New Introductory Courses to Arts & Humanities
This fall, the Division of Arts & Humanities is launching a dynamic new slate of introductory courses designed especially for first-year students. These courses invite you to explore big ideas, ask meaningful questions, and see the world - and yourself - through new lenses. Whether you’re curious about philosophy, literature, the arts, history, or culture, this is your chance to dive in, connect across disciplines, and find your intellectual home.
We know that many students come to Harvard excited about the humanities but aren’t always sure where to begin. These new courses are built to meet you where you are - engaging, expansive, and relevant to the world you live in now. Taught by some of our most passionate and creative faculty, they’re designed to show how humanistic thinking can challenge, inspire, and shape your path forward, no matter what you choose to study.
Explore the full list of new courses and discover how the arts and humanities can deepen your Harvard experience.
Fall 2026
Spencer Lee-Lenfield
Great art constantly morphs: novels become films, statues become poems, music becomes dance. This introduction class looks at how masterpieces from around the world transform as they move across languages, art forms, and renditions. In addition to written assignments, we do creative projects to explore each of those modal shifts. We also learn about the structure of a range of languages, and think about how those languages shape their literatures. This is a great class to take if you’re thinking about learning a new language in the future. It’s also a good entryway to other literature and language classes for first- and second-year students, as well as students concentrating in fields outside the humanities. This course also counts toward the Secondary Field in Translation Studies. Taught in English; no other languages required (just curiosity).
Lauren Kaminsky, Steven Biel, Raphael Allison
This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary study of cultural materials in their historical contexts. Weekly lectures, given by members of History and Literature's Committee on Degrees and other members of the faculty, will focus on types of primary sources (such as film, fiction, music, photography, and archival documents), approaching them from key theoretical and methodological perspectives. Class meetings will feature trips to campus museums, archives, and performances. Assignments will practice the fundamental skills of close reading and historical contextualization, culminating in a research project.
Laura van den Berg & Neel Mukherjee
How to tell a story? How do writers discover character, imagine worlds, and shape narrative time? This open-enrollment creative writing course will focus on the cornerstones of storytelling. We will move through an expansive reading list—for there is no writing without reading—designed to showcase the many different shapes a story can take. Ask any writer why they became a writer, and they'll tell you that it's because they read. (Octavia Butler, who came from a poor family, once said that she became a writer because she had access to public libraries. Books, in other words; they showed her what was possible.) These conversations about “reading like a writer” will, in turn, inform the creative work you generate this semester: you will write your own stories, exploring different styles and literary techniques. You can expect to leave the course with a portfolio of creative work.
Kathryn Davidson
What is Language? Is language “a uniquely human gift”? Is it central to the human experience, as many have suggested? Why do some writers say that Language is what “makes us human?” Do other animals have Language? Do AI models “know a language”? What does it even mean to ask questions like these? Do languages vary from one another without limit? Or is there an underlying common core beneath the surface diversity? How similar are languages across modalities (signed/spoken)? Do the languages we know determine the thoughts we can think? Do we think (only) in language? Are there right and wrong ways of speaking? Who decides? What’s the difference between a language and a dialect? Where do our words come from? It’s said that more than half of the world’s languages and maybe as many as 90% are “endangered” and may no longer be spoken by the end of the century. Are they “unsuited to the modern world”’ or are other factors at play? Are some languages more logical than others? Students in this course will be exposed to classical and new questions about language, and will gain practical skills in linguistic analysis along with an appreciation of how one can approach these questions analytically. Our aim is not to present answers, but to foster critical thinking in order to understand on the one hand what such questions mean, and on the other, how one might approach them and why various answers have been given from a diversity of perspectives from Linguistics, Philosophy, Languages and Literatures, Psychology, Computer Science, Anthropology, and related fields in the humanities and sciences. This course can also be used to satisfy any introductory prerequisites for more advanced coursework in Linguistics, and the distributional requirement in Arts & Humanities.
Spring 2026
Kathryn Davidson
What is Language? Is it “a uniquely human gift,” central to human experience, or what “makes us human”? Do other animals have language, and do AI models “know” one? Do languages vary without limit or share a common core across signed and spoken forms? Are some languages more logical than others? Students in this course will explore classical and new questions about language, develop skills in linguistic analysis, and learn to approach such questions critically from perspectives across Linguistics, Philosophy, Languages and Literatures, Psychology, Computer Science, Anthropology, and related fields. The course fulfills introductory prerequisites for advanced Linguistics coursework and the Arts & Humanities distribution requirement.
Moira Weigel
In this class, we will explore over three thousand years of literature about what it means to create and live with artificial intelligences. In the process, we will address urgent questions about the purpose of work, the nature of love, the limits of agency, and the essence of creativity, drawing wisdom from writers ranging from Aristotle to Zhuangzi and William Shakespeare to Mary Shelley, and scrutinizing texts from the Book of Genesis and Gospel of Matthew to tweets by @sama and essays by Ted Chiang. At the same time, we will ask whether literature itself might constitute a kind of AI, with its vast repository of data about human experience and its variety of forms for recombining them–noting that, at least since Alan Turing, computer scientists have treated imitation or mimesis of human language as a key test of their machines.
Spencer Lee-Lenfield
We read a range of historically important works of literature from around the world - twice! We read everything carefully in more than one translation to learn the art of rereading, as well as how to enjoy and critique translations, not just read “through” them. We also learn about the structure of a range of languages, and think about how those languages shape their literatures. This is a great class to take if you’re thinking about learning a new language in the future. It’s also a good entryway to other literature and language classes for first- and second-year students, as well as for students concentrating in fields outside the humanities.
Fall 2025
Karen Thornber
Engaging dynamically with literature, film, the visual and performing arts, history, philosophy, ethics, and religion, as well as a range of skills inherent to the arts and humanities, this course provides students with insights and perspectives that broaden their understanding and appreciation of the accelerating complexities facing health care systems worldwide, introducing them to the challenges of delivering care and achieving better health in ways that are humanized and sustainable, increasing their capacity for impactful action amidst shifting societal expectations, biomedical breakthroughs, and advances in artificial intelligence.
Lauren Kaminsky
Combining lectures and student-centered tutorials, this course introduces the study of primary sources (such as film, music, art, newspapers, oral histories, poems, material culture, and maps) alongside the theories and methods scholars across disciplines use to study them, inviting students to practice habits of observation, formal analysis, historical reflection, and the formulation of questions that are central to the study of the Arts & Humanities.
Laura van den Berg & Neel Mukherjee
This course approaches fiction-writing through literature. Including lectures that explore game-changing works of fiction as well as craft talks that teach students to apply some of the forms and techniques learned through reading in their own creative writing, the course features both critical and creative writing assignments, with an emphasis on the creative.
Jonathan Bolton, Stephen Greenblatt, Tara Menon, Louis Menand, David Elmer, Glenda Carpio
Six professors! Twelve books! 3,000 years! Humanities 10a is the first semester of a year-long course open only to first-year students. We cover interesting and important books from Homer's Odyssey to the present. Experts lecture each week, and students meet in seminars led by professors to discuss the text. Students also meet in writing labs, led by specially trained Teaching Fellows. HUM 10 is a unique opportunity for students to work closely with professors in their first year.
Richard F. Thomas
This course examines Bob Dylan in the context of those long-lived literary and musical cultures with which he works: the Beats and Moderns of the 20th and Romantics of the 19th century; Poe, Melville, Whitman and Americana of the same 19th century; Shakespeare and the old ballad traditions; and in more recent songs going back to Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and the western literary canon. Exploration and discussion of the ways in which Dylan has, like those time-tested predecessors, become a classic in his own lifetime.