Explore exciting new and featured courses for Spring 2026.
Days of the week: M = Monday, T = Tuesday, W = Wednesday, R = Thursday, and F = Friday
Core Requirements: CPUD = U.S. Diversity; CPRF = Regional Focus; CPGC = Global Connections; CPFA = Arts; CPPE = Pre-1800; CPMS = Math/Science; CPLS = Lab Science
Note: Course times and details are subject to change. Please check for the latest information.
![[Historical Illustration] Combat of Rama and Ravana](/sites/default/files/assets/Advising/F25_ARTH_195.jpg "Combat of Rama and Ravana")
Prof. Rebecca Hall | TR 3:05-4:30 | 4 units
Core Requirements Fulfilled: CPRF, CPFA, & CPPE (Any 2 of the 3)
Prerequisites: None
Course Description:
This course introduces East Asian art from ancient times to the present. Although the framework of the course is loosely chronological, each week will focus on in-depth analysis of a different type of object that addresses a particular problem or concept. We will explore topics such as metaphorical uses of amorphous ink in calligraphy and painting, the deconstruction of artistic hierarchies in the tea ceremony, and gender and the politics of contemporary performance art. In addition to developing the foundational skills of close looking, critical thinking, and self-reflective writing, students will ultimately gain an understanding of the diversity, complexity, and conceptual excitement of East Asian art.
![[Painting] Dorothy Tanning's "Aux environs de Paris (Paris and Vicinity)" (1962)](/sites/default/files/styles/wysiwyg_300w/public/assets/Advising/Tanning_Aux_environs_de_Paris.jpeg)
Prof. Amy Lyford | MW 4:05-5:30pm | 4 units
Core Requirements Fulfilled: CPGC & CPFA
Prerequisites: None
Course Description:
This course will explore the artistic and literary movement of Surrealism that emerged in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. Born in the years just after World War I, Surrealism aimed to destroy conventional modes of artistic and literary representation through what they called a Surrealist "revolution." The Surrealists read the works of Freud, Marx, Sade and Lautreamont; they aimed to destroy bourgeois cultural traditions including the family, the state, and organized religion. And although many of the Surrealists were men, women artists and writers were deeply connected to Surrealism. In this course, we will focus on the work of these women artists and the specific ways they created work that explored notions of female power, desire, embodiment, and political activism. Although we will primarily focus on artists of the 1930s-1970s, we will explore how contemporary artists continue to mine Surrealist artistic strategies to disrupt dominant cultural, social and artistic paradigms to challenge ideas about how "women" might be represented.
Image caption: Dorothea Tanning's "Aux environs de Paris (Paris and Vicinity)" (1962)
Prof. Jingyi Li | MW 4:05-5:30pm | 4 units
Core Requirements Fulfilled: CPRF & CPPE
Prerequisites: None
Course Description:This course offers an overview of Japanese literary history from the eighth to the early twentieth century. We will read a variety of translated works from premodern to modern Japan, the social and religious background that shaped Japanese literature?s forms and aesthetics, as well as the role of Japanese literature in constructing world views and national identity towards modern times. We will also analyze the textual sources in comparison with visual materials and objects to further explore the themes that connected premodern and modern cultural lives. Through secondary scholarship that examines these texts from multiple disciplines, we will explore different ways of critically engagement with Japanese literature. At the end of the semester, students will produce a free-form media presentation that analyzes one of the literary works covered in this course. The source texts are translated into English and knowledge of the Japanese language is not required. Crosslisted as ASN 262 and CSLC 262.
Image caption: Image of an early modern Japanese book
Prof. Julia Sushytska | TR 1:30-2:55 pm | 4 units
Core Requirements Fulfilled: CPRF
Prerequisites: None
Course Description: The course will critically examine philosophical ideas about humans, animals, and machines. We will think about the current stage of technological development—the ways in which contemporary technologies both expand and interrupt what it means to be human. We will focus on several key concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (including becoming-animal, lines of flight, and reterritorialization). Our discussions will situate these concepts in the context of past and ongoing posthumanist debates, placing them alongside the contributions of contemporary philosophers, such as Bernard Stiegler and Catherine Malabou. The plays and short stories of Anton Chekhov will help chart out—not so much the lines of flight, as footpaths for slower becomings and futures.
Image caption: Cueva de las Manos (“Cave of the Hands”), Argentina
Prof. Clair Morrissey | MWF 1:55-2:50pm | 4 units
Core Requirements Fulfilled: CPFA
Prerequisites: None
Course Description: This course will explore foundational questions in the philosophy of art: What is art? How does art get its meaning? (Why) do we value the authenticity or originality of an artwork? What determines whether something is a good work of art? Can art make us better (or worse) people? Can good works of art have morally bad properties? How can we be moved by fictions (that is, how can we fear the monsters of horror films)? We will also have at least one field trip, and will partner with 511±¬ÁĎ's Lowercase Printshop to create a collective commonplace book.
Image caption: The Nine Muses - Wonders of the Ancient World, New York Public Library
Prof. Alec Schramm | MWF 9:35-10:30am | 4 units
Core Requirements Fulfilled: CPMS
Prerequisites: MATH 214
Course Description:
Topics include: Fundamentals of discrete-state quantum mechanics; Bits vs qubits; the no-cloning theorem; entanglement and EPR states; teleportation; quantum encryption; Bell’s inequality and non-local correlations; interpretations of quantum mechanics; quantum logic gates; and quantum algorithms.
Prof. Tiffany Wheatland-Disu | MWF 1:55-2:50pm | 4 units
Core Requirements Fulfilled: CPRF
Prerequisites: None
Course Description: This course offers an introduction to the modern history of Africa from the 15th century to the end of the Cold War, engaging a particular focus on the vital role African societies have played in the making of the modern world. Rather than presenting Africa as peripheral to global history and conceptions of modernity, this course emphasizes the centrality of Africa in the major political, economic and social transformations which shape and define our modern world. Students will examine the evolving relationship between Africa and Europe within the broader context of the global rise of mercantile capitalism, the European imperial project of the 15th - 19th centuries and the geopolitical context of the Cold War struggle for influence and resources in Africa.
Key themes include: sovereignty and dependency, development and underdevelopment, nationalism and resistance, and pan-Africanism and black internationalism. These will be analyzed in relation to broader global forces including neocolonialism, monopoly capitalism and globalization.
Interrogating hegemonic narratives that portray Africa as a passive recipient of external forces, this course centers African agency in global history and contributions to modernity, concluding with an assessment of Africa’s role in the emerging global order.
Image caption: Modern Africa
![[Historical Photo] Jewish Resistance fighters who were captured by SS troops during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising](/sites/default/files/assets/Advising/F25_CTSJ_HIST_232.jpg "Jewish Resistance fighters who were captured by SS troops during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising")
Prof. Ben Ratskoff & Prof. Marla Stone | TR 1:30-2:55 | 4 units
Core Requirements Fulfilled: CPRF
Prerequisites: None
Course Description:This course examines the Holocaust as a historical event, as well as its continuing manifestations around memory, justice, and representation. We will trace the origins, implementation, and legacies of the persecution and mass murder of Jewish people by Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators alongside the persecution and mass murder of Communists, Socialists, Sinti and Roma, disabled people, queer and trans people, Black people, Slavic peoples, and others in Nazi-occupied territories. Situating the Holocaust within the broader history of Europe and the world from 1919 to 1945, students will study the rise of fascism and the Nazi Party, the role of nationalism, antisemitism, and colonialism, the development of racist and eugenic policy, the context of war in enabling mass atrocity, and postwar processes of memory and justice. In addition to historical frameworks, this interdisciplinary course draws on methods and sources from Jewish Studies, Genocide Studies, Cultural Studies, Visual Studies, Memory Studies, and Critical Theory. Throughout, attention will be given to the potentials and pitfalls of documentary evidence, photography, and testimony; the politics of memorialization and representation; debates over uniqueness and comparison; and the roles played by gender, sexuality, race, religion, class, geography, and political ideology in shaping the experiences of both victims and perpetrators. Students will also have an opportunity to engage the landscape of Holocaust memory in Los Angeles, including institutions such as the USC Shoah Foundation, the Holocaust Museum Los Angeles, and the Museum of Tolerance.
Image caption: Jewish Resistance fighters who were captured by SS troops during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising
Prof. Rosie Stockton | MWF 3:00-3:55 | 4 units
Core Requirements Fulfilled: CPGC
Prerequisites: None
Course Description: In this course, students will consider the intersection of the histories of psychoanalysis, psychiatry and liberation movements. Since the 90s, psychoanalysis is often characterized as a theory concerning sexuality and sexual difference divorced from political histories, accused of universalism and essentialist assumptions about difference. In recent years, there has been a return to psychoanalysis to examine the social unconscious and psychic manifestations of oppression. This class revisits the political potential of psychoanalysis and psychiatry movements. In addition to queer and feminist interventions into hegemonic discourses of psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, we will explore how psychoanalysis might be repurposed to analyze problems of race and racial difference and investigate the material histories of the psychiatry in anti-colonial liberation movements. We will examine topics such as Frantz Fanon’s psychiatric practice during the Algerian Revolution, the relationship of the Institutional Psychiatry Movement and the Spanish Civil War, Abolitionist theories of deinstitutionalization, Queer and Trans interventions into psychopathologies, the psychoanalytic question of negativity in Black Studies, and clinical psychoanalytic practices under colonial occupation. Students can expect to read theorists and practitioners such as Jean Oury, François Tosquelles, Félix Guattari, Judith Butler, José Esteban Muñoz, Jaqueline Rose, Lauren Berlant, Liat Ben-Moshe, Patricia Gherovici, Avgi Saketopoulou, Hortense Spillers, Fred Moten, Lara Sheehi, Stephen Sheehi, and more. We will also connect theories of madness and gender deviance to make sense of the psychology of our contemporary political climate. Drawing on epistemological resistance from bodies of minoritarian knowledge, students will explore the psychic life of racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, and social injustice.
Prof. Kai Yui Samuel Chan | TR 1:30-2:55pm | 4 units
Core Requirements Fulfilled: CPGC
Prerequisites: None
Course Description:
Increasingly people are on the move, but not on equal terms. In this class, we will approach contemporary regimes of movement normatively and critically. While our investigations are anchored in political theory, we will draw from other social sciences and read studies ranging from that of ancient Greeks to those about contemporary Tibetans.
The first half of the course centers on questions of membership. We will examine the meaning of citizenship, probe into the various membership categories beyond that of citizenship, interrogate the acquisition rules of these membership categories, and question how rights and obligations are distributed across these categories. We will also explore the possibilities of going beyond the nation state, as promised by the idea of cosmopolitan citizenship.
The second half of the course turns to migration. We will study the debates over whether people should be allowed to migrate across state borders and, relatedly, on what grounds could the state justify their control over borders. We will then attend to the meanings and politics of the categorization of migrants (refugees, asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, economic migrants etc.). Finally, we will ask what rights and obligations migrants have in relation to their home, host, and diasporic communities.
This course consists of a community based learning component in collaboration with the CCBL and migrant rights organizations. This course fulfills the Theory Subfield for the Politics major and minor requirements.
Prof. Peter Dreier | W 2:00-4:55pm | 4 units
Core Requirements Fulfilled: CPUD
Prerequisites: None
Course Description: This course will examine why the U.S. has more poverty and more inequality than any other wealthy nation -- and what we can do about it. The course will include class discussion, readings, and films. Among the topics we'll discuss are: Who benefits and who suffers from America's high of poverty and inequality? Should our society try to significantly reduce poverty and inequality? If so, what can we do? Who is poor in America? Who is super-wealthy? Who is middle class? What are the major stereotypes about the lives of the poor and the super-wealthy? How have issues of race, gender, and immigration influenced the level of poverty? Why are poor, middle class, and wealthy people in America concentrated in certain locations - more so than in other wealthy societies? Has government policy made poverty and inequality better or worse? What political movements and policy reforms have made a difference in improving the lives, and reducing the number, of America's poor? How can poor Americans and their allies influence politics and policy? Same as SOC 295. Students who want to get a head start on the readings should read Barbara Ehrenreich's book, "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America."
Prof. Chris Cianci | MW 1:55-2:50pm | 2 units
Core Requirements: None
Prerequisites: None
Course Description:
What does it take to be an entrepreneur? Entrepreneurship is about imagining a new venture and taking steps to implement that vision. This path can be difficult, complex, and risky, but also has the potential for substantial meaningful impact and rewards. In this course, we will explore the entrepreneurial process. You will learn how different types of business structures shape a company's foundation, what it takes to fund raise (if it is that kind of company), and the everyday concerns of running the company that evolve through the various stages of its development.
First floor, Room 134