Autumn Quarter 2025 Arts & Humanities courses
This is for informational purposes only. Areas of inquiry/degree requirements, fees, and course descriptions may change. Check the time schedule for course days and times BEFORE you register. Always refresh your degree audit after registering for courses or changing your schedule.
For more A&H courses, use the Time Schedule: http://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/
American Indian Studies
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/ais.html
AIS 170 – American Indian Art and Aesthetics (5 credits)
Diversity credit
Introduces the aesthetic universe of Indigenous peoples of North America, peoples who are currently known as American Indian, Alaskan Native and Canadian First Nations. Explores multiple examples of North American Indigenous thought, expression, stories, dance, art, film, and music.
AIS 377 – Indigenous Literature and the Environment (5 credits)
Diversity credit
Engages with a variety of authors and literary forms, as well as critical perspectives including Creative writings (novels, short stories, poems) of contemporary Indian authors; the traditions out of which these works evolved. Differences between Indian writers and writers of the dominant European/American mainstream. Offered jointly with ENGL 359.
African American Studies
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/afamst.html
Afram 214 – Intro African American Literature (5 credits)
Diversity credit
Introduction to various genres of African American literature from its beginnings to the present. Emphasizes the cultural and historical context of African American literary expression and its aesthetics criteria. Explores key issues and debates, such as race and racism, inequality, literary form, and canonical acceptance. Offered jointly with English 258A.
Afram 220 – African American Film Studies (5 credits)
Diversity credit
Examines the history and theory of African American filmmaking, introducing central political and aesthetic debates by way of different cinematic eras, genres, and filmmakers. Focuses primarily on black directors and producers independent and commercial contexts as they confront popular representations of U.S. blackness in their own cinematic practice.
Afram 318 (5 credits)
Diversity credit
Considers how generic forms and conventions have been discussed and distributed in the larger context of African American, or other African diasporic literary studies. Links the relationship between generic forms to questions of power within social, cultural, and historical contexts. Offered jointly with ENGL 318.
American Ethnic Studies
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/aes.html
AES 312 – Race and Radical Imagination (5 credits)
Diversity credit
Works of speculative culture and experimental writing in Black, Asian American, Chicanx/Latinx, and Indigenous literary and aesthetic traditions, such as Afrofuturism. Includes popular genres like sci-fi and horror, alongside demanding, innovative, and visionary texts. Considers their relation to radical and revolutionary political movements.
Asian American Studies
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/asamst.html
AAS 330 – Asian American Theater (5 credits)
Diversity credit
Covers drama from the 1970's to now, in historical contexts. The study of drama is dialogical, through dialogue. Themes are contested among the characters. Our studies participate, with the plays, in questioning race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. Includes students' performances of dramatic readings. No prior experience in theater is required.
Anthropology
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/anthro.html
Anth 233 – Language and Society (5 credits)
Introduces the study of sociolects, the varieties of language that arise from differences in cultural and societal groups, often reflective of power inequalities. Raises awareness of the role that society and the individual play in shaping sociolects via the systematic observation and critical discussion of linguistic phenomena. Offered jointly with COM 233/LING 233.
Architecture
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/archit.html
Arch 150 – Appreciation of Architecture I (3 credits)
Historical survey of global architecture and built environments with reference to environmental, technological, and socio-cultural contexts, from prehistory to 1400. For nonmajors.
Arch 200 – Architectural Design and Representation (5 credits)
No freshmen, seniors
Introduces architectural representation as fundamental medium for investigation, analysis, and documentation of objects, processes, and architectural space. Consists of a series of investigative projects that introduce orthographic projection, axonometric, and perspective drawing, through which students develop comprehensive skills in hand-drawing and digital media.
Arch 350 – Architecture of the Ancient World (3 credits)
No freshmen
Architectural history from beginnings to AD 550.
Art History
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/arthis.html
Art H 200 – From Athena to Lady Gaga: Art in the Modern Imagination (5 credits)
writing credit
Informs ability to see art as a tool to examine history, ideology, beauty, and ultimately the image-saturated present. Also to distinguish between historical context and modern projection on artworks. Further, to discover how art transcends its context and still speaks in a language in which people can become literate.
Art H 205 – Arts of Africa (5 credits)
Writing credit
Thematic exploration of art and artists from Africa and its diaspora.
Art H 210 – Arts of Japan (5 credits)
Surveys the arts of Japan from the pre-historic era to the present. Themes include ongoing tension in Japanese art between native traditions and foreign influences, the role of ritual in Japan's visual arts, artistic responses to multiple visual pasts and rupture from these pasts, the changing loci of patronage, and the formats and materials of Japanese art.
Art H 307 – Art and Archaeology of Ancient China (5 credits)
Chinese art and archaeology from the third millennium to the third century BCE. Examines several themes in detail including: ethnographic analogy in archaeology; iconography without text; metal technology and its beginnings; the earliest known Chinese writing; the interaction between design and technique in bronze casting and jade working; comparative study of the first civilizations; archaeology of music.
Art H 316 - Buddhist Arts of Asia (5 credits)
Examines the birth and spread of Buddhism beginning with its earliest moments in South Asia. Following the Silk Road, traces Buddhism's development eastward through China, Korea, and finally to Japan to recognize the historical, social, political, and religious factors that inform the production of Buddhist art and belief.
Artic Studies
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/arctic.html
Artic 391 – Climate Change – An International Perspective: Science, Art, and Activism (5 credits)
Explores climate change science in the context of geographic, social, and political constraints, considering the role of art, activism, and Arctic indigenous peoples in communicating impacts and mitigation. Students gain knowledge in key atmospheric and ocean science principles along with the role of science in society Offered jointly with JSIS B 391.
Asian Language and Literatures
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/asianll.html
Asian 200 – Intro to Asian Languages and Literatures (5 credits)
Introduces approaches to the study of Asian languages and literature. Topics include theoretical, applied, historical, and comparative linguistics; literary and cultural study; philosophy; languages, and writing systems of Asia; and indigenous Asian approaches to the study of language and literature.
Asian 263 – Great Works of Asian Literature: Racial Histories and Stories of the Malay Archipelago (5 credits)
Selected major works of Asian literature. Taught on a rotational basis with the literary traditions of China, Japan, India covered in successive years. Content varies depending on specialization and interest of instructor. Primary emphasis on literary values of works and their tradition; attention also given to historical and social contexts and the thought and value systems of the culture involved.
Asian 498A – Epic Emotions in the Poetry of Ancient Greece and Contemporary India: The Iliad and The Mahabharata (5 credits)
The Iliad and the Mahabharata through the emotional worlds of the epics. Parts of the two epics supplemented by contemporary work on psychology of emotions and modern creative receptions of epics in literature and film. Topics include language of emotions, trans-cultural comparisons, and emotions that drive the narratives and shape the conflict of the two epics (fear, love, grief, anger, etc.). Jointly offered with Classics 369.Glits 313C.
Built Environments
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/be.html
B E 200 – Intro to Built Environments (3 credits)
Introduction to critical issues related to the planning, design, construction, and use of our built environments and the roles of the various disciplines contained within the College of Built Environments.
Chicano Studies
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/chist.html
CHSTU 465 – Contemporary Chicano Literature (5 credits)
Examines one or more problems, themes, and/or figures in the developing body of Chicano literature. Taught in English. Jointly offered with Comp Lit 321D/Span 465/Glits 313B.
Classics
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/clas.html
Clas 328 – Sex, Gender, and Representation in Greek and Roman Literature (3 credits)
Affirmation and inversion of gender roles in Greek and Roman literature, myths of male and female heroism; marginalization of female consciousness; interaction of gender, status, and sexual preference in love poetry. Readings from epic, drama, historiography, romance, and lyric.
Clas 424 – Epic Tradition (5 credits)
Ancient and medieval epic and heroic poetry of Europe in English: the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid; the Roland or a comparable work from the medieval oral tradition; pre-Greek forerunners, other Greco-Roman literary epics, and later medieval and Renaissance developments and adaptations of the genre. Choice of reading material varies according to instructor's preference. Jointly offered with Comp Lit 424/Glits 311A.
Clas 430 – Greek and Roman Mythology (3 credits)
Principal myths found in classical and later literature. Offered jointly with Comp Lit 496B.
Clas 435 – The Ancient Novel (3 credits)
Reading and discussion of the principal Greek and Roman novels, the earliest European prose fiction, with attention to earlier literature and to imperial culture.
Communications
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/com.html
Com 200 – Introduction to Communication (5 credits)
Introduces theories and research in communication. Explores the myriad ways scholars approach fundamental issues of contemporary human communication. Focuses on theories and research of communication (e.g. relational, group, political, cultural, and international). Acts as a gateway to knowledge about the communication discipline.
Com 234 – Public Debate (5 credits)
Examines public debate in a democracy by developing a rhetorical perspective of public argument and skills to evaluate debates critically. Develops an understanding of rhetoric, values, audiences, tests of reasoning, and sources of information. Sharpens critical skills and applies them to contemporary controversies in the public sphere.
Comparative History of Ideas
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/chid.html
Chid 112 – Intro to Visual Culture in the Global South (5 credits)
Introduces the study of visual images in everyday life. Topics include histories of visual technologies such as photography, and the role of images in art, journalism, advertising, and social media in shaping self and social identity in various locations in the global south.
Chid 201 – Radical Poetics (5 credits)
Diversity credit
This course is a deep dive into the radical poetic innovations of BIPOC poets. Although close reading of a poem will be important, this course will be primarily focused on understanding how and why these poets have experimented with existing poetic forms to better … approach the particulars of historical shifts and political crises. Although this course highlights the play with forms, it in no way precludes discussion of how these poems impact each of us as individuals occupying various social contexts and experiences. Written work may take the form of either a critical or creative response.
Chid 210 – The Idea of the university (5 credits)
Is the university an agent of colonialism, capitalism, and the state? Alternatively, is it a crucible for social change and resistance? Is it all of these things? Can it be something else? This course examines the university as simultaneously a crime scene, a site for healing, and a place of transformation. This course engages with the work of scholars across the arts and humanities, with special attention to the contributions of Black, Indigenous, and other critical intellectual traditions.
Chid 211 – Apocalypse and Popular Culture (5 credits)
Diversity credit
Introduces strategies for interpreting popular culture and film, focusing on a range of filmic subgenres that imagine future worlds, while situating these films within wider cultural, political, and historical contexts and foregrounding questions of power and difference, science and technology, and the politics of representation.
English
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/engl.html
Engl 204 – Popular Fiction and Media (5 credits)
No seniors Period I registration
Writing credit
Introduces students to the study of popular culture, possibly including print or visual media, understood as sites of critical reflection. Particular attention to dynamics of production and reception, aesthetics and technique, and cultural politics. Topics may foreground genres (science fiction; romance) or forms (comics; graffiti).
Engl 206 – Rhetoric in Everyday Life (5 credits)
No seniors Period I registration
Writing credit
Introductory rhetoric course that examines the strategic use of and situated means through which images, texts, objects, and symbols inform, persuade, and shape social practices in various contexts. Topics focus on education, public policy, politics, law, journalism, media, digital cultural, globalization, popular culture, and the arts.
Engl 257 – Asian American Literature (5 credits)
Writing credit
Diversity credit
No seniors Period I registration
Examines the emergence of Asian American literature as a response to anti-Asian legislation, cultural images, and American racial formation. Encourages thinking critically about identity, power, inequalities, and experiences of marginality.
Engl 265 – Intro to Environmental Humanities (5 credits)
Writing credit
Diversity credit
No seniors Period I registration
Introduces the study of the environment through literature, culture, and history. Topics include changing ideas about nature, wilderness, ecology, pollution, climate, and human/animal relations, with particular emphasis on environmental justice and the unequal distribution of environmental crises, both globally and along class, race and gender lines.
Engl 319 – African Literatures (5 credits)
Diversity credit
Open to all majors period II registration
Introduces and explores African literatures from a range of regions. Pays particular attention to writings connected with the historical experiences of colonialism, anti-colonial resistance, and decolonization. Considers the operations of race, gender, nationhood, neocolonialism, and globalization within and across these writings.
Engl 340 – Irish Literature (5 credits)
Open to all students period II registration
Examines how Irish writers have responded to Ireland's history of being divided by both British colonialism and religious conflict. Covers how these authors brought literary experimentation and innovation to Celtic storytelling traditions. Varied readings, with some imagining a unified Irish identity, while others explore the continued legacies of colonialism on issues of gender, race, religion, and citizenship.
Engl 365 – Literature and the Environment (5 credits)
Open to all students period II registration
Diversity credit
Covers ecocriticism, the study of literature and environment. Explores both environmental writing and the way literature and other cultural artifacts reflect environmental issues, including their intersection with history, inequality, and systems of power, and the placing of humanistic methods in dialogue with the sciences.
Engl 366 – Literature and Law (5 credits)
Open to all students period II registration
Introduces and explores topics in law and literature, with a focus on the relationship between legal materials and literary or cultural imaginaries. Surveys debates in the field of law and literature or focuses on a specific problem, genre, or historical period. Jointly offered with GWSS 350 and CHID 350.
French
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/french.html
French 320 – French Language and Cultural Identity (5 credits)
Explores the French language as social practice. Students learn of the social aspect of the evolution of the French language, the dynamic relationship between language and identity, and the linguistic and cultural diversity in the Francophone world. Taught in English. Prerequisite: either FRENCH 103 or FRENCH 134
Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/gwss.html
GWSS 235 – Global Feminist Art (5 credits)
Diversity credit
Introduces feminism as a way of thinking about visual art practice in terms of social hierarchy, aesthetic form, and ideology. Explores how feminist artists working in diverse locations and cultural traditions challenge, at the local and global level, artistic conventions and representations of gender, sexuality, race, class, and nationality. Offered jointly with ANTH 235.
GWSS 251 – Gender and Popular Culture (5 credits)
Diversity credit
Introduction to critical examination of gender, race/ethnicity, and sexuality in music, film, television, and the internet. Explores cultural meanings and social uses of popular culture by various communities in local and global contexts. Analysis of commercial and independent pop culture. Examination of popular culture forms varies depending on instructor.
GWSS 350 – Women in Law and Literature (5 credits)
Diversity credit
Representations of women in American law and literature. Considers how women's political status and social roles have influenced legal and literary accounts of their behavior. Examines how legal cases and issues involving women are represented in literary texts and also how law can influence literary expression. Offered jointly with CHID 350/Engl 366A.
GWSS 445 – Feminist Science (Fiction) Studies (5 credits)
This course addresses science fictional narratives to trouble and transform the human, the inhumane, the scientific apparatus, and the natural world. Students examine gender, race, sexuality, and ability, alongside relevant scientific documents and feminist theory, to better understand both science and fiction through feminist lenses. Recommended: GWSS 200 or equivalent.
GWSS 451 – Latina Culture (5 credits)
Explores the expressive culture of Chicana/Mexican American/Latina women in the United States. Cultural and artistic practices in home and in literary, music, film, spoken word, performing and visual arts. Focuses on how Chicana/Latina writers and artists re-envision traditional iconography.
Global Literary Studies
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/glits.html
Glits 200A – Literature and the Nobel Prize (5 credits)
Literature from around the world as seen through the writings of Nobel Prize winners. Features authors from a range of countries, languages, and traditions to explore wide-ranging questions such as: What is literature? Why study literature in global contexts? Who wins, who doesn't, and why? What does that tell us about literature and about the world in which we live? Taught in English. Offered jointly with French 216A. Credit/no-credit only.
Glits 251D – Global Literary Themes: The Resistance Starts Now: Media and Popular Culture in the Fight Against Authorization Power (5 credits)
An introduction to literary study. Literature from around the globe, with focus on themes such as love, friendship, war, family, art, hope, joy, goodness, or justice. Topics vary. Offered jointly with Chid 270A/Lit 298A/German 285A.
History of Modern Europe
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/modeuro.html
HSTEU 274 – European History and Film from the 1890s to Present (5 credits)
Writing credit
The twentieth century, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm has said, was an “age of extremes.” This course serves as an introduction to this turbulent age. We will survey the histories of world war, the rise and fall of fascism and communism, postwar migrations, the Cold War and decolonization, and the making (and breaking) of the European Community up through the age of Brexit.
Our discussions will be unified by our focus on the social and political function of film. This course is intended to provide an opportunity for students to explore the diverse historical uses of film – and to sharpen their own skills of visual analysis – along with an overview of major themes in 20th-century European history. Through our explorations of key moments in the recent European past, we will consider broader questions of citizenship and identity in modern political life.
We will read texts such as Art Spiegelman's Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began. Films will include early French films by Georges Melies, Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion, Sergei Eisenstein's Ten Days that Shook the World, Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, Michael Verhoeven's Nasty Girl, Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three, Gillo Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers, Richard Lester's Hard Day's Night, and Matthieu Kassovitz's Hate. Assignments will include a midterm, an exam, and a 7-8 page paper based on the readings and films.
Italian
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/italian.html
ITAL 356 – Italian Society in Film and Literature (5 credits)
Studies the evolution of Italian postwar society through the analysis of film and literature as well as critical, historical, and sociological readings. Taught in English. Open to all students. No pre-requisites.
Jackson School of International Studies: Comparative Religion
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/religion.html
Relig 105 – Jesus: A Global Biography (5 credits)
Explores how Jesus became a global icon, shaping not just Western religions but influencing cultures and traditions worldwide. Goes beyond his role in Christianity and Judaism, diving into his presence as a prophet in Islam and his impact on Asian religions. Illustrates how his teachings and legacy have transcended religious boundaries, sparking conversation, adaptation, and influence across the globe.
Jackson School of International Studies: Area Studies
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/jsisa.html
JSIS A 360 – Contemporary Spain (5 credits)
Offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the history and diversity of Spain. Presents historical, political, social, and cultural works to reflect on the major transformations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from the Spanish Civil War to today. Examines the main events that have shaped Spain's identity on both a national and global scale. Offered jointly with SPAN 360.
Jackson School of International Studies: Global and Thematic Studies
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/jsisb.html
JSIS B 416 – Putting the World on the Couch: Psychoanalysis and International Studies (5 credits)
Asynchronous online. See time schedule for details.
Explores the relation of trauma to memory and cultural production, focusing on historical, literary, and filmic treatments of hysteria and repression, shell shock, and the effects of war, terrorism, and psychic trauma. Uses psychoanalytical theory to analyze the commentary on international issues that lies in texts, films, and other cultural phenomena.
Jackson School of International Studies: Jewish Studies
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/jewst.html
Jew St 340 – Modern Yiddish Literature (5 credits)
Examines modern Yiddish literature from its origins in the Russian Empire's western borderlands (today's Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania) to its responses to ruptures of the twentieth century: world wars, revolutions, and the Holocaust. Written in the diasporic and stateless language of East European Jews, Yiddish literature deals with migration, ethnic violence, challenges to religious customs, gender norms, sexualities. Readings in English. Offered jointly with SLAVIC 340.
Landscape Architecture
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/landscape.html
L Arch 322 – Intro to Planting Design (3 credits)
Traditional ways plants are used in landscape design. Composition and design characteristics of plant materials. Technical considerations for selection, climate, cultural suitability, availability, costs, and maintenance. Open to nonmajors.
L Arch 352 – History of Landscape Architecture: (Re)Righting Landscapes (5 credits)
The history of landscape is embedded within the land. Even when those narratives are contested or erased, they continue to affect the ways in which we understand and shape the world. Survey of the development of landscape architecture as an art form from Mesopotamia to the present. Relationships to physical landscape, climate, culture, religion, and other arts. Open to non-majors.
Linguistics
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/ling.html
Ling 200 – Intro to Linguistic Thought (5 credits)
RSN credit
Not open for credit to students who have completed LING 201 or LING 400.
Language as the fundamental characteristic of the human species; diversity and complexity of human languages; phonological and grammatical analysis; dimensions of language use; and language acquisition and historical language change.
Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/melc.html
Melc 101 Gateway to the Middle East (5 credits)
Introduces the peoples of the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Horn of Africa from ancient to modern times. In this course, we will learn about the experiences of these peoples from their own stories, texts, and media. We will engage with diverse cultures, religions, languages, and lifeways. How did people in the ancient Middle East think about their identities? How did religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam start? What's the deal with the Crusades? And much more. Please note: We will talk about history and politics (including recent developments), but that is not the main focus of the course. Our main focus is learning about people's lives and experiences, and how they choose to express them in stories and media.
Melc 316 – Israeli Identities (5 credits)
Diversity credit
This course examines fiction and film, as well as selected poetry, popular songs, essays, and comics to explore the experience of diverse groups within contemporary Israeli society. Among the topics to be considered: the sabra ideal; Holocaust survivors and the second generation; Sephardic/Mizrahi communities; religious/secular divides in Israeli culture; Israel’s Arab/Palestinian minority; and questions of gender, including LGBTQ+ lives.
Melc 318 – Literature and the Holocaust (5 credits)
Diversity credit
Examines fiction, poetry, memoir, diaries, monuments, film, and pop culture from several languages and cultural milieus, with emphases on English and Hebrew. Topics include survivor testimony, shaping of collective memory, the second generation, Holocaust education and children's literature, gender and the Holocaust, and fantasy and humor as responses to catastrophe.
Melc 332 – Arab American Writers (5 credits)
Explores the influences of Arab American writing both in the United States and the Arab world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Discusses issues of emigration to the United States from the Arab world and its impact on the formation of a distinctive Arab American identity.
Melc 334 – Culture of the Arab World (5 credits)
Diversity credit
Hybrid course. Go to Time Schedule for details.
This course offers a general survey of the linguistic, geographical, historical, social, religious, cultural, and artistic aspects of the modern Arab world. Special attention will be given to the Arabic language, family, the role of the past and of social change, and Arab art and music. A good deal of the course is specifically intended to increase students' sensitivity to racial bias and sharpen awareness of multicultural issues. Ideally, the course is intended to increase tolerance and understanding by providing students with a realistic view of the cultural contours of the modern Arab World and the richness of the Arab cultural heritage. The course material will be explored through lectures and videos in addition to discussions based upon the assigned readings and lectures.
Melc 359 – Language and Ethnicity (5 credits)
Diversity credit
Explores the political, social, and linguistic contexts of language diversity in Inner Asia, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and the ongoing process of nation-state building efforts from sociolinguistic and ethnographic perspectives. Examines the power relationship between language and ethnicity, the role played by language in power inequalities, and inequality in the distribution of resources. Offered jointly with LING 359.
Music
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/music.html
Music 120 – Survey of Music (5 credits)
Studies in listening, with emphasis on the changing components of Western art music. Illustrated lectures, laboratory section meetings, and presentations by guest artists.
Music 131 – History of Jazz (5 credits)
Group Start online course. Go to time schedule for details.
Extensive overview of important musicians, composers, arrangers, and stylistic periods of jazz history from emergence of the first jazz bands at the turn of the twentieth century through post-modern bebop era of the 1990s.
Music 162 – American Pop Song (5 credits)
Group Start online course. Go to time schedule for details.
Historical, social, and stylistic study of popular idioms from the late nineteenth century to the present. Most attention to contemporary idioms (rock, country-western, soul, hip-hop). Various facets of the industry examined to learn how they influence taste and musical style.
Music 185 – The Concert Season (2 credits)
Group Start online course. Go to time schedule for details.
Performances from the School of Music concert season, supplemented by lecture topics related to concert repertoire. Analysis of applicable musical topics appropriate for enhanced appreciation of historical and cultural contexts of works performed. Attendance at ten concerts required.
Music 252 – Musical Cultures of the World (5 credits)
Near East, Central Asia, Far East, South and Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Content varies.
Philosophy
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/phil.html
Phil 102 – Contemporary Moral Problems (5 credits)
Philosophical consideration of some of the main moral problems of modern society and civilization, such as abortion, euthanasia, war, and capital punishment. Topics vary.
Phil 240 – Intro to Ethics (5 credits)
Critical introduction to various philosophical views of the basis and presuppositions of morality and moral knowledge. Critical introduction to various types of normative ethical theory, including utilitarian, deontological, and virtue theories.
Phil 242 – Medical Ethics (5 credits)
Course status TBA and is dependent on instructor availability. Contact philadv@uw.edu for status update after June 23.
Introduction to ethics, primarily for first- and second-year students. Emphasizes philosophical thinking and writing through an in-depth study of philosophical issues arising in the practice of medicine. Examines the issues of medical ethics from a patient's point of view. Course overlaps with T PHIL 270.
Russian
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/russian.html
Russ 110 – Intro to Russian Culture and Civilization (5 credits)
Introduction to Russian culture and history from pre-Christian times to the present, as seen through literary texts, music, film, visual art, and historical works. All lectures and written materials in English. No prior knowledge of Russian necessary.
Russ 223 – Russian Cinema (5 credits)
From the early years of the Soviet avant-garde to the post-Stalin era of covert critique, Soviet cinema offers an intriguing perspective on life in the USSR and the art of film. We will explore the pioneering cinema of Eisenstein, Vertov, Pudovkin, and Dovzhenko; the Hollywood-modeled propaganda films and musical comedies of the 1930s; the representation of World War II; the aesthetic and moral quests of post-Stalin era filmmakers like Kalatozov, Muratova, Shepitko, and Parajanov; and comedies, socially critical films, and new cinematic directions at the end of the USSR. With Russia's ongoing war against Ukraine, we will also explore Soviet-era films by filmmakers sensitively exploring Soviet and Russian imperialism that anticipates its resurgence in the present, under Putin.
With the hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution marked only very recently, we will approach our thinking about Soviet film by focusing on the revolution as a subject. Or, rather, revolutions—plural—in society, everyday life, gender, sexuality, and the art of cinema itself. Course offered jointly with CMS 320B.
Scandinavian Studies
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/scand.html
Scand 100 – Intro to Scandinavian Culture (5 credits)
The Scandinavian experience from the Viking Age to the present day. Covers the background for contemporary Scandinavian democracy with major emphasis on the cultural, political, and religious development of the Scandinavian countries.
Scand 326 – Scandinavian Women Writers (5 credits)
Diversity credit
Selected works by major Scandinavian women writers from mid-nineteenth-century bourgeois realism to the present with focus on feminist issues in literary criticism. Offered jointly with GWSS 429.
Scand 445 – War and Occupation in Northern Europe: History, Fiction, and Memoir (5 credits)
Diversity credit
The study of literary representations (fiction, memoirs, and personal narratives) dealing with World War II and the occupation of the Nordic and Baltic countries.
Slavic Languages and Literatures
http://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2024/slavic.html
Slavic 200 – Intro to Slavic Literature (5 credits)
While wars seem “never ending, still beginning,” we seldom pay attention to what wisdom, if any, can be gleaned from how they are portrayed by poets and writers. While the genre of war literature, which ranges from eyewitness accounts of combat to the depictions of civilians caught in the crossfire, has had many practitioners over the centuries, our readings will include works by David Diop (France), Bertolt Brecht (Germany), Anna Świrszczyńska (Poland), Yusef Komunyaaka (USA), Tarfia Faizullah (Bangladesh/USA), Don Mee Choi (Korea/USA), Serhiy Zhadan (Ukraine), among others. In addition to focusing on close-reading and comparative analysis of novels, short stories, hybrid works, and poetry, we will also examine various social, political, and cultural contexts to see if and how they might have impacted the authors under discussion. Offered jointly with Glits 251B. All readings are in English. No prerequisites.
Textual and Digital Studies
https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/AUT2025/txtds.html
TXTDS 221 – Artificial Intelligence and Human Creativity in Historical Perspective (5 credits)
Can chatbots write original poems or create art? Should generative AI output be protected by copyright? Or is generative AI, almost by definition, an infringement of copyright insofar as models are invariably trained on massive amounts of in-copyright text without permission? How exactly should we evaluate and engage with the text and images that AI models create? The striking resemblance of this output to the “natural,” and even the “creative” expression of humans has sparked anxiety and euphoria. At one level, this is related to dislocations generative AI technologies seem poised to introduce: into job markets, workflows, human relations, and education. At another level, these resemblances force us to question and defend values and qualities we’ve long felt defined us in our humanity, such as creativity and originality.
But conceptions of human creativity and originality have always been shaped by changing technologies for writing, archiving, classifying, retrieving, and processing text, starting with the technology of writing itself. We'll explore how writing techniques and tools have, for centuries and millennia, impacted and reflected evolving conceptions of human ability, creativity and originality. These include technologies for replicating texts at scale such as the printing press and the photocopier, technologies for storing and classifying information (like reference works organized alphabetically), and technologies of automation, which date back centuries (see the “poet” above!).
We’ll look at legal, economic and cultural infrastructures that have evolved to uphold and sustain these conceptions, things like copyright and citation practices, and authorship. Like the automaton in the image, these infrastructures largely date from the 18th century and reflect not only a set of values about what constitutes the human, but the dominance of a specific information technology, notably print publication. These infrastructures are coming under enormous pressure today by new digital publication models, from social media to AI, yet it is largely to this framework from 300 years ago – to copyright and to the rights of authors and creators to control the circulation of their works – that the response to generative AI has turned.
At the core of the course will be a reflection on interactions between humans and machines as the historical basis for notions of human originality and creative expression. This offers a framework for considering ways in which AI both represents something new and grows out of continuities, thereby demystifying AI and allowing for a more dispassionate assessment of its limitations and possibilities. This is a 200-level course, offering a broad historical introduction. No prior experience or knowledge is required or expected.
TXTDS 403 – Archives, Data, and Databases (5 credits)
Open to all majors period II registration
Textual archives and databases; their historical construction and role as mediators to the past, bringing light to and obscuring/reshaping the past. Digitization of archives and repositories. Transformation of historical texts into data, which can be searched, processed, and analyzed in new ways. Techniques for building, organizing, and analyzing archives and databases.