Arts & Human Courses

Courses designated ARTS or HUMAN in the course catalogue have been specifically designed to incorporate the very best of our disciplines, from boundary-pushing arts practice, to close interpretation of textual readings, to encounters with works of art and history.

Fall 2023

HUMAN 10A: A Humanities Colloquium: From Homer to Derek Walcott
David Elmer, Namwali Serpell, Stephen Greenblatt, Samantha Matherne, Louis Menand, Emily Greenwood

2,500 years of essential works, taught by six professors. Humanities 10a will likely include works by Homer, Euripides, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Schiller, Mary Shelley, Marx, Kafka, Du Bois, Alain Locke, Morrison, and Walcott. One 75-minute lecture plus a 75-minute discussion seminar led by the professors every week. Students will receive instruction in critical writing one hour a week, in writing labs and individual conferences. Students also have opportunities to participate in a range of cultural experiences, ranging from plays and musical events to museum and library collections.

HUMAN 20: A Colloquium in the Visual Arts
Yukio Lippit, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Jennifer L. Roberts, Vishal Khandelwal, Felipe Pereda

HUMAN 20 is an introduction to the study of the humanities through major works of art and architecture from around the world, taught by five members of the Harvard faculty. The course was specially created for students focusing on the humanities or interested in a wide-ranging introduction to works of art and architecture and the many issues they embody.Each week immerses students in the cultural and imaginary world of an artwork, whether it be a Japanese woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai, Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the portrait sculptures of the Ife Empire, the scientific illustrations of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s Self-Portrait, or the animal locomotion photography of Eadweard Muybridge. Each week, an artwork is introduced during a 75-minute lecture. Then, students attend a weekly looking lab, where they develop skills of visual observation, analysis, and description. The looking lab is followed by a discussion section where ideas from the lecture, looking lab, and selected readings will be explored further.Humanities 20 teaches students what it means to engage deeply with an artwork, and how to think through that artwork about large questions. The course will consider: the relationship between race, visuality, and social justice; modernism; monuments and cultural memory; encounters between cultures; the relationship between art and science and time; artworks and the expression of religious beliefs; and how different cultures have thought about life, death, and the beginning of the world. The readings emphasize engagement with primary source texts which include artists’ statements, manifestoes, art criticism, religious narratives, and history.

HUMAN 90: Mahindra Scholars Seminar
Robin Kelsey, Lauren Kaminsky

Mahindra Scholars Seminar is a course for sophomores, regardless of intended Concentration, who wish to deepen their engagement in the humanities. Each week in the seminar, guided by a distinguished guest, we will focus on a particular creative form – the novel, for example – with the aim of refining our powers of observation, interpretation, and articulation. In this way, we will learn new ways to approach the meaning of poems, speeches, paintings, sculptures, plays, arguments, and songs. The course will not only give us insight into these creative forms; it will also enhance our relationship to the world.