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Browse Gen Ed courses for the 2024-2025 academic year or explore the full range of Gen Ed offerings.

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Program in General Education Course Catalog

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127 results found.

Act Natural

David Levine
Gen Ed 1050    |   Spring 2025    |    Course Listing     |     Canvas Site
Wednesday, 12:00 PM – 2:45 PM
How do we draw the line between being yourself and performing yourself, between acting and authenticity?
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African Spirituality and the Challenges of Modern Times

Jacob K. Olupona
Gen Ed 1071    |   Last offered Fall 2024
What can African spiritual traditions contribute to human flourishing in the contemporary age?
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AI, Computing and Thinking

Petros Koumoutsakos
Gen Ed 1187    |  
How can AI and Computing be integrated in our thinking for solving societal and scientific challenges?
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American Capitalism

Sven Beckert
Gen Ed 1159   |   Last offered Spring 2024
What is capitalism and how has it unfolded in American history? How did capitalism emerge, expand and transform daily life in North America over the past 500 years?
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American Dreams Made in Hollywood and Beyond

Eric Rentschler
Gen Ed 1043    |   Last offered Fall 2023
If we talk about American dreams and the many different ways they take shape in the mass-produced film fantasies made in Hollywood and beyond, what language are we to use and how are we to speak as we confront the diversity of experience portrayed in these designs for living; for whom is the American dream, one wonders, is it for everyone?
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American Food: A Global History

Joyce Chaplin
Gen Ed 1147   |   Last offered Fall 2021
If we are what we eat, well, here at the end of 2021, who the hell are we?
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American Society and Public Policy

Theda Skocpol and Mary Waters
Gen Ed 1092  |   Last offered Fall 2024
How do patterns of American economic, political, and social inequality shape our policy responses to working families, immigration, and poverty?
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Americans as Occupiers and Nation Builders

Andrew Gordon and Erez Manela
Gen Ed 1017   |    Last offered Fall 2023
How have US military occupations abroad, such as in the Philippines, Japan, and most recently Afghanistan and Iraq, shaped both the United States and the world?
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Anime as Global Popular Culture

Tomiko Yoda
Gen Ed 1042    |   Spring 2025    |    Course Listing    |   Canvas Site
Tuesday & Thursday, 1:30 PM – 2:45 PM
What can anime’s development in Japan and its global dissemination teach us about the messy world of contemporary media culture where art and commerce, aesthetic and technology, and producers and consumers are inextricably entangled with each other?
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Ballots and Bibles: Why and How Americans Bring Scriptures into Their Politics

David Holland
Gen Ed 1062   |   Last offered Spring 2024
Why do Americans’ sacred texts have a close, frequently fraught relationship with their political history?
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Borders

Mary Lewis
Gen Ed 1140    |   Spring 2025    |   Course Listing    |   Canvas Site
Tuesday & Thursday, 10:30 AM – 11:45 AM
How have borders been formed historically, and what are the ethics of border construction, defense, expansion or transgression?
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Brains, Identity, and Moral Agency

Steven Hyman
Gen Ed 1064    |    Spring 2025    |    Course Listing    |   Canvas Site
Monday & Wednesday, 10:30 AM – 11:45 AM
Can we reconcile the scientific ‘brain as a machine’ view with our strong experience of moral agency?
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Can We Know Our Past?

Jason Ur
Gen Ed 1105    |    Last offered Fall 2024
In a time when histories are being contested, monuments removed, and alternative facts compete with established orthodoxy, how do we evaluate competing narratives about what really happened in the past?
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Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory

Michael Puett
Gen Ed 1091    |   Last offered Fall 2024
What if many of our assumptions about the self and about how to live fully are limiting and even dangerous, and what other possibilities might we be able to find in classical Chinese philosophy?
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Classical Mythology: Myth in Antiquity and Today

Rachel Love
Gen Ed 1110    |   Last offered Spring 2024
Why do some stories get told over and over for thousands of years, and how do those ancient tales still shape (and get shaped by) us today?
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Climate Crossroads

James G. Anderson
Gen Ed 1167    |    Last offered Fall 2024
Irreversible climate change poses an unprecedented challenge to the stability of all societies: What are the scientifically viable pathways to a future that is sustainable and just?
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Conflict Resolution in a Divided World

Daniel Shapiro
Gen Ed 1033 | Last offered Fall 2022
From the interpersonal to the international, are we destined to live in a world of destructive conflict—or can we negotiate our way out?
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Confronting Climate Change: A Foundation in Science, Technology and Policy

Daniel Schrag
Gen Ed 1094    |    Last offered Fall 2024
How can we address the issue of climate change, reducing the damages by preparing for impacts already underway and fixing the problem by transforming our energy system?
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Consent

Elaine Scarry
Gen Ed 1138 | Last offered Spring 2022
How can we recognize the link between ethical acts of consent in personal life (marriage, sexual experience, contracts) and the essential role that citizenship plays in democratic states during both war and peace?
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Contemporary Developing Countries: Entrepreneurial Solutions to Intractable Problems

Tarun Khanna and Satchit Balsari
Gen Ed 1011   |   Last offered Fall 2023
How do you successfully design and implement solutions to intractable social and economic problems in the developing world?
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Creativity

David Atherton
Gen Ed 1067    |   Last offered Spring 2023
Where does creativity come from, how does it work, and how can we deepen its role in our own lives?
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Deep History

Matthew J. Liebmann and Daniel Lord Smail
Gen Ed 1044   |   Last offered Fall 2024
Who are we, how did we get here. . . and how far back in time do we have to go to start asking the question?
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Disease, Illness, and Health through Literature

Karen Thornber
Gen Ed 1078    |   Last offered Fall 2023
As healthcare costs soar and considerable suffering from disease and illness continues despite regular advances in medicine, what should we advocate for in our communities, our societies, our nations, and beyond to ease the burden of disease and illness on health professionals, family caregivers, and care recipients alike?
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East Asian Cinema

Jie Li
Gen Ed 1049    |   Last offered Spring 2023
How can we critically analyze and creatively respond to films, meanwhile letting cinema open up a window to other cultures and histories while serving as a mirror for ourselves and our own times?
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Eating Culture: Past, Present, and Future

Joseph Nagy
Gen Ed 1195    |   Spring 2025    |    Course Listing    |   Canvas Site
Monday & Wednesday, 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM
How and why do we humans “play” with the food we eat, and on which we depend for our lives, in so many different ways—creatively, profoundly, and consequentially?
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Economic Justice

Mathias Risse
Gen Ed 1121 | Last offered Spring 2023
How can we understand and make progress on disagreements about matters of economic and racial justice that are divisive to the point of making societies fall apart?
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Equity and Excellence in K12 American Schools

Katherine K. Merseth
Gen Ed 1076 | Last offered Fall 2022
How does the U.S. K12 education system reflect, reinforce, and reshape American society?
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Ethics of Climate Change

Lucas Stanczyk
Gen Ed 1015 | Last offered Spring 2024
What are individuals, scientists, businesses, and governments morally required to do to prevent catastrophic climate change?
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Evolving Morality: From Primordial Soup to Superintelligent Machines

Joshua D. Greene
Gen Ed 1046    |   Spring 2025    |   Course Listing    |   Canvas Site
Monday & Wednesday, 1:30 PM – 2:45 PM
How can we understand the evolution of morality—from primordial soup to superintelligent machines—and how might the science of morality equip us to meet our most pressing moral challenges?
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Faith and Authenticity: Religion, Existentialism and the Human Condition

Courtney Bickel Lamberth and David Lamberth
Gen Ed 1069    |    Last offered Fall 2024
How do the possibilities of faith and the demands of living authentically square with the developments of the modern west and its threats of nihilism?
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Finding Our Way

John Huth
Gen Ed 1031    |    Last offered Fall 2024
How did/do humans find their way across the planet, and how can we replicate their wayfinding?
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Gender and Science

Sarah Richardson
Gen Ed 1127 | Last offered Spring 2022
Does Science have a gender? Do gender beliefs influence the content of scientific knowledge?
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Global Japanese Cinema

Alexander Zahlten
Gen Ed 1145    |   Last offered Fall 2024
What can film from Japan tell us about the strange pair of intensifying global interconnections and rising nationalism in the world today?
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Great Experiments that Changed Our World

Philip Sadler
Gen Ed 1037    |    Spring 2025    |    Course Listing    |    Canvas Site
Tuesday & Thursday, 10:30 AM – 11:45 AM
In what ways does reliving 10 groundbreaking scientific experiments teach us how our own efforts can remake the world?
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Grimm’s Fairy Tales: Echoes of the Past, Reflections of the Present

Ekaterina Pirozhenko
Gen Ed 1197    |    Spring 2025    |    Course Listing    |   Canvas Site
Tuesday & Thursday, 10:30 AM – 11:45 AM
What do fairy tales reveal about universal human experiences such as birth, death, love, jealousy, discrimination, dreams, growth, resilience, and empowerment?
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Guns in the U.S.: A Love Story

Caroline Light
Gen Ed 1073    |    Last offered Fall 2024
Why does America love guns?
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Happiness

Susanna Rinard
Gen Ed 1025    |    Last offered Fall 2024
Should we pursue happiness, and if so, how should we do it?
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Harvard Gets Medieval

Daniel Lord Smail
Gen Ed 1160    |   Spring 2025    |    Course Listing    |   Canvas Site
Monday & Wednesday, 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM
How did our world come to be suffused with medieval images and motifs, and what do we learn about the past and ourselves as we begin to explore the fascinating time on the other side of the stereotypes?
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How Music Works: Engineering the Acoustical World

Robert Wood
Gen Ed 1080    |    Last offered Fall 2024
Music and technology are two dimensions of humanity that have been interdependent for tens of thousands of years; what can this intersection teach us about our past and our future?
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How to Build a Habitable Planet

Charles H. Langmuir
Gen Ed 1018    |    Last Offered Fall 2023
The relationship between human beings and Earth is the central problem of our time; can an understanding of Earth’s history reveal a place for us in a process of planetary evolution that might influence our behavior?
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Human Evolution, Human Health, and Climate Change

Daniel Lieberman and Kevin Uno
Gen Ed 1027    |    Spring 2025    |    Course Listing    |    Canvas Site
Tuesday & Thursday, 10:30 AM – 11:45 AM
How and why did climate change influence how humans evolved to be the way we are, and what are the implications of our evolutionary history for human health in a post-industrial world? In addition, how did human activities drive and continue to influence climate change with major impacts on human health?
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Human Nature

Joseph Henrich and Cammie Curtin
Gen Ed 1056    |    Last offered Fall 2024
What makes us human and why does it matter?
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Human Trafficking, Slavery and Abolition in the Modern World

Orlando Patterson
Gen Ed 1115   |   Spring 2025   |   Course Listing    |   Canvas Site
Monday & Wednesday, 1:30 PM – 2:45 PM
Why do slavery, human trafficking and other forms of servitude thrive today globally, including the USA, and what can we do about it?
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I Wonder Why: Science as a Culture of Curiosity

L Mahadevan
Gen Ed 1190 | Last offered in Spring 2024
How can a habit of curiosity, courage, and careful observation power an eternal adventure of unravelling the magic and mystery in the mundane worlds in and around us – forever uncertain, forever fruitful?
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If There is No God, All is Permitted: Theism and Moral Reasoning

Jay Harris
Gen Ed 1161   |   Last offered Spring 2024
Can we have confidence that our moral claims are true?
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Ignorance, Lies, Hogwash, and Humbug

Christopher Robichaud
Gen Ed 1023 | Last offered Spring 2024
Fake news, echo chambers, conspiracies, propaganda, information pollution–what are these and other features of the post truth era and how can we successfully navigate them?
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Is the U.S. Civil War Still Being Fought?

John Stauffer
Gen Ed 1133    |   Spring 2025    |    Course Listing    |    Canvas Site
Monday & Wednesday, 1:30 PM – 2:45 PM
How and why does the U.S. Civil War continue to shape national politics, laws, literature, and culture—especially in relation to our understanding of race, freedom, and equality?
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Islam and Politics in the Modern Middle East

Malika Zeghal
Gen Ed 1123    |   Last offered Fall 2024
What is the role that religion plays in the political life of Middle Eastern Muslim-majority societies today, and how does our understanding of that compare with conventional wisdom, including what we are often exposed to in the news media?
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Justice: Ethical Reasoning in Polarized Times

Michael Sandel
Gen Ed 1200    |    Last offered Fall 2024
What is a just society, and how should we think our way through the ethical choices we confront in politics and in our everyday lives?
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Language in Culture and Society

Nicholas Harkness
Gen Ed 1177    |   Last offered Spring 2023
How is verbal art — from story-telling to poetry and from hip hop to church song — created from linguistic and musical form, and how does its performance mediate social relations as well as construct cultural meanings that are central to our lives?
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Law, Politics, and Trade Policy: Lessons from East Asia

Christina Davis
Gen Ed 1119   |   Last offered Spring 2024
Must the East Asian Growth Miracle always lead to trade wars or can international law bring cooperation How do states balance the challenges and opportunities of international markets?
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LGBT Literature, Politics, and Identity

Linda Schlossberg
Gen Ed 1176    |   Last offered Spring 2022
What is the relationship between LGBT literary representation and politics, activism, and culture?
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Life and Death in the Anthropocene

Naomi Oreskes
Gen Ed 1174    |    Last offered Fall 2024
What does it mean for us — both as a society and as individuals — to live in a world radically remade by the human hand?
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Life as a Planetary Phenomenon

Dimitar Sasselov
Gen Ed 1070    |    Spring 2025    |    Course Listing    |   Canvas Site
Monday & Wednesday, 10:30 AM – 11:45 AM
Is there alien life beyond Earth?
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Living in an Urban Planet

Bruno Carvalho
Gen Ed 1103    |    Last offered Fall 2024
How did our planet become so urban, and how can our cities be more vital, livable, and sustainable?
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Loss

Kathleen Coleman
Gen Ed 1131    |   Spring 2025    |    Course Listing    |   Canvas Site
Monday & Wednesday, 9:00 AM – 10:15 AM
How are we to cope with the inevitability that some of what we most love in life we will lose?
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Making Change When Change Is Hard: the Law, Politics, and Policy of Social Change

Cass Sunstein
Gen Ed 1102    |    Last offered Fall 2024
How does social change happen?
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Making Things (Breaking Things)

Katarina Burin
Gen Ed 1191    |   Last offered Fall 2024
How do we know ourselves through things and what does it mean to think with our hands, to innovate and to productively fail as a tool of self knowledge?
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Medical Ethics and History

David Shumway Jones
Gen Ed 1116   |   Last offered Fall 2023
Why have debates about medicine and public health (e.g., vaccination, abortion, etc.) become so polarized and contentious in the United States?
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Mental Health and Mental Illness through Literature and the Arts

Karen Thornber
Gen Ed 1144   |   Last offered Fall 2022
How have mental illness and mental health been understood across time and space, and how have literature and the arts both perpetuated and undermined stigmas against individuals with mental illness?
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Meritocracy and Its Critics

Michael Sandel
Gen Ed 1181   |   Last offered Fall 2023
If a society achieved truly equal opportunity, so that everyone could rise as far as their effort and talent would take them, would it be a just society?
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Mexico and the Making of Global Cuisine

Jennifer Carballo
Gen Ed 1178   |   Last offered Spring 2024
What does the food we eat tell us about ourselves—as individuals, communities, and countries—and how has humanity’s relationship with food changed over time?
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Moctezuma’s Mexico Then and Now: Ancient Empires, Race Mixture and Finding Latinx

Davíd L. Carrasco and William L. Fash
Gen Ed 1148    |    Last offered Fall 2024
How does Mexico’s rich cultural past shape contemporary Mexico and the US in the face of today’s pandemics, protests and other challenges of the borderlands?
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Modern Art and Modernity

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, David Joselit, and Maria Gough
Gen Ed 1156    |   Last offered Spring 2024
What role do artistic practices play in the formation of modern culture and society, and how does art foster critical reflection and debate?
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Moral Inquiry in the Novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky

Justin Weir
Gen Ed 1059   |   Last offered Fall 2023
If a society achieved truly equal opportunity, so that everyone could rise as far as their effort and talent would take them, would it be a just society?
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Multisensory Religion: Rethinking Islam

Ali S. Asani
Gen Ed 1087    |   Last Offered Spring 2022    
What role do our senses play in shaping our understandings of “religion” and “religious experience”?
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Music from Earth

Alexander Rehding
Gen Ed 1006    |   Last offered Fall 2023
How can music help us in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence?
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Natural Disasters

Brendan Meade
Gen Ed 1098    |    Last offered Fall 2024
What makes our planet so dangerous?
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Nature

Joyce Chaplin
Gen Ed 1117 | Last offered Spring 2021
Saving the planet is necessary and will actually make us happy, right?
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Novel Thought: Being (In)Human

Annabel Kim
Gen Ed 1182    |   Last offered Spring 2024
How can the novel enable us to think in ways that other forms of knowledge production cannot and what does that allow us to understand about the world?
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Painting’s Doubt: A Studio Course

Matt Saunders
Gen Ed 1114    |   Last offered Fall 2023
How does a hands-on practice of image making (painting) lead us to perceive, represent and inhabit our world differently?
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Permanent Impermanence: Why Buddhists Build Monuments

Jinah Kim and Eugene Wang
Gen Ed 1083    |   Last offered Spring 2024
Why do Buddhists build monuments despite the core teaching of ephemerality, and what can we learn from this paradox about our own conception of time and space?
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Philanthropy, Nonprofits, and the Social Good

Shai M. Dromi
Gen Ed 1192   |   Spring 2025   |   Course Listing    |   Canvas Site
Monday & Wednesday, 6:00 PM – 7:15 PM
How can we most effectively harness the power of philanthropic giving and nonprofit work to create positive social change and address society’s most pressing challenges?
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Philosophy of Technology: From Marx and Heidegger to Artificial Intelligence

Mathias Risse
Gen Ed 1194   |   Spring 2025   |   Course Listing    |   Canvas Site
Monday & Wednesday, 10:30 AM – 11:45 AM
Is technology good, bad, or neutral – and if good, should we make it central to solving all our problems; if bad, should we radically change our ways; and if neutral, then what else should be the focus as we look for solutions to global problems?
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Poetry Without Borders

Stephanie Sandler
Gen Ed 1057    |   Last offered Spring 2024
Why do poems and poets today boldly cross the borders of language, geography, form, and how are those border-crossings charged politically, ethically, and aesthetically?
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Popular Culture and Modern China

David Wang
Gen Ed 1111    |   Last offered Fall 2024
What is the “people,” and how “popular” can popular culture be in contemporary People’s Republic of China and beyond?
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Power and Civilization: China

William C. Kirby and Peter K. Bol
Gen Ed 1136    |   Last offered Fall 2024
What does China’s past mean for its and your future as China once again becomes the most powerful nation on earth?
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Power and Identity in the Middle East

Melani Cammett
Gen Ed 1008   |   Last offered Spring 2024
How do material interests and identities shape the foundations of political order?
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Power to the People: Black Power, Radical Feminism, and Gay Liberation

Michael Bronski
Gen Ed 1130    |   Spring 2025    |    Course Listing    |   Canvas Site
Monday & Wednesday, 10:30 AM – 11:45 AM
How does understanding political activists and movements in the past help us radically change the world today?
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Prediction: The Past and Present of the Future

Alyssa Goodman
Gen Ed 1112    |    Spring 2025    |    Course Listing    |   Canvas Site
Wednesday, 3:00 PM – 5:45 PM
How and why do humans try to divine their own futures?
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Pride & Prejudice & P-values: Scientific Critical Thinking

Edward J. Hall and Douglas Finkbeiner
Gen Ed 1024    |   Spring 2025    |   Course Listing    |   Canvas Site
Monday & Wednesday, 10:30 AM – 11:45 AM
How can we (as individuals and as whole societies) better incorporate into our thinking and decision making the problem-solving techniques characteristic of science at its best?
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Psychotherapy and the Modern Self

Elizabeth Lunbeck
Gen Ed 1179    |    Last offered Fall 2024
How can we understand the appeal of psychotherapy, widely recognized as the preferred antidote to human unhappiness and misery, and what does it offer that friends, family, self-help, and psychopharmacological remedies do not?
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Pyramid Schemes: What Can Ancient Egyptian Civilization Teach Us?

Peter Der Manuelian
Gen Ed 1099   |   Spring 2025   |   Course Listing   |    Canvas Site
Monday & Wednesday, 1:30 PM – 2:45 PM
How does ancient Egypt enlighten our times about what defines a civilization, and were those ancient humans, with their pyramids, hieroglyphs, and pharaohs, exactly like or nothing like us?
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Race and Justice

Tommie Shelby
Gen Ed 1146 | Last offered Fall 2022
What is racial justice, and through what justifiable means might it be achieved in the United States?
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Race in a Polarized America

Jennifer L. Hochschild
Gen Ed 1052   |   Last offered Spring 2023
Is the United States a beacon of liberal, democratic, diverse values and practices, that also has a pattern of racial injustice – or is the US at its core a white supremacist society, in which some people aspire to creating a genuinely tolerant liberal democracy?
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Race, Gender, and Performance

Robin M. Bernstein
Gen Ed 1113    |   Last offered Spring 2024
How do the performances we see every day–on screens, on stages, and in everyday life–make race, gender, and sexuality real?
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Rationality

Steven Pinker
Gen Ed 1066 | Last offered Spring 2024
In an era of fake news, conspiracy theories, quack cures, science denial, and paranormal woo-woo, the well-being of the world depends on an understanding of rationality, why it is so easily eclipsed by irrationality, and how the rational angels of our nature can prevail.
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Reclaiming Argument: Logic as a Force for Good

Edward J. Hall
Gen Ed 1051 | Last offered Spring 2024
Argument and persuasion are features of all of our lives that can be as challenging and fraught as they are unavoidable and essential; what is the best way for us to handle them?
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Rise of the Machines? Understanding and Using Generative AI

Logan S. McCarty
Gen Ed 1188    |    Spring 2025    |    Course Listing    |   Canvas Site
Monday & Wednesday, 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM
If we’re living through the emergence of a highly disruptive technology, namely Chat-GPT and similar generative AI tools, what should we do about it?
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Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science

David Weitz and Pia Sorensen
Gen Ed 1104    |    Last offered Fall 2024
How can we use scientific principles to make better food, for ourselves and for the world?
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Security

John Hamilton
Gen Ed 1020    |   Spring 2025    |   Course Listing    |   Canvas Site
Tuesday & Thursday, 1:30 PM – 2:45 PM
How do the moral implications of security, a term with a long and provocatively ambivalent history, continue to be relevant in today’s understanding of community and social responsibility?
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Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

Jocelyn Viterna
Gen Ed 1193     |    Why are questions of sex, gender, and sexuality so frequently politicized, and how does this politicization shape the social world, as well as our individual opportunities?
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Sleep

Charles Czeisler and Frank A.J.L. Scheer
Gen Ed 1038    |    Spring 2025    |    Course Listing    |   Canvas Site
Tuesday, 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
How does sleep affect your health, your safety, and our society?
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Stories from the End of the World

Giovanni Bazzana
Gen Ed 1001    |   Spring 2025    |    Course Listing    |   Canvas Site
Tuesday & Thursday, 9:00 AM – 10:15 PM
How can and should we live at the end of the world as we know it?
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Superheroes and Power

Stephanie Burt
Gen Ed 1165    |   Last offered Fall 2023
What makes superheroes popular, and how can their stories answer enduring questions about identity, power, disability, symbolism, law, and the state?
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Texts in Transition

Ann Blair and Leah Whittington
Gen Ed 1034   |   Last offered Fall 2024
What makes some texts long-lived while others are ephemeral, today and in the past?
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The Age of Anxiety: Histories, Theories, Remedies

Beth Blum
Gen Ed 1186    |    Last offered Spring 2024
How have authors throughout history channeled anxiety into meaningful and imaginative works of art?
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The Ancient Greek Hero

Gregory Nagy
Gen Ed 1074    |   Last offered Fall 2024
How did ancient Greek heroes, both male and female, learn about life by facing what all of us have to face, our human condition?
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The Art and Politics of Propaganda

Eric Rentschler
Gen Ed 1012    |   Last offered Fall 2022
Why did Nazi sights, sounds, and propaganda prove to be so captivating and compelling for German audiences of a modern nation and how do we explain the continuing impact of Nazi images and fantasies to this very day, which is to ask, what do “they” have to do with “us”?
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The Border: Race, Politics and Health in Modern Mexico

Gabriela Soto Laveaga
Gen Ed 1089    |    Last offered Fall 2024
If we want to understand our own history we need to look at the fringes, in this case the ongoing tensions and violence at the U.S.-Mexico border illustrates what we value and fear as a society.
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The Caribbean Crucible: Colonialism, Capitalism and Post-Colonial Misdevelopment In The Region

Orlando Patterson
Gen Ed 1019   |   Last offered Fall 2023
How does the growing inequality between and within nations—which is the major global issue of our times—impact the Caribbean region and, in turn, its U.S. neighbor?
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The Challenge of Human Induced Climate Change: Transitioning to a Post Fossil Fuel Future

Michael McElroy
Gen Ed 1137    |    Spring 2025    |    Course Listing    |    Canvas Site
Tuesday & Thursday, 1:30 PM – 2:45 PM
What can we do now to avoid the most serious consequences of climate change, which poses an immediate problem for global society?
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The Crusades and the Making of East and West

Dimiter Angelov
Gen Ed 1088   |  Last offered Spring 2022
How did we come to think of the world as split into East and West?
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The English Language Today, Yesterday, and Tomorrow

Daniel Donoghue
Gen Ed 1183   |   Spring 2025   |   Course Listing  |    Canvas Site
Tuesday & Thursday, 10:30 AM – 11:45 AM
How does the English language shape our world, and how does the world shape English?
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The Global Heart Disease Epidemic: Stopping What We Started

Richard Lee
Gen Ed 1053    |    Last offered Fall 2024
What are you willing to do for the health of others?
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The Holocaust

Kevin Madigan
Gen Ed 1118   |   Last offered Spring 2022
How could the Holocaust have happened/how did it happen?
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The Philosopher and the Tyrant

David Damrosch
Gen Ed 1030 | Last offered Spring 2023
In a time of rising authoritarianism and polarized debate, what role can the love of wisdom have in tempering the pursuit of power?
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The Political Economy of Globalization

Lawrence Summers and Robert Lawrence
Gen Ed 1120    |    Last offered Fall 2023
How can a globalizing world of differing countries – rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian – best promote inclusive growth and human security by meeting the challenges of inequality, climate change, rising populism, and global disease?
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The Power and Beauty of Being In-Between: The Story of Armenia

Christina Maranci
Gen Ed 1185    |   Last offered Fall 2024
How can one small, remote country change the way we think about the culture of the world?
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The Social Responsibilities of Universities

Julie Reuben
Gen Ed 1122    |    Last offered Fall 2024
What do universities owe society?
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The Two Koreas in the Modern World

Carter Eckert
Gen Ed 1100    |    Last offered Spring 2022
Why is it that the Two Koreas (North and South Korea), sharing the same small peninsula, have followed such radically divergent paths in the modern world?
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The United States and China

William C. Kirby
Gen Ed 1068   |   Last offered Spring 2024
Are the United States and China destined for conflict or can they lead the world in addressing common challenges?
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Tradition in Everyday Life

Sarah Craycraft
Gen Ed 1196    |   Last offered Fall 2024
How do groups express themselves creatively in everyday life, and how do these group expressions reflect our individual experiences of the world?
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Tragedy Today

Naomi Weiss
Gen Ed 1168    |   Last offered Spring 2024
How can ancient Greek tragedy help us to address some of today’s most pressing sociopolitical problems?
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U.S. K-12 Schools: Assumptions, Binaries, and Controversies

Elizabeth City
Gen Ed 1189    |    Spring 2025    |    Course Listing   |   Canvas Site
Tuesday, 9:00 AM – 11:45 AM
What if schools were for learning instead of education?
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Understanding Islam and Contemporary Muslim Societies

Ali Asani
Gen Ed 1134   |   Last offered Spring 2023
How does one understand a major global religion in a highly polarized and fragmented world?
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Vaccines: History, Science, Policy

Galit Alter, Allan M. Brandt, and Ingrid Katz
Gen Ed 1175 | Last offered Fall 2022
Can vaccines solve the problem of infectious global pandemics?
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Video Commune

Karthik Pandian
Gen Ed 1072    |   Last offered Spring 2023
From gifs and memes to confessions and controversies, what can the riotous festival of contemporary expression in video teach us about living together?
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Water and the Environment

Kaighin McColl
Gen Ed 1158    |    Spring 2025    |    Course Listing    |   Canvas Site
Tuesday & Thursday, 1:30 PM – 2:45 PM
How does the water cycle change us, and how do we change it?
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What is a Book? From the Clay Tablet to the Kindle

David Stern
Gen Ed 1090    |   Spring 2025    |    Course Listing    |   Canvas Site
Tuesday & Thursday, 1:30 PM – 2:45 PM
What is the nature of the object that has been the focus of your education since you began to read–and at the core of Western culture since its inception– and why is it important to understand and appreciate its presence before your eyes even if it’s all but transparent?
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What is a Republic?

Daniel Carpenter
Gen Ed 1032    |   Spring 2025    |   Course Listing    |    Canvas Site
Monday & Wednesday, 3:00 PM – 4:15 PM
What is a democratic republic, and can such a regime — one that trusts citizens to capably choose and monitor those in power, and one that trusts those in power to restrain themselves and each other while attending to the public good — survive and protect us from tyranny?
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What Is the Good China Story?

David Wang and Wai-yee Li
Gen Ed 1169    |   Last offered Fall 2023
Why do stories have the power to bring China to the world and the world to China?
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Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Cares? Reimagining Global Health

Arthur Kleinman, Anne Becker, and Salmaan Keshavjee
Gen Ed 1093 | Last offered in Fall 2023
How can health care systems be restructured to provide high quality care even to the poorest and most vulnerable people on our planet?
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Why Is There No Cure for Health?

David M. Cutler
Gen Ed 1079 | Last offered in Fall 2023
Given all our technological advances, why are we still not able to prevent preventable diseases, provide affordable healthcare for millions of people, and deliver cures for curable diseases?
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Work, Life, and Purpose in an Uncertain World

Nien-hê Hsieh
Gen Ed 1028 | Last offered Spring 2023
Almost everyone must work, so how will you choose what work to do, avoid ethical pitfalls at work, and shape the world of work for others?
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World Health: Challenges and Opportunities

Sue Goldie
Gen Ed 1063    |     Last offered Spring 2024
How do we analyze the health of global populations in a time of unprecedented crisis, and create new policies that address the social, political, economic, and environmental dimensions of health in an increasingly interdependent world?
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Worlds Beyond: The Past, Present and Future of Our Solar System

Robin Wordsworth
Gen Ed 1184    |    Spring 2025    |    Course Listing    |   Canvas Site
Tuesday & Thursday, 10:30 AM – 11:45 AM
What is the nature of other worlds beyond Earth, and why is space exploration important?
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