Humanities

Indigenous Canada is a 12-lesson Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) that explores Indigenous histories and contemporary issues in Canada. From an Indigenous perspective, this course explores key issues facing Indigenous peoples today from a historical and critical perspective highlighting national and local Indigenous-settler [...]

Do you have a desire to write a novel, write a screenplay, design a video game? In this project-centered course you will develop your own, original, intellectual property (IP) into a transmedia project containing written versions of your IP on various platforms. You will begin your novel, adapt the [...]

Philosophy, Science and Religion mark three of the most fundamental modes of thinking about the world and our place in it. Are these modes incompatible? Put another way: is the intellectually responsible thing to do to ‘pick sides’ and identify with one of these approaches at the exclusion of [...]

This course of Chinese Culture and Contemporary China will explore the foundations of Chinese civilization and the dimensions of Chinese culture. It will pay particular attention to the relationship between Chinese culture and the present-day life of the Chinese people and to the different elements of the culture which [...]

Colossal pyramids, imposing temples, golden treasures, enigmatic hieroglyphs, powerful pharaohs, strange gods, and mysterious mummies are features of Ancient Egyptian culture that have fascinated people over the millennia. The Bible refers to its gods, rulers, and pyramids. Neighboring cultures in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean wrote about its [...]

In this course we will discuss the history of some ideas that have been hugely influential in the modern west and that were taken out to the rest of the world. The discussion centers on an extraordinary and historically important figure, a sixteenth century German man named Martin Luther. [...]

The objective of this course is to provide an overview of the culture of ancient Rome beginning about 1000 BCE and ending with the so-called "Fall of Rome". We will look at some of the key people who played a role in Rome, from the time of the kings [...]

The Holocaust was an inconceivable historical event, which forever robbed Western culture of its innocence. As civilized human beings, we fail to understand how events of such horror could have taken place, and how an idea so inhumanly warped could have spread like wildfire through an entire continent, instigating [...]

Effective altruism is built on the simple but unsettling idea that living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good one can. In this course you will examine this idea's philosophical underpinnings; meet remarkable people who have restructured their lives in accordance with it; and think about how [...]

How did the State of Israel come to be? How is it that an idea, introduced in 19th century Europe, became a reality? And how does that reality prevail in the harsh complexities of the Middle East? Presented by Professor Eyal Naveh, with additional units from Professor Asher Sussers' [...]