Spring 2026 Courses

HUMN STUDENTS: If you run into ANY problems enrolling for classes please contact napodano@colorado.edustating your full name, the class in which you are trying to enroll and the error message you are receiving. If you are enrolling in a lecture class that also has a recitation, please include the applicable recitation section number.

If you get a message that a class is full even though there appears to be spaces in the recitation you want, this is a known systems issue. Please go ahead, waitlist yourself for the class and email napodano@colorado.edu. We are actively monitoring this and will move you into the lecture/recitation if there is space.

  Download Full Course List Here

HUMN 1001 Forms of Narrative: An Introduction to Humanities
Annje Wiese

Introduces students to forms of narrative from different historical, geographical, and cultural contexts in different media in order to explore how narrative, as cognitive tool and form of representation, functions as a means of understanding human experience. Students learn to analyze and interpret narratives and improve critical thinking, the practice of close reading, and written and verbal communication. Serves to introduce students to the types of questions and methods of interpretation encountered in Humanities.

HUMN 1002 Visualizing Culture: An Introduction to Humanities
Audrey Burba

How do we see, what do we consider worth looking at, how does this shape culture? What do visual media do to/for us and how do we endow them with meaning? This class probes such questions using a range of visual media including visual art, film, music videos, and social media. With the help of theoretical, scholarly, and popular sources, students analyze examples of visual culture and articulate their responses to the issues raised.

HUMN 1003 Conflicts in History: Civilization and Culture: An Introduction to Humanities
Andy Gilbert

Introduces students to concepts of culture, history, and civilization as sites of conflict across different historical times and geographical locations. Course materials address political and artistic questions that intersect across different ages through their different histories and guiding concepts. Students will learn to read and understand critical, historical, political, and artistic works. Emphasis will be placed on developing critical thinking, close reading, and the ability to articulate and develop issues in writing and verbally.

HUMN 1810 Islamic Spain: Land of Three Religions
Brian Catlos

For almost a thousand years much or most of the area that is now Spain and Portugal was under Islamic rule. During this time, Muslim Spain – al-Andalus – was the home to communities of Christians, Muslims and Jews who lived together in both cooperation and conflict. By the year 1000, under the rule of the Umayyad caliphs, Cordoba became the capital of the most powerful, sophisticated and wealthiest European power, and the culture they promoted helped lay the foundations for the later European Renaissance and Scientific revolution, and of modern Jewish culture. With the collapse of the caliphate soon after, Spain became a battleground for rival Christian and Muslim princes who each tried to reestablish its unity and take control of its rich legacy. The last Spanish Muslim kingdom, Granada, would fall in 1492, and over the following century Spain’s Muslims were forced to convert to Christianity, and just after 1600, their descendants were sent into exile en masse.

HUMN 3092 Studies: Capturing Sound
Matthew Peattie

This course examines how musicians and writers have attempted to describe the sonic, aesthetic, and affective aspects of sound, with an emphasis on notation, writing, and visual representations of sound. We will consider how musical sound has been translated into images, signs, and symbols, as well as how music and its effects have been described in literary and theoretical texts. Examples will range from the earliest records of music writing in the Western tradition through to graphic notations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The course will also consider literary, theoretical, and scientific texts from Ovid and Augustine through to the present day, focusing on how organized sound is captured in language.

HUMN 3092 Studies: The Podcast: Applied Humanities
Andy Gilbert

THE PODCAST is a class which critically engages podcasting as a form of media and also produces a public-facing podcast orbiting topics in the Humanities chosen by the students. Throughout the semester, the class will be analyzing various and popular formats which engender applications of the Humanities within culture and society. THE PODCAST will also produce several episodes of a podcast to be published on major podcasting apps in order to put into practice the critical skills gained throughout the students’ academic career at CU. Students will bring to their episodes unique perspectives and passions that hopefully spark curiosity and engagement within our communities.

HUMN 3093 Topics: Applied History
Patricia Limerick

This course positions CU Boulder students to unleash the full force of the skills and insights they have acquired in their study of history. In the first half of the course, students will take possession of a toolkit of techniques to turn hindsight into foresight, bringing historical perspective to bear on contemporary dilemmas and conflicts. In the second half of the course, students will put Applied History’s practices to work on down-to-earth, real-time case studies, ranging from the management and interpretation of a Boulder site connected to the atrocity of the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864 to the rethinking and reconfiguring of the core exhibit at the Longmont Museum, from the mandated 2026 revision of the century-old arrangements for allocating water from the Colorado River to the activities planned for the 150th anniversary of Colorado statehood. Concluding the course, students will assemble an inventory, to be distributed nationwide, of the ways Applied History that can enhance the employability of emerging historians while also offering hope to a society struggling with a chronic affliction of historical amnesia.

HUMN 3600 Avatars: Studies in Contemporary Posthumanism
Andy Gilbert

This course seeks to introduce students to the analysis of posthuman thought via the concept of the avatar within our digital cultures. Through an interdisciplinary approach to theory, art, and culture, students will become familiar with the discourse of both humanism and posthumanism as it relates to games, virtual spaces, and digital embodiments. Students will read selected theories on defining avatars and posthumanism and engage with these texts in a critical fashion in order to develop skills in close-reading, critical thinking, and analytical writing. Our primary creative texts will span different modes and genres of media from video games to poetry from around the world. The final grade will be assessed based on tests, papers, quizzes, and participation. It is my desire that students gain a foundational knowledge of human complexity. These skills will be integral to the further study of cultural texts that shape society within any given class or within your everyday reality where the borders of the human self are measured or tested.

HUMN 3666 Critical Futures: Theorizing Climate Change
Annje Wiese

This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding environmental humanities and explores the insights that arts and humanities can provide in the face of climate change, environmental injustice, and our uncertain futures. By looking at diverse representations/theories about the Anthropocene, this course considers how we account for humans’ relationship to nature and what the consequences of this are. It also discusses how art and fiction might harness individual and group will to sustain our world.

HUMN 3801 Muslims, Christians, Jews & the Mediterranean Origins of the West
Brian Catlos

This course provides a historical foundation for the study of western Modernity, including the Anglo-European and Islamic worlds. It focuses on the Mediterranean region in the long Middle Ages (650-1650), emphasizing the role of Christian, Muslim and Jewish peoples and cultures, in Europe, Africa and West Asia in both conflict and collaboration. The approach is interdisciplinary incorporating social, economic, cultural, literary and art history, combining lectures with discussions based around readings of contemporary documents and the analysis of contemporary artifacts.

The goals are to provide students with foundational knowledge of history of the broader West and the history of the Pre-Modern Mediterranean region, focusing on the role of ethnic and religious diversity in the formation of Western societies and cultures. Topics will include: political, economic and social history, religion and culture, ethnicity and community, gender, intellectual and cultural history, slavery, and others.

No pre-requisites/ all majors are welcome.

HUMN 4170 Fiction and Reality
Annje Wiese

Throughout history humans have tried to understand the distinction between fiction and reality. But our contemporary culture seems particularly interested in (maybe obsessed with?) the relationship between the two concepts. In this course we will explore the consequences of the assumption that a recognizable distinction between reality and fiction exists. We will also consider the increasing sense that there is no tangible way to distinguish the two. Over the course of the semester, we will analyze a diverse selection of sources in order to see how they define reality and fiction and what the consequences of these definitions are. 

HUMN 4720 Architecture and the Feminine: Women on space and Creativity
Audrey Burba

This course examines women’s depictions of space, confinement, and liberation in literature, art, and film. Women’s artistic productions have long sought to conceptualize, expose, and subvert the ways that gender and power relations are inscribed into the spaces they inhabit. Together, we will trace the rich history of these visions of spaces (physical, geographical, psychological, and imagined) and explore their relationship to gender, subjectivity, power, and creativity.

Over the course of the semester, we will consider how representations of the traditional places assigned to women are used to comment on the physical, intellectual, economic, and religious boundaries erected by these spaces. Most notably, we will examine how the home, sometimes painted as a valuable and meaningful source of identity, also represents male dominance and female subjugation.