harvard Business School (HBS) Online.

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

Learn how global warming impacts human health, and the ways we can diminish those impacts.

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.

Build a viable, valuable tech venture that can profitably scale in this course from Harvard Business School (HBS) Online.

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.

An exploration of the magnetic and ambivalent character of Shylock in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.

This introduction to moral and political philosophy is one of the most popular courses taught at Harvard College.

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

This introduction to moral and political philosophy is one of the most popular courses taught at Harvard College.

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

Explore what makes cities energizing, amazing, challenging, and perhaps humanity’s greatest invention.

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.

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

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.

Reimagine global health problems with some of the leading global health thinkers and actors through a case-based biosocial framework.