Career Strategy Fellowships Study Abroad Summer Session MyYSS

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TOC: Experience a Course with Yale in the Summer

Why Take a Course at Yale?

Studying at Yale gives students a newfound appreciation for their academics and forges friendships that will last a lifetime.  Students come to Yale Summer Session to:

  • earn credit toward their major and fulfill requirements for their degree
  • explore a new field or topic
  • focus intensely on one particular subject
  • study with Yale faculty
  • prepare for the challenges of highly selective colleges

Tips for Choosing a Yale Summer Session Course

  • Online courses are marked as such in the course description. If there is no indication, the course is offered in-person. Online course numbers end with an "E."
  • Some courses have pre-requisites. To enroll, your transcript must show that you have the met the pre-requisite(s).
  • Course numbers do not necessarily indicate the level of the course. If a course has no pre-requisites, it is open to any student.
  • Some courses are not open to high school students. Check course descriptions.
  • There is a two course limit per session
  • All courses are in Eastern Daylight Time (UTC -4)

Course Syllabi

2023 course syllabi are being posted as they are received from the instructors. These are meant as a reference and are subject to change before the session starts. You should refer to updated versions from your instructors once admitted to your course(s). 

2023 Course Syllabi

Classroom Locations

Click here to locate where your in-person class will meet.

2023 Course Search

Summer 2023 Dates

Date: Session A:
May 29 - June 30, 2023

Session B:
July 3 - August 4, 2023

Rethinking Civil Rights and Black Power

AFAM S137 (CRN: 30587)

Course cancelled. In-person Course. This course reconsiders the complex arguments and activities that have characterized the civil rights movement, thinking beyond the master narrative of Montgomery to Memphis, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. to understand Black agency, actions, and politics through historiography, documentary film, and art. Students read primary sources alongside secondary scholarship, focusing each week on an individual case study.  Each week builds upon the past week to understand the civil rights movements in the United States, including in the urban North, the Midwest, and elsewhere. This course will answer the questions: did the Civil Rights Movement really just happen in the South? What was happening in other parts of the country? What made local movements similar or different? How can we use these movement histories to understand how we got to where we are today? 1 Credit. Session B: July 3 – August 4. Tuition: $4850. (View syllabus)

Education and Empire

AFAM S259 (CRN: 30598)

Course closed to further enrollment. In-person Course. This course offers an introduction to the transnational history of education in relation to the development of U.S. empire both at home and abroad. By bringing together topics often approached separately -- immigration, education, race, colonialism, and the history of U.S. empire -- we will interrogate the ways that education has been mobilized to deploy power: controlling knowledge, categorizing and policing difference, administering unequal paths to citizenship/belonging, forcing assimilation, promoting socio-economic divides, and asserting discipline and control. Topics to be covered include American Indian education and self-determination, African American education in slavery and freedom, U.S. colonial education in the Philippines/Cuba/Puerto Rico, immigration and forced Americanization schooling, Latinx fights for educational access and autonomy, State Department experiments in educational diplomacy and child socialization, educational missions abroad, and national security and the war on terror. Throughout, we will draw links between the past and the present and ask what it might mean to “decolonize” education today. 1 Credit. Session B: July 3 – August 4. Tuition: $4850.

African American Autobiography

AFAM S305 (CRN: 30358)

Course cancelled. In-person Course. Examination of African American autobiography, from slave narratives to contemporary memoirs, and how the genre approaches the project (and problem) of knowing, through reading, the relationships of fellow humans. Chronological consideration of a range of narratives and their representations of race, of space, of migration, of violence, of self, and of other, as well as the historical circumstances that inform these representations. 1 Credit. Session A: May 29 – June 30. Tuition: $4850. (View syllabus)

Geographies of Freedom: Race, Space, and Gender in the Caribbean

AFAM S312 (CRN: 30311)

Course cancelled. In-person Course. An examination of configurations of space and place in Caribbean thought. We will explore how space and place have been represented, constructed, and imagined in literary and theoretical texts. We will focus on issues concerning the transatlantic slave trade, colonization, and the postcolony, with particular attention to race, gender, and sexuality. Main topics include imperial conquest, the plantation, the slave ship, the Black Atlantic, the ocean, fugitivity, the urban, indenture, nature, tourism, and diaspora. 1 Credit. Session A: May 29 – June 30. Tuition: $4850. (View syllabus)

Race, Gender, and Class Inequities in the U.S.

AFAM S348 (CRN: 30475)

Course closed to further enrollment. In-person Course. What are race, gender, and class? How do they operate individually or collectively to shape contemporary inequities? This course investigates these questions and the diverse methodological and theoretical approaches that scholars have taken to highlight matters affecting Black people and racially-minoritized populations in the United States. Likewise, it examines how persisting inequities are observed and experienced in the domains of education, employment, population health, food access, housing, incarceration, and policing, among others. No previous background in Sociology or any social science discipline is assumed. 1 Credit. Session B: July 3 – August 4. Tuition: $4850.

Plantation, Prison, and Ghetto in the United States

AFAM S385E (CRN: 30379)

Online Course. Survey of the plantation, ghetto, and prison. Three spatial forms as foundations for the American project, aligned with colonialism and domination. Theoretical and historical considerations of how production of space and racial differences have been articulated together in United States. Topics include political economy of slavery, ghetto origins, and prison abolition. 1 Credit. Session A: May 29 - June 30. Tuition: $4850. Technology Fee: $85. (View syllabus)

Visual Approaches to Global Health

AFST S350 (CRN: 30570)

Course cancelled. This course is part of a Yale Summer Session Program Abroad and cannot be taken independent of the program. Interested students must apply to Yale Study Abroad by February 7th. For more detailed information about the program, including a description of the courses, housing, excursions, and budget, visit: https://studyabroad.yale.edu/programs/yale-summer-session-johannesburg-visual

Rethinking Civil Rights and Black Power

AMST S137 (CRN: 30588)

Course cancelled. In-person Course. This course reconsiders the complex arguments and activities that have characterized the civil rights movement, thinking beyond the master narrative of Montgomery to Memphis, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. to understand Black agency, actions, and politics through historiography, documentary film, and art. Students read primary sources alongside secondary scholarship, focusing each week on an individual case study.  Each week builds upon the past week to understand the civil rights movements in the United States, including in the urban North, the Midwest, and elsewhere. This course will answer the questions: did the Civil Rights Movement really just happen in the South? What was happening in other parts of the country? What made local movements similar or different? How can we use these movement histories to understand how we got to where we are today? 1 Credit. Session B: July 3 – August 4. Tuition: $4850. (View syllabus)

What is Law?

AMST S221 (CRN: 30372)

Course closed to further enrollment. In-person Course. As an introductory class to the main principles and topics of legal thought and practice, the class will use works of literature, theatre, film and music to acquaint with the field of law. Students will learn in what ways culture shapes the law, and, in turn, how law governs and shapes culture. Topics include being a person on Instagram and Facebook; Black Lives Matter, the US Constitution; Freedom of Speech, “Calling out” and “Cancel Culture”; Interpretation and Authority; Law, Ethics and Religion; Islam, Totalitarianism, The Trump Administration; Criminal Law, Agency and Multiple Personality Disorder; Sampling and Copyright, Hip Hop/Rap in the courtroom. 1 Credit. Session B: July 3 – August 4. Tuition: $4850.

Education and Empire

AMST S253 (CRN: 30501)

Course closed to further enrollment. In-person Course. This course offers an introduction to the transnational history of education in relation to the development of U.S. empire both at home and abroad. By bringing together topics often approached separately -- immigration, education, race, colonialism, and the history of U.S. empire -- we will interrogate the ways that education has been mobilized to deploy power: controlling knowledge, categorizing and policing difference, administering unequal paths to citizenship/belonging, forcing assimilation, promoting socio-economic divides, and asserting discipline and control. Topics to be covered include American Indian education and self-determination, African American education in slavery and freedom, U.S. colonial education in the Philippines/Cuba/Puerto Rico, immigration and forced Americanization schooling, Latinx fights for educational access and autonomy, State Department experiments in educational diplomacy and child socialization, educational missions abroad, and national security and the war on terror. Throughout, we will draw links between the past and the present and ask what it might mean to “decolonize” education today. 1 Credit. Session B: July 3 – August 4. Tuition: $4850.

Plantation, Prison, and Ghetto in the United States

AMST S303E (CRN: 30381)

Online Course. Survey of the plantation, ghetto, and prison. Three spatial forms as foundations for the American project, aligned with colonialism and domination. Theoretical and historical considerations of how production of space and racial differences have been articulated together in United States. Topics include political economy of slavery, ghetto origins, and prison abolition. 1 Credit. Session A: May 29 - June 30. Tuition: $4850. Technology Fee: $85. (View syllabus)

Geographies of Freedom: Race, Space, and Gender in the Caribbean

AMST S310 (CRN: 30314)

Course cancelled. In-person Course. An examination of configurations of space and place in Caribbean thought. We will explore how space and place have been represented, constructed, and imagined in literary and theoretical texts. We will focus on issues concerning the transatlantic slave trade, colonization, and the postcolony, with particular attention to race, gender, and sexuality. Main topics include imperial conquest, the plantation, the slave ship, the Black Atlantic, the ocean, fugitivity, the urban, indenture, nature, tourism, and diaspora. 1 Credit. Session A: May 29 – June 30. Tuition: $4850. (View syllabus)

Introduction to Transgender Studies

AMST S314 (CRN: 30315)

Course cancelled. In-person Course. Introduction to transgender studies, an emergent field that draws on gender studies, queer theory, sociology, feminist science studies, literary studies, and history. Representations of gender nonconformity in a cultural context dominated by a two-sex model of human gender differentiation. Sources include novels, autobiographies, films, and philosophy and criticism. 1 Credit. Session A: May 29 – June 30. Tuition: $4850. (View syllabus)

Film, Video, and American History

AMST S483 (CRN: 30363)

In-person Course. This course will take a hard, imaginative, speculative, and poetic look at U.S. history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the lens of film and video. In a time where we are awash with moving images in our environments on a daily, if not minute-by-minute basis, this course will be a space to meditate upon the sights, sounds, and texts around us.  We will interrogate how we have been trained to read a moving image. We will place the image historically, aesthetically, politically. We will learn how to see history as a series of discontinuities, yet with unconscious repetitions, thematic overlaps, and eternal returns — not simply as a single thread of greatest hits and milestones moments. Topics will include: Empire, Language, Love (viz. the Screwball Comedy), Class, War and Empire, Politics, Communism, Ideology, Youth, Revolt, Postmodernity, the Network, and Memory. Periods and events covered include: The Black Freedom Struggle, The Jazz Age, the Great Depression, World War II, the Long 1960s, the U.S. failure in Vietnam, the Dot Com Boom and Silicon Valley, and contemporary activist/revolutionary movements. We will not consider the U.S. in isolation: films and discussions will inevitably take us to Latin America, to France, to Senegal, to Iran, and to the Soviet Union. We will have mandatory Monday night screenings as well; these will include moving-image work by Julie Dash, Charlie Chaplin, Frank Tashlin, Douglas Sirk, Barbara Loden, Jane Schoenbrun, Anthony Banua-Simon, Kevin Jerome Everson, Don Hertzfeldt, Vincente Minnelli, Chuck Jones, Michelangelo Antonioni, Abbas Kiarostami, Frédéric Da, Spike Lee, Walt Disney, Warren Beatty, Brian De Palma, Richard Lester, and Eric André, among a host of others. This course seeks to expand students' knowledge of the history of film, of U.S. culture, and the society in which they exist. 1 Credit. Session B: July 3 – August 4. Tuition: $4850.

Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

ANTH S110 (CRN: 30317)

In-person Course. Anthropological study of cosmology, tacit knowledge, and ways of knowing the world in specific social settings. Ways in which sociocultural specificity helps to explain human solutions to problems of cooperation and conflict, production and reproduction, expression, and belief. Introduction to anthropological ways of understanding cultural difference in approaches to sickness and healing, gender and sexuality, economics, religion, and communication. 1 Credit. Session B: July 3 – August 4. Tuition: $4850.

Ancient Civilizations of Mesoamerica

ANTH S233 (CRN: 30318)

Course cancelled. In-person Course. An exploration of the archaeology of the Olmec, Maya, Aztec, and other peoples of ancient Mesoamerica, with emphasis on current debates and queries. Students will be introduced to new discoveries aided by scientific methods, theoretical and methodological insights, and advances in the interpretation of writing and symbolic systems that challenge traditional interpretations. The course also explores the links with contemporary peoples in Mexico and Central America, who still preserve significant aspects of ancient Mesoamerican cultural traditions. 1 Credit. Session A: May 29 – June 30. Tuition: $4850.

Feminist & Queer Ethnographies: Dystopia, Catastrophe, Extinction

ANTH S308E (CRN: 30454)

Online Course. This seminar centers the analytics and methods that feminist and queer ethnographic analyses have brought to the fore to revisit a cluster of topical issues, this year assembled around the theme: Dystopia, Catastrophe, Extinction. Key to the overall class will be the relation between humans and the world and, in particular, the way in which different “ends of the world” configure humankind as an entity to whom the world belongs. 1 Credit. Session A: May 29 – June 30. Tuition: $4850. Technology Fee: $85. (View syllabus)

Race, Inequality, and Urban Education and Housing Policy

ANTH S324E (CRN: 30402)

Online Course. Blends urban history with educational and housing policy to explore how spatial relationships have shaped opportunity since the groundbreaking supreme court decision, Brown V. Board of Education. Investigates a range of historical, legal, and contemporary issues relevant to both the segregation and desegregation of American cities and their public schools in the twentieth century. Uses Atlanta, GA as a case study in how race, cities, schools and space have been differently understood in the South as compared to the North, and to Atlanta as compared to other “Deep South” cities. 1 Credit. Session A: May 29 – June 30. Tuition: $4850. Technology Fee: $85.

The Anthropology of Possible Worlds

ANTH S423 (CRN: 30320)

Course cancelled. In-person Course. This course focuses on the nature of possible worlds: literary worlds (Narnia), ideological worlds (the world according to a particular political stance), psychological worlds (what someone remembers to be the case, wishes to be the case, or believes to be the case), environmental worlds (possible environmental futures), virtual worlds (the World of Warcraft), and—most of all—ethnographic works in which the actual and possible worlds of others are represented (the world according to the ancient Maya). We don’t focus on the contents of such worlds per se, but rather on the range of resources people have for representing, regimenting, and residing in such worlds; and the roles such resources play in mediating social relations and cultural values. 1 Credit. Session A: May 29 – June 30. Tuition: $4850. (View syllabus)

Global Health Ethnography

ANTH S462 (CRN: 30321)

In-person Course. Study of anthropological ethnographies on serious health problems facing populations in resource-poor societies. Poverty and structural violence; struggles with infectious disease; the health of women and children; human rights and medical humanitarianism. Focus on sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia, and the Middle East. Enrollment limited to 18 students. 1 Credit. Session A: May 29 – June 30. Tuition: $4850. (View syllabus)

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