Matthew Ichihashi Potts (Committee on the Study of Religion (FAS) and Harvard Divinity School) Freshman Seminar 65C4 credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
Apocalypse is all around. Not only do apocalyptic visions and dystopian...
Charles R. Nesson (Harvard Law School) Rebecca N. Nesson (John A. Paulson School Of Engineering And Applied Sciences) Freshman Seminar 72T4 credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
A founding principle of the United States is that We the People, not a ruler or his designee, are to decide issues of justice. The mechanism by which We exercise our power of justice is the jury, as guaranteed in the...
Thomas Wisniewski (Department of Comparative Literature) Freshman Seminar 65E 4 credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
In life, as in literature, humor often takes us by surprise: it gives delight; it lightens our mood; it makes us laugh. The question is: why? Laughter, in many ways, is a mystery. If tragedy’s existence is all too easy to explain— suffering needs to be borne, and...
P. Quinn White (Department of Philosophy) Freshman Seminar 65F4 credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
What, if anything, is the relationship between art and morality? Can art be immoral? Or is it a mistake to evaluate a work of art in such terms? Can the moral of a content of a work bear on its ...
C.-T. James Huang (Department of Linguistics) Freshman Seminar 33R 4 credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
Prerequisite: Some experience of the Chinese language is required as a pre-requisite for taking the seminar (e.g., a minimum of one semester of prior formal instruction, or as a heritage speaker of Mandarin or any Chinese dialect). To...
Karen Thornber (Department of Comparative Literature and Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations) Freshman Seminar 64U4 credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
With gender inequities and biases pervasive within and across cultures worldwide, and the global...
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (Department of History and Department of African and African American Studies) Freshman Seminar 72S 4 credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
This seminar explores the long tradition of Black protest against racial discrimination and oppression in the United States by focusing on the role of religion, as represented by selected individuals, institutions, and movements for social change during the pre-Civil War Era, the Civil...
Andrew J. Holder (Harvard Graduate School of Design) Freshman Seminar 64Z4 credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
There is a paradox in contemporary architecture. It is designed using tools of astounding digital sophistication by architects grappling with a world of social inequities and impending environmental catastrophe. And yet, surveying the work of these architects, you would be forgiven for thinking it looks, well, ancient: ziggurats, stacks, rock piles, and...
Sebastian Jackson (Committee on Degrees on Social Studies) Freshman Seminar 72V4 credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
How have the natural and social sciences contributed to the cultural invention of “race” as a social fact of modernity, and to the historical development of structural racism? How has seemingly “objective” scientific knowledge concerning the diversity of...
Jared M. Hudson (Department of the Classics) Freshman Seminar 62L 4 credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
Note: No prior knowledge of Cicero, Latin, or the ancient Roman world is assumed or required in order to take this seminar. The seminar will include a visit to Houghton Library to examine some of the library’s rare manuscripts of Cicero’s works.
Lowry Pressly (Committee on Degrees in Social Studies) Freshman Seminar 72W4 credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
Suppose that someone is listening to your phone calls and reading your emails, but you never find out and your life is never affected. What reason do you have to complain? Does it make a difference if it’s a neighbor, a lover, the state, or an algorithm listening in? What if you are the one posting the information on Facebook? Do we have a right not to be tracked, photographed, or surveilled in public? In this...
Mahzarin R. Banaji (Department of Psychology) Freshman Seminar 72M4 credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
We coined the term implicit bias in the mid-1990s to capture the idea that bias, i.e., a deviation from accuracy or values can be implicit, i.e., operate without conscious awareness or conscious control. The idea emerged from basic research on ...
