Featured Courses

Instructor: We Jung Yi

How did Korea become the global cultural force it is today? How does its past continue to shape its present? This course explores Korean culture from antiquity to the twenty-first century through painting, film, TV drama, literature, and other media. We will examine the origins of Korean traditions, focusing on the formation of social relations, popular beliefs, and systems of thought that have shaped Korean life. Then we'll trace Korea's transformation through its encounters with the West, colonial rule, liberation, and the Korean War. Finally, we'll examine contemporary South Korea—its economic development and crises, democratization and its limits, relations with North Korea and the U.S., and sociocultural diversification in a global age. No preliminary knowledge of Korean history or language is required.  

Instructor: TBD

Do you dream of starting a business, but don't know where to start? This course introduces you to foundational concepts of entrepreneurship with hands-on development of a business plan and numerous guest speakers. The class is practical, hands-on and a lot of fun!

Instructor: Garnett Slatton

Business skills apply to fields far beyond commerce. Art, law, medicine, government, hospitality, and many others require a basic understanding of disciplines including selling, marketing, finance, strategy, operations, and management. This survey course introduces you to the fundamentals of running a business. Whether business is your career aspiration or you just want to learn the basics, this interactive and experiential course is for you!

Instructor: Allison Walker

This course will teach you how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is shaping research in chemistry and biochemistry. You will learn to program and build your own AI models and apply them to problems in chemistry and biochemistry, preparing you to navigate these fields in the emerging era of AI.

Instructor: Dusan Danilovic

As the United States prepares to return to the moon, we find ourselves on the brink of another space race...not only with other countries like China and India, but companies like Space X and Blue Origin. We will examine the history of the race to the moon between the US and USSR, identify important drivers and themes, then and now, and speculate on what will happen this time around.

Instructor: Amanda Little

What are the most important stories about science and discovery at Vanderbilt? Students will work with journalist-professors Amanda Little and Stephen Ornes to document the research and innovation landscape at Vanderbilt and in greater Nashville -- interviewing lab directors and research teams working on breakthroughs in medicine, engineering, AI, energy, climate solutions, human cognition and beyond. You will learn the fundamentals of journalism, interviewing skills, and the power and impact of science writing. Your work will be published our growing Vanderbilt Journalism Lab Substack and you will connect with top scholars and entrepreneurs. This 3-credit inquiry lab course can also counts for Immersion.

Instructor: John Ayers

What if the choices you make today determine the world you inherit tomorrow? In this course, you'll discover how scientific methods can be applied to understand & address pressing societal and environmental issues, from climate change to biodiversity loss to the inequitable health impacts of pollution. By exploring real-world challenges like energy production, resource management, and environmental justice, you'll learn why understanding these systems matters for your future. Whether you're concerned about the planet, curious about sustainability careers, or simply want to make informed decisions as a citizen, this course equips you with the knowledge to think critically about the environmental issues defining our time.

Instructor: Susannah Morey

Highly recommended for EES and CES majors interested in developing practical computation and coding skills with real world application to studying the Earth and environment. The skills that you will learn and practice in this course will help prepare you for a wide range of research, graduate school and career opportunities. Prior experience with Python or coding is not required.

Instructor: Sheba Karim

In this NaNoWriMo-inspired class, you will spend the semester writing your novel. While we'll read some essays on craft, complete writing exercises, and maintain a writing journal, these all work to the heart of this class: supportive and constructive feedback to help everyone produce a significant portion of their novel.

Instructor: Vera Kutzinski

Magical realism, a type of Speculative Fiction that has enjoyed remarkable popularity since the mid-20th century, began in Latin America and spread into a global phenomenon. Concerned with gender, sexuality, and race, it plays at and with the limits of reason and rationality, suggesting different ways of understanding and ordering our world. We'll explore the differences between realism and magical realism, and see how it offers escape, consolation, and sometimes revolutionary change for readers.

Instructor: Robert Barsky

Taught in English, this course explores great French literary texts from the Medieval to the modern era, touching on provocative and powerful literary themes. This survey of poems, plays, and short stories by extraordinary authors includes: François Rabelais's insights into "The Uses of Laughter" (1534); Molière's "New Forms of Comedy (1668); Madame de Lafayette's Birth of the Modern Novel" (1678); Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's "The Unknown Woman" (1845); Victor Hugo's "The Divine Stenographer" (1862); Charles Baudelaire's "Knock Down the Poor!"; Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine's "Sonnet to an Asshole" (1871); all the way up to Assia Djebar insights on postcolonial studies. (This course is not open to students who have declared a major or minor in French).

Instructor: Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller

Join an immersive, discussion-driven seminar on immigration, identity, and conflict in modern France. Drawing on films, literature, and historical sources, you'll investigate pivotal events—from the Dreyfus Affair to the 2015 Paris attacks—to understand tensions among Jews, Arabs, and Black Muslims in a society shaped by ties to Africa and the Middle East. This course is ideal for students interested in politics, history, global studies, and social justice.

Instructor: Julie Gamble

Gender is a central social relation that shapes cities and urban life. Gendered, racialized, and sexed power relations shape who can use cities, who is surveilled, and who benefits from them. Engaging directly in experiential assignments across Nashville, you will investigate the geography of gender relations in the city—between public and private, inside and outside, city center and suburb.

Instructor: Rebecca Epstein-Levi

What does it mean to live well? How ought one behave toward oneself, one's fellows, and one's community? Students will explore how one is shaped as a moral actor, and what gender has to do with that.

Instructor: Tracy Miller

Discover the profound connection between physical environments and healing outcomes through diverse mediums, ranging from the intricate materiality of ritual bronzes and Daoist talismans to the immersive design of aesthetic gardens and exquisite tea wares for medicinal brews. In this course, you will develop advanced skills in visual analysis and academic writing while investigating how ancient systems of design were crafted to enhance well-being.

Instructor: Jack Crawford

Learn and apply the policies, practices, and techniques involved in interpreting and programing museum and gallery exhibitions. We will explore how interpretive materials, experiential learning, and other forms of audience engagement can bring art to life for viewers. Students will work in tandem with an exhibition project at the Curb Center, focused on contemporary landscape art in a variety of media.

Instructor: Brandon Byrd

This course explores the deep causes and profound consequences of the U.S. Civil War. You will read recent work by some of America's most distinguished scholars and will interpret primary sources written in the nineteenth century. This is a must-take course for anyone interested in understanding the American past—and understanding how history influences the United States today.

Instructor: Bairam Khan

Discover the beauty and depth of Urdu through its rich literary traditions. You will explore both classical and modern poetry, fiction, and performance in Urdu while engaging in seminar-style discussions, recitations, and creative responses. You will strengthen reading, speaking, and interpretive skills in Urdu and experience literature as a living culture—connecting themes of geopolitics, gender, history, cinema, society, and much more.

Instructor: William Franke

This course provides an introduction to Dante's three-part poetic odyssey, the cultural world it embodies, and the literary, philosophical, and theological questions it raises. You will explore the existential descent into the self in Inferno, the transition from profane to sacred love in Purgatory, and the problematics of religious language and divine transcendence in Paradise.

Instructor: Eliav Grossman

Thinking of law school? The Talmud can help. Come discover the ancient art of Jewish legal reasoning. This class will introduce students to classical rabbinic primary sources, including biblical interpretation (midrash), law (Mishnah), scholastic discourse (Talmud), and narrative (aggadah). All sources will be provided in translation.

Instructor: Christina Karageorgou-Bastea

Mexico is more diverse than you think. Jews are also more diverse than you think. This course will introduce you to the cultural treasures of Mexico's Jewish community.

Instructor: Jesus Ruiz

Think the modern world was shaped only by Europe and the U.S.? Think again. In this course, you'll explore how colonialism, slavery, revolution, migration, and culture across the Americas created the global systems of race, labor, and power we live with today. Through an interdisciplinary lens bridging history, law, politics, and culture, you'll learn why Latin America and the Caribbean are central—not peripheral—to the story of modernity.

Instructor: Gretchen Selcke

Why are Caribbean cities like Santo Domingo, San Juan, and Miami becoming increasingly important logistics hubs? How do trade policies and supply chain management intersect with local cultures? You will explore these questions in this course, which focuses on Spanish Caribbean port cities as commercial and cultural hubs. The course is eligible for the Business Minor.

Instructor: Kirsty Clark

Explore the key frameworks, theories, and research methods for understanding LGBTQ health disparties. Pushing beyond problems, you will imagine and examine potential solutions to reduce LGBTQ health inequities, including policy approaches, healthcare interventions, organizational engagement, and interpersonal relationships.

Instructor: Ashley Watts

Addiction is one of societies most prevalent social and health issues. Learn about the physiological, psychological and social bases causing addiction from an expert on the topic, Dr. Watts. Students will learn about the brain basis for drug addiction, put into context with the social/environment factors, and learn how both contribute to the psychological spaces that addiction occurs. Why do people drink/smoke/take drugs too much? Take the class to learn the answers.

Instructor: William Franke

In this course, you will read the Bible from beginning to end—the Pentateuch (Torah), the narratives from the history books, prophets, writings, and the New Testament. We'll alo explore texts from authors such as Dante, Milton, Blake, G. M. Hopkins, and negro spirituals, to show how the tradition of poetic prophetic revelation carries on in secular literature. We'll examine how experience of communities of worship—Jewish synagogue, Catholic and Protestant churches—will add a liturgical dimension to appreciating the work as living literature and as embedded in cult and ritual.

Instructor: Albina Khabibulina

Explore classic Russian fairy tales through ancient Slavic and Christian traditions and through striking adaptations by Pushkin, Tolstoy, Stravinsky, Nabokov, Bulgakov, and others, including artistic, musical, and cinematic visions of the supernatural. No knowledge of Russian is required.

Instructor: Albina Khabibulina

Encounter the Russian novel at the moment of its highest development. Through close reading and sustained conversation, students explore how Dostoevsky's The Idiot and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina confront love and desire, moral responsibility, violence, faith, and the sense of the sacred, while offering radically different narrative forms and moral visions. No knowledge of Russian is required.

Instructor: Mariano Sana

Demography is all around us: births, deaths, marriages, fertility, divorces, moves, the onset of disability, even graduations...all of that is demographic. This course will explore key questions such as why did our global population grow from a few to over 8 billion? Can we feed 9.7 billion people by mid-century? Why is there so much variation geographically in how long people live? Why do some people have many kids but others have one, or even none? Once you see demography... you can't unsee it.

Instructor: Arun Hendi

Why is U.S. life expectancy so abysmal? Will population aging destroy our economies and healthcare systems? Why is fertility so low in Korea and so high in Kenya? Why do China and India have too many boys and too few girls? Can immigration solve population aging in Europe? Are Elon Musk and Bill Gates right? To address these questions, this course will examine the causes and consequences of population change, with a focus on the policy levers that are used to regulate fertility and migration, to improve health and living conditions, to manage population aging, and to reduce mortality. Students will learn basic demographic concepts, measures, and data sources and engage with longstanding debates about whether and how population growth promotes or undermines prosperity.

Instructor: Chalene Helmuth

Are you currently studying abroad? Coming back to Vanderbilt doesn't have to feel like a "crash landing." This course, fully taught in English, is specifically designed to transform the often daunting transition of re-entry into a collaborative, reflective journey. You will have the space to process your time abroad, turn your memories into marketable intercultural skills, and complete your immersive project. You'll gain: strategies to navigate the "reverse culture shock" of returning to Nashville, tools to critically evaluate and articulate your growth after studying abroad, a deeper understanding of the topics sparked during your semester abroad, skills to turn your experiences into professional assets, and connections to a supportive community of others who recently returned from abroad.

Instructor: Chalene Helmuth

You've already made the big decision to study abroad, but how do you make sure those months away actually change your life? Taught in English, this course is a pre-departure course designed to give you an individualized toolkit for impact. It's a deep dive into your specific goals, tailored to your destination. Each student will identify their personal goals and explore the potential of an immersive experience abroad, starting with these four pillars of engagement: sustainability, cross-cultural exploration, linguistic proficiency, and documentation of the experience.