Courses

The courses listed below are provided by the JHU Public Course Search. This listing provides a snapshot of immediately available courses and may not be complete.

Course registration information can be found on the Student Information Services (SIS) website. Please consult the online course catalog for cross-listed courses and full course information.

Course # (Section)	Title	Day/Times	Instructor	Location	Term	Additional Details
AS.010.255 (01)	Introduction to Performance Art	MW 1:30PM - 2:45PM	Schopp, Caroline Lillian	Krieger 300	Spring 2026	Description: Performance art is provocative and often controversial because it troubles, without dissolving, the distinction between art and life. Not just a matter of activating bodies or spurring participation, performance art asks what kinds of actions count as worthy of attention in contemporary culture. Studying performance art provides a unique introduction to art history because it allows us to rethink established art historical concerns with representation, form, perspective, and materiality, while at the same time offering critical insight into the forms of attention that structure everyday life. In this introduction to performance art and its history, we will explore how performance art addresses ingrained assumptions about action and passivity, success and failure, embodiment and mediation, “good” and “bad” feelings, emancipation and dependency. The study of performance art invites transdisciplinary approaches. Students from across the university are welcome. Our attention to a wide array of artists and practices will be supplemented by readings in art history and art criticism as well as diverse theoretical approaches. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 2/24 Tags: HART-MODERN
AS.061.391 (01)	Love and Film	T 2:30PM - 5:00PM	Ward, Meredith C	The Centre 206	Spring 2026	Description: In this course, we explore different understandings of "love" and the way that film has dealt with the concept as a medium. We explore a variety of approaches to the question of "love" - from the agapic to the familial to the romantic - through a series of interdisciplinary readings ranging from philosophy to anthropology. We will also equally explore the question of how film has engaged with the question of love as a concept, and what depictions of human affection - from the general to the personal - it has offered us. Screenings are required for this course. Lab fee: $50 Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 0/15 Tags: FILM-CRITST
AS.100.252 (01)	Sex and the American City	T 3:00PM - 5:30PM	Gill Peterson, Jules	Gilman 377	Spring 2026	Description: Why are cities associated with sex and vice? How did modern forms of policing and urban development first arise? This introductory course explores the place of US cities in the history of sexuality, including Baltimore. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 0/12 Tags: HIST-US
AS.100.283 (01)	Making and Unmaking Queer Histories: Identity, Self-Representation, Politics, and Contexts, 1800-Pre	MW 10:00AM - 10:50AM, F 10:00AM - 10:50AM	Hindmarch-Watson, Katherine Anne	Hodson 316; Krieger 304	Spring 2026	Description: This course investigates sexual cultures through the lens of modern Queer History in the United States and Western Europe, with forays into global and transnational histories. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 11/20 Tags: HIST-US, HIST-EUROPE, INST-GLOBAL
AS.100.283 (02)	Making and Unmaking Queer Histories: Identity, Self-Representation, Politics, and Contexts, 1800-Pre	MW 10:00AM - 10:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM	Hindmarch-Watson, Katherine Anne	Hodson 316	Spring 2026	Description: This course investigates sexual cultures through the lens of modern Queer History in the United States and Western Europe, with forays into global and transnational histories. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 19/20 Tags: HIST-US, HIST-EUROPE, INST-GLOBAL
AS.213.385 (01)	The Flesh of Nature: Body, Media and Environment	MW 1:30PM - 2:45PM	Harmon, Brad	Gilman 443	Spring 2026	Description: In this course we will explore how literature and film depict the material relationships between our human bodies and more-than-human worlds within and around us. We will consider not only how the classical elements (earth, air, fire, water) are media and how they connect our individual bodies with other bodies, but how the body itself is a medium. We will examine a range of ecologically conscious literary texts and films from the German and Nordic worlds as they engage themes including elementality, the nuclear age, the Anthropocene, and queer ecologies. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 13/15 Tags: ENVS-MAJOR, ENVS-MINOR
AS.214.363 (01)	Italy Beyond Italy: Languages, Affects, and Geographies in Modern Literature	TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM	Cerreti, Marta	Gilman 77	Spring 2026	Description: What is Italian in a globalized world? How do geography, language, and migration shape the stories we tell and the ways we read them? This course offers an introduction to twentieth- and twenty-first-century Italian literature through a transnational lens. We will explore how Italian identity is constructed, challenged, and redefined through migration, multilingualism, and political contestation. Focusing on authors who write about Italy from afar or examine the broader world from within its borders, we will reconsider Italy not as a fixed geographic entity, but as a fluid concept shaped by global entanglements and affects. Readings will include novels about dictatorship, contemporary diasporic family memoirs, postcolonial narratives of identity and migration, and graphic novels that link the streets of Rome to global conflict zones. We will examine how the Italian language becomes a site of expression and transformation—adopted, reshaped, and reimagined by writers working across borders and traditions. Authors include Dino Campana, Italo Calvino, Antonio Tabucchi, Melania Mazzucco, Jhumpa Lahiri, Claudia Durastanti, Igiaba Scego, Helena Janeczek, Amara Lakhous, and Zerocalcare. Throughout the semester, students will engage with key themes including the history of fascism and anti-fascism, colonial legacies, modern migration, and the resurgence of nationalism in Europe while critically rethinking what constitutes “Italian literature” today. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 8/12 Tags: n/a
AS.214.417 (01)	Galileo in Dialogue: Science, Literature, and Gender in Early Modern Italy	T 3:00PM - 5:30PM	Ray, Meredith	Maryland 202	Spring 2026	Description: This seminar investigates the contours of scientific dialogue in early modern Italy through the figure of Galileo Galilei and his intellectual milieu. We will examine how literary culture shaped the circulation of new ideas, and how women—whether as poets, patrons, or correspondents—participated in the exploration and communication of scientific knowledge. Readings include selections from Galileo’s scientific writings and extensive correspondence, alongside literary and artistic texts that illuminate the cultural contexts in which his ideas were produced, debated, and disseminated. By situating Galileo within academic, courtly, and cultural networks, the seminar considers the reciprocal relationship between scientific inquiry and literary production, with particular attention to how gender shaped access to, and participation in, intellectual life. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 4/12 Tags: n/a
AS.230.370 (01)	Housing and Homelessness in the United States	TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM	Greif, Meredith	Krieger 309	Spring 2026	Description: This course will examine the role of housing, or the absence thereof, in shaping quality of life. It will explore the consequences of the places in which we live and how we are housed. Consideration will be given to overcrowding, affordability, accessibility, and past and existing housing policies and their influence on society. Special attention will be given to the problem of homelessness. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 2/20 Tags: CES-CC, CES-LE
AS.290.330 (01)	Human Sexuality	F 10:00AM - 12:30PM	Kraft, Chris S	Hodson 211	Spring 2026	Description: Course focuses on sexual development, sexuality across the lifespan, gender identity, sexual attraction and arousal, sexually transmitted disease, and the history of commercial sex workers and pornography. Please note that the use of electronic devices is not permitted during this class, in order to promote the full interactive potential of this engaging seminar-style offering. Open to Juniors & Seniors within the following majors/minors: Behavioral Biology; Biology; Cognitive Science; Medicine, Science & the Humanities; Molecular & Cellular Bio; Neuroscience; Psychological & Brain Sciences; Public Health; Sociology; Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 10/30 Tags: BEHB-SOCSCI, MSCH-HUM
AS.310.329 (01)	Women, Patriarchy, and Feminism in China, South Korea, and Japan	TTh 4:30PM - 5:45PM	Henning, Stefan	Gilman 313	Spring 2026	Description: We will try to get a quick overview of the recent history of patriarchy in China, South Korea, and Japan from the mid-twentieth century to our present and then compare the initiatives of feminists to transform the lives of women throughout these three societies. We will also debate whether or how it makes sense to adapt the Western notions of patriarchy and sexism as well as the Western political program of feminism to the non-Western context of East Asia by reading books by historians, anthropologists, and sociologists. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 3/15 Tags: INST-GLOBAL, INST-CP, CES-GI
AS.360.406 (01)	ERL: Composing Research: Collaborating with Elephants/People/Rivers/Kidneys/Soil	TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM	Ludden, Jason	Gilman 77	Spring 2026	Description: This course focuses on writing with/for/about natural resource issues and scientific research. This writing class prepares students for travel to Sri Lanka, in the summer of 2026, to study Human-Elephant Conflict (HEC) while learning about the health of communities around Wasgamuwa National Park. During the spring of 2026, we’ll work with community collaborators in the Baltimore area to address their content production needs and identify spaces and places for text production/revision while also learning about HEC and Sri Lanka. Additionally, we’ll explore ethical representations of data and synthesize complex arguments into public facing documents. In late May of 2026, we will travel to Sri Lanka for two weeks to work alongside the Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society (SLWCS) – a non-governmental organization committed to saving elephants by helping people – in the Mahaweli Development Project (MDP): a key agricultural region, which has a high rate of both HEC and chronic kidney disease. Students will spend their mornings mapping elephant movements and surveying farmers about elephant related incidences. We’ll also meet with faculty and researchers from the University of Colombo, University of Peradeniya, American Institute for Sri Lanka Studies, and other organizations; these hosted workshops will expose students to new research networks, contemporary scholarship, and help them develop an understanding of collaboration and global scholarship. Additionally, we’ll visit sites of ecological and historical importance. By the end of the trip, students will have worked with GIS databases and technology, sociology and anthropology field methods, and the process of community and public engaged research. After our return from Sri Lanka, students will propose their own research project. Enrollment by permission only. Application required; email [email protected]. Commitment to 2 credit-course in Summer 2026 required. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 4/10 Tags: MSCH-HUM, ENVS-MAJOR, ENVS-MINOR
AS.363.336 (01)	Sexual Politics of the Cold War: An Inter-Asia Approach	T 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Kim, Sojung		Spring 2026	Description: Has the Cold War truly ended? What does it mean to end a war? This course invites you to critically examine the Cold War through the lenses of sexuality and inter-Asia. While the general consensus is that the Cold War has concluded, this notion of an absolute “end” has continuously faced challenges in new Cold War studies, particularly posed by scholars across regions and areas within “Asia.” What are the imperatives of these challenges? Simultaneously, growing feminist scholarship on sexual politics reveals the ways in which sexuality serves as a pivotal arena in the construction and transformation of Cold War politics, shaping our ordinary lives. How are possibilities for intimacy and alternative futures woven under seemingly endless conditions of war? Situated at the intersection of sexual politics and inter-Asia methods, drawing from a diverse range of interdisciplinary texts, literature, and visual materials, we explore postcolonial, feminist, and queer discussions surrounding the changing nature of Cold War politics. These discussions engage critically and expand upon the traditionally Western-centric understanding of war, peace, and Asia. Credits: 3.00 Status: Canceled Seats Available: 12/12 Tags: INST-GLOBAL
AS.363.367 (01)	Learning Sex and Gender: AI, Algorithms, Automatons	TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM	Islam, Heba Zainab	Mergenthaler 426	Spring 2026	Description: This course explores the interactions between sex, gender, and cyber-technologies, old and new. How do the internet, smart devices, robots and generative AI shape sex and gender? In turn, how do discourses of sex and gender shape technologies? This seminar will help students answer these questions by introducing them to debates within feminist theory, the historical development of gendered and sexed technologies, the embedding of these technologies in our everyday life and the aesthetics and ethics of such technologies as seen in film and media. We will explore how AI, algorithms, and machines raise complex questions around the ethics, politics, and epistemologies of sex and gender. Through readings of key academic texts, films, and ethnographies, we will try to gain a full picture, through discussion, of what a gendered cyberscape looks like and how it might come to look otherwise. By understanding such technologies as instruments of power, we will analyze how this power is applied differentially across different marginalized groups and in different regional contexts. Further, we will consider how technologies enter our intimate spaces and reshape our desires and pleasures. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 8/12 Tags: n/a
AS.010.301 (01)	Michelangelo: Religion, Sexuality, and the Crisis of Renaissance Art	MW 4:30PM - 5:45PM	Campbell, Stephen John	Hodson 303	Fall 2026	Description: The course will focus on the controversies surrounding the representation of the body in the writings and figurative art of Michelangelo and his contemporaries, the historical circumstances under which the most admired artist in Europe was attacked as a blasphemer and an idolator, and the effect of widespread calls for censorship on his later production. The writings of Michelangelo, Pietro Aretino, Benvenuto Cellini and own writings will be considered with a focus on their staging of an ambivalent and transgressive eroticism. Credits: 3.00 Status: Waitlist Only Seats Available: 0/25 Tags: HART-RENEM
AS.061.248 (01)	Women Making Films About Women	MW 3:00PM - 4:15PM	Yasinsky, Karen	The Centre 216	Fall 2026	Description: This course will examine films (features and shorts) throughout the history of cinema beginning with Alice Guy-Blaché . We will look at how form reveals content, thematic issues and how films relate to the culture and politics of the filmmaker. Filmmakers include Germaine Dulac, Nelly Kaplan, Marguerite Duras, Chantal Ackerman, Barbara Hammer and Nina Menkes. Readings include critical essays, texts by the filmmakers and fiction. Assignments consist of weekly papers on the films. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 5/12 Tags: FILM-CRITST
AS.100.125 (01)	The History of Gender and Sexuality on the Internet	TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM	Gill Peterson, Jules	Hodson 211	Fall 2026	Description: This course examines the historical forces since the 1960s that gave rise to the computing industry, the internet, and social media. Topics will include the history of Silicon Valley, parasociality, loneliness, and identity politics. Credits: 3.00 Status: Waitlist Only Seats Available: 0/20 Tags: HIST-US, CES-GI, CES-TI
AS.100.426 (01)	Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe	MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM	Marshall, John W	Krieger 304	Fall 2026	Description: Witchcraft, magic, carnivals, riots, folk tales, gender roles; fertility cults and violence especially in Britain, Germany, France, and Italy. Credits: 3.00 Status: Waitlist Only Seats Available: 0/19 Tags: INST-GLOBAL, HIST-EUROPE
AS.230.370 (01)	Housing and Homelessness in the United States	TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM	Greif, Meredith	Gilman 400	Fall 2026	Description: This course will examine the role of housing, or the absence thereof, in shaping quality of life. It will explore the consequences of the places in which we live and how we are housed. Consideration will be given to overcrowding, affordability, accessibility, and past and existing housing policies and their influence on society. Special attention will be given to the problem of homelessness. Credits: 3.00 Status: Waitlist Only Seats Available: 1/20 Tags: CES-CC, CES-LE
AS.250.351 (01)	Reproductive Physiology	T 3:00PM - 4:40PM	Zirkin, Barry R	Bloomberg 272	Fall 2026	Description: Focuses on reproductive physiology and biochemical and molecular regulation of the female and male reproductive tracts. Topics include the hypothalamus and pituitary, peptide and steroid hormone action, epididymis and male accessory sex organs, female reproductive tract, menstrual cycle, ovulation and gamete transport, fertilization and fertility enhancement, sexually transmitted diseases, and male and female contraceptive methods. Introductory lectures on each topic followed by research-oriented lectures and readings from current literature. Credits: 2.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 3/154 Tags: BIOL-UL, BIOL-UL
AS.280.225 (01)	Population, Health and Development	TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM	Becker, stan	Krieger 205	Fall 2026	Description: This course will cover the major world population changes in the past century as well as the contemporary situation and projections for this century. Topics include rapid population growth, the historical and continuing decline of death and birth rates, contraceptive methods as well as family planning and child survival programs, population aging, migration (including urbanization), population and the environment and a debate about whether the average person in the world in 2050 will be better or worse off than the average person today. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 29/75 Tags: ENVS-MAJOR, CES-PD
AS.290.330 (01)	Human Sexuality	F 10:00AM - 12:30PM	Kraft, Chris S	Ames 234	Fall 2026	Description: Course focuses on sexual development, sexuality across the lifespan, gender identity, sexual attraction and arousal, sexually transmitted disease, and the history of commercial sex workers and pornography. Please note that the use of electronic devices is not permitted during this class, in order to promote the full interactive potential of this engaging seminar-style offering. Open to Juniors & Seniors within the following majors/minors: Behavioral Biology; Biology; Cognitive Science; Medicine, Science & the Humanities; Molecular & Cellular Bio; Neuroscience; Psychological & Brain Sciences; Public Health; Sociology; Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality. Credits: 3.00 Status: Waitlist Only Seats Available: 0/30 Tags: BEHB-SOCSCI
AS.363.201 (01)	Introduction to the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality	MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM	Pahl, Katrin	Gilman 186	Fall 2026	Description: This course will serve as an intensive introduction to contemporary approaches to theories of gender and sexuality, and their relationship to cultural production and politics. Students will develop a historically situated knowledge of the development of feminist and queer scholarship in the 20th and 21st centuries, and consider the multiply intersecting forces which shape understandings of sexual and gender identity. We will consider both foundational questions (What is gender? Who is the subject of feminism? What defines queerness?) and questions of aesthetic and political strategy, and spend substantial time engaging with feminist and queer scholarship in comparative contexts. Students will be introduced to debates in Black feminism, intersectionality theory, third world feminism, socialist feminism, queer of colour critique, and trans* theory. We will read both canonical texts and recent works of scholarship, and the final weeks of the course will be devoted to thinking with our theoretical and historical readings against a selection of feminist and queer literature and cinema. No prior familiarity with the study of gender and sexuality is necessary. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 1/18 Tags: MSCH-HUM
AS.389.220 (01)	Queer Sixties	W 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Plaster, Joseph		Fall 2026	Description: Introduction to U.S. queer and trans politics and culture in the period building up to the gay liberation movement. The course highlights the significance of homophile organizing, drag and leather communities, trans activism, bar- and street-based publics, experimental film, and subcultural practices. It examines how we, as a culture, have come to narrate queer and trans history and investigates the ways archival practices shape those narrations. Students will learn to conduct historical research in online and analog archives, finding and integrating primary and secondary sources to write original research about the past. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 12/15 Tags: CDS-SSMC