Department: Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities

Code Name Description
HUMCORE111 Texts that Changed the World from the Ancient Middle East This course traces the story of the cradle of human civilization. We will begin with the earliest human stories, the Gilgamesh Epic and biblical literature, and follow the path of the development of law, religion, philosophy and literature in the anc...
HUMCORE112 Great Books, Big Ideas from Ancient Greece and Rome This course will journey through ancient Greek and Roman literature from Homer to St. Augustine, in constant conversation with the other HumCore travelers in the Ancient Middle East, Africa and South Asia, and Early China. It will introduce participa...
HUMCORE113 Looking for the Way (Dao) in East Asia This course looks at foundations of East Asian thought, including Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism as well as other cultural traditions. The ideologies were first articulated in ancient China (or India) and from there spread to Korea, Japan, and th...
HUMCORE121 Ancient Knowledge, New Frontiers: How the Greek Legacy Became Islamic Science What is the relation between magic and science? Is religion compatible with the scientific method? Are there patterns in the stars? What is a metaphor? This course will read key moments in Greek and Islamic science and philosophy and investigate the...
HUMCORE122 Humanities Core: The Renaissance in Europe The Renaissance in Europe saw a cultural flowering founded on the achievements of pagan antiquity, a new humanism founded on the conviction that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality, and the foundation o...
HUMCORE123 Beauty and Renunciation in Japan Is it okay to feel pleasure? Should humans choose beauty or renunciation? This is the main controversy of medieval Japan. This course introduces students to the famous literary works that created a world of taste, subtlety, and sensuality. We also re...
HUMCORE127 Love, Loss, and Devotion in Indian Literature Why are human cultures perennially preoccupied with love, and with what happens when it vanishes? Classical theorists in India have argued, at least, that love is the very foundation of aesthetic experience, and that love has something fundamental to...
HUMCORE12Q Humanities Core: Great Books, Big Ideas -- Europe, Middle Ages and Renaissance This three-quarter sequence asks big questions of major texts in the European and American tradition. What is a good life? How should society be organized? Who belongs? How should honor, love, sin, and similar abstractions govern our actions? Wh...
HUMCORE13 Humanities Core: Great Books, Big Ideas -- Europe, Modern What is a good life? How should society be organized? Who belongs? How should honor, love, sin, and similar abstractions govern our actions? What duty do we owe to the past and future? This course examines tcourse examines these questions in the mode...
HUMCORE131 Modernity and Novels in the Middle East This course will investigate cultural and literary responses to modernity in the Middle East. The intense modernization process that started in mid 19th century and lingers to this day in the region caused Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literary cultur...
HUMCORE133 Humanities Core: How to be Modern in East Asia Modern East Asia was almost continuously convulsed by war and revolution in the 19th and 20th centuries. But the everyday experience of modernity was structured more profoundly by the widening gulf between the country and the city, economically, poli...
HUMCORE134 Freedom Fighters, Terrorists, and Social Justice Warriors: Protest and Decolonization in South Asia The South Asian region comprises the contemporary nations of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives. Racially, linguistically, politically, religiously, and in every way diverse, this region has also experienced the c...
HUMCORE135 Atlantic Folds: Indigeneity and Modernity The Atlantic as an infinite doubling of ancient and modern. The Atlantic as an endless, watery cloth of African, American, and European folds, unfolding and refolding through bodies and ideas: blackness, whiteness, nature, nurture, water, blood, cann...
HUMCORE137 Time Travel in the Americas Historical fiction refracts our view of the present and our hopes for the future through the prism of the past. This course explores twentieth and twenty-first century writing from the Americas that reflects back on the relationship between American...
HUMCORE138 Narrating the British Empire In this course, we will read major British literary works of the age of empire to explore the relationship between imperialism and modern literature. We will attend to the way imperialism shaped the evolution of a range of genres, from romantic to go...
HUMCORE139 Pacific Ocean Worlds: A Sea of Islands How do we think about the modern Pacific Ocean world? Here in California, we border this vast waterscape, which is larger than all the world's remaining oceans combined and which could easily fit all of the planet's landmasses within it. What lessons...
HUMCORE13Q Humanities Core: Great Books, Big Ideas -- Europe, Modern This three-quarter sequence asks big questions of major texts in the European and American tradition. What is a good life? How should society be organized? Who belongs? How should honor, love, sin, and similar abstractions govern our actions? What du...
HUMCORE20 Humanities Core: Dao, Virtue, and Nature -- Foundations of East Asian Thought This course explores the values and questions posed in the formative period of East Asian civilizations. Notions of a Dao ("Way") are common to Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, but those systems of thought have radically different ideas about what...
HUMCORE21 Humanities Core: Love and Betrayal in Asia Why are lovers in storybooks East and West always star-crossed? Why do love and death seem to go together? For every Romeo and Juliet, there are dozens of doomed lovers in the Asian literary repertoires, from Genji's string of embittered mistresses,...
HUMCORE21Q Humanities Core: Love and Betrayal in Asia Why are lovers in storybooks East and West always star-crossed? Why do love and death seem to go together? For every Romeo and Juliet, there are dozens of doomed lovers in the Asian literary repertoires, from Genji's string of embittered mistresses,...
HUMCORE22 Humanities Core: Everybody Eats: The Language, Culture, and Ethics of Food in East Asia Many of us have grown up eating "Asian" at home, with friends, on special occasions, or even without full awareness that Asian is what we were eating. This course situates the three major culinary traditions of East Asia--China, Japan, and Korea--in...
HUMCORE52 Global Humanities: The Grand Millennium, 800-1800 How should we live? This course explores ethical pathways in European, Islamic, and East Asian traditions: mysticism and rationality, passion and duty, this and other worldly, ambition and peace of mind. They all seem to be pairs of opposites, but as...