Harvard University courses

Why are some cities and states richer than others? What drives people and businesses to cluster in certain places and not others? This course explores the economic forces that shape local outcomes, such as productivity, wages, housing, and inequality, and how…

What is populism, and how much of a threat is it to democracy? The recent rise of authoritarian-populism, across both long-established and developing democracies, has posed new challenges for good governance. This course explores the conditions for the rise…

This course aims to provide students with an overview of issues relating to the relationships between digital technologies, politics, and law. It also introduces students to theoretical frameworks for examining the mutually interactive relationships between…

This is an intensive workshop in the craft of writing short fiction. It is for writers who love to read short stories and want to make their own short stories come alive on the page. Students should arrive having read widely among past and contemporary…

How do we know how humans evolved? This course investigates the evidence and methods used to reconstruct human evolution. We review eight million years of evolutionary history, focusing on the origins of defining features of our species such as bipedalism,…

What do our ghost stories say and what do our beasts betray about us? Which witches bewitch us, which rumors consume us, and what sense can be made of what haunts us? Restless spirits, alien invaders, wicked witches, bloodthirsty vampires, legendary cryptids,…

There is widespread agreement that global and local food systems must be improved in order to promote long-term sustainability, but there is widespread disagreement about exactly what those changes should be. This course provides an overview of key approaches…

The digital age has arrived. The fourth industrial revolution—driven by artificial intelligence (AI) combined with a fusion of cutting-edge technologies—is blurring the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds. Accelerated by the recent pandemic,…

This section of the writers' residency is for writers interested in writing drama, as well as for fiction and creative nonfiction writers interested in studying elements of dramatic writing. Students interested in exploring dramatic writing for the first time…

This course is a comprehensive survey of chemistry for the general student that emphasizes the principles underlying the formation and interaction of chemical substances: stoichiometry, states of matter, thermochemistry, atomic and molecular structure,…

This course provides an introductory survey of the field of finance. It examines the agents, instruments, and institutions that make up the financial system of the modern economy, such as bonds, the stock market, derivatives, and the money market. Along the…

The goal of this course is to develop skills for making corporate investment decisions and for analyzing risk. Topics include discounted cash flow and other valuation techniques; risk and return; capital asset pricing model; corporate capital structure and…

While a near consensus has been reached on the existence and impact of climate change, the question now turns to what can be done to address the problem. Sustainability challenges increasingly offer unparalleled opportunities for innovative solutions. This…

This course is a capstone for students earning a Master of Liberal Arts, sustainability degree. Course deliverables include a detailed, actionable, and measurable sustainability action plan (SAP), as well as a presentation to be given to the class and to…

This course is an introduction to electromagnetism, wave optics, and ray optics. Topics covered include electrostatics, circuits, magnetism, diffraction, interference, and image formation via reflection and refraction. This course has a laboratory component…

This course is about how to lift the veil of an insider's industry. Students learn how quantitative finance is applied in practice and utilized by the world's largest investment banks, asset management firms, hedge funds, pension plans, and insurance…

This course aims to introduce student to normative, ethical, and philosophical debates around the place of science and technology in human societies. Political theory brings a specific set of questions, problems, approaches, and conceptual tools for thinking…

No one wants someone they love to starve or go without medicine or shelter, but one in ten people go hungry every day, a record-high number are homeless every night, and nearly three million children live in extreme poverty in the United States, one of the…

This course exposes the student to the basic principles of test construction and interpretation, including issues related to reliability and validity. Additionally, issues related to test administration, scoring, and reporting are explored, with emphasis…

This course examines how domestic and international legal institutions regulate the law of war, crimes against humanity, torture, and genocide, and the main legal theories that lawyers and judges use to address their violation. Students are introduced to the…

The course examines the science of happiness and well-being through lenses of positive psychology, neuroscience, and organizational behavior. We translate findings from academic research on human flourishing into attitudes, behaviors, and practices that…

This course offers an in-depth overview of the management consulting industry and the skills required to succeed within it. Topics include the structure, conduct, and performance of the management consulting industry; firms in the industry and their…

This course is designed for students with little or no prior instruction in ancient Greek who are committed to learning the language at rapid speed. Equivalent to the first two semesters of college-level instruction, it covers all basic grammar and vocabulary…

Speaking the language of modern mathematics requires fluency with the topics of this course: infinite series, integration, and differential equations. We model practical situations using integrals and differential equations. Students learn how to represent…

This course introduces students to the Arabic language. Emphasis is placed on building communicative skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing), as well as on developing intercultural competence in relation to Arab cultures.

Intended and designed for students with little, if any formal knowledge of Italian, this course enables beginning students to develop the skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing Italian in a cultural context. Activities include listening…

This course considers how culture shapes the economic aspects of our lives. That is, we seek to understand the economy not as a separate realm with its own special logic and structure but instead as embedded in the social relations, identities, and cultural…

This course examines the history of the form, including graphic novels and comic strips, and explores the building blocks necessary to create effective comics based upon personal experiences and research. Students are taught ways to access their writing and…

How would you choose the ideal worker out of 400 applicants? Is it possible to predict employee motivation? Are virtual teams more effective than in-person teams? Questions like these can be answered through the help of industrial and organizational (I/O)…

This course trains students in the skills of critically engaging the scholarly literature in their field of study. They learn how to assess the presuppositions, argumentation, methodology, evidence, and conclusions of scholarly writing in their discipline.…

Humankind faces tremendous challenges. Lives and livelihoods of civilians around the world are threatened by conflict, the health of individuals everywhere is at risk due to infectious diseases such as COVID-19, and our planet is threatened by the…

This course is designed for students who wish to acquire a precise reading knowledge of sophisticated German prose for research, study, and/or career purposes. The course focuses on grammar topics, parsing, and translation, for which texts from a variety of…

This course helps students develop academically strong, team-based capstone proposals. It is mandatory for candidates in the Master of Liberal Arts, systems engineering, who wish to register for <a href="/search/?p=CSCI%20E-599c" data-action="result-detail"…

This course introduces the generally accepted principles that govern an entity's financial accounting system and the income statement and balance sheet that are the principal end products of the system. Students learn how accounting information is used to…

In this course, students not only learn practical techniques for handling high-stakes deals and partnerships, but also practice using artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools to simulate real-world negotiation scenarios such as negotiating salaries, hiring…

This course immerses students in a single, real-world entrepreneurial challenge from a for-profit, nonprofit, or government organization. Across the course, students work directly with senior executives and relevant stakeholders—conducting interviews,…

This course provides a comprehensive introduction to the concept and types of negotiation. It is designed for students who wish to manage individual and organizational conflict and negotiations more effectively based on the premise that those in management…

Work is more than what we do; it shapes who we are and who we may become. Whether competing at the highest level, managing people and leading a company, caring for a loved one, or learning to live with health challenges, pressures that drive success can also…

Extracting actionable insights and relationships from massive complex data sets is the domain of data mining. Data mining has wide-ranging applications in science and technology. This course addresses several key aspects of data mining including the use of…

Success in today's software marketplace requires excellent user experience (UX). This course presents the foundations of excellent UX in a platform-agnostic manner. This course requires no programming. Instead, we focus on deciding what to program to make our…

This section of the writers' residency is for creative writers who wish to develop craft techniques to build suspense in their work. While this section may be especially useful for students interested in writing suspense, thriller, or detective fiction, it…

Mathematical models are ubiquitous, providing a quantitative framework for understanding, prediction, and decision-making in nearly every aspect of life, ranging from the timing of traffic lights, to the control of the spread of disease, to resource…

This course introduces and wrestles with some of the central themes, concepts, and issues in biomedical ethics. Ethics is the study of normativity or shoulds, and biomedical ethics takes on the challenge of thinking through the normative aspects of the fact…

This course takes a case-based clinical approach towards integrating laboratory sciences across multiple biology disciplines. Each case explores a patient's clinical presentation through hands-on laboratory activities, experiments, and simulations. For…

Come to Harvard University for an experience where students engage with industry leaders during visits to local incubators, accelerators, and companies, as well as academic research departments and institutions. The course focuses on the following questions:…

This is an intensive course of study of the foundational mathematics needed for calculus and for the sciences, with a goal of developing deep understanding of the material. Linear, quadratic, polynomial, rational, exponential, and logarithmic functions are…

This course provides an overview of economic tools and analytic approaches available to the manager for business decision-making. It includes such topics as pricing, forecasting, demand analysis, production and cost analysis, and macroeconomic policy as it…

In this course, which is open to all levels, students explore how to create a polished and convincing solo song performance. Each class meeting begins with a vocal warmup, reviewing the basics of good singing technique and ear training. Through individual…

This advanced course explores the role of intelligence in the development of United States national security policy. We review the origins of American intelligence in Boston during the revolution and its subsequent evolution through the Civil War, world wars,…

This course is an exploration of the intersection between finance and sustainability, designed for students with a foundational understanding of sustainable finance. It focuses on how financial markets integrate environmental, social, and governance (ESG)…