2026 Summer Humanities Courses

From a few huts on seven hills in the eighth century BCE (or so they say), Rome became an empire that, at its greatest expanse, encompassed western Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and lands surrounding the Black Sea. More impressive than its expanse, its eastern half would last until 1453.

A good story rarely stays put for long. Since the advent of Indian cinema more than a century ago, novels, poetry, and short stories have provided a rich source of inspiration for filmmakers. As these stories move across time, space, and media forms, their meanings shift, sparking new interpretations and cultural conversations.

The colonial era saw widespread extraction of cultural treasures by European powers across the globe. Stanford University, for example, has a large collection of African objects in the Cantor Museum, while in nearby San Francisco, the renowned De Young Museum has a significant selection in its Africa gallery. Greece, Egypt, and other countries have maintained that they belong at home rather than in the museums of London, Paris, and New York. In this course we will consider the role of African art in debates about ownership, access, and aesthetics.

In this course, we’ll read some foundational works of ancient Greek philosophy, including all or part of Plato’s Symposium, Aristotle’s On the Soul, Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism (the most important extant ancient Skeptical text), and a central Epicurean work, Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things.

In this course, we consider what philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists, writers, and artists have to say about happiness and reflect on its relationship to love, belonging, community, fame, fortune, freedom, spirituality, and mortality. We move between Asian and Western sources and interrogate deeply held assumptions through the lens of cross-cultural inquiry.

What is “magical realism”? Is it a genre, a style, a label for elaborated fiction from the Third World? How does magical realism, a globalized phenomenon, reflect upon globalization itself?

From Sally Hemings to Barack Obama, this course explores how racial identity has been experienced, represented, and contested throughout American history. Engaging historical, legal, and literary texts, as well as film, we will examine the major historical transformations that have shaped our understandings of racial identity.

“Revolutions are the locomotives of history,” wrote Karl Marx. As the ongoing turmoil of the Middle East reminds us, revolutions have the power to reshape the political order of the world more than any other social, economic, or cultural forces. Most states today were born out of a revolution. What exactly is a revolution? Is it, like Marx believed, the inevitable result of a social conflict? Or does it take determined revolutionaries to make a successful revolution? To have a revolution, do you have to call it “a revolution”?