New and Revised Courses
New and revised courses approved by faculty during the 2025-2026 academic year will be displayed here upon approval.
New and Revised Courses and Programs approved by the Scripps College faculty during the 2025-2026 academic year will be within the Course Descriptions and Programs of Study sections of the 2026-2027 catalog, and are presented here to highlight them as additions/revisions to the College’s curriculum this year.
New Courses Approved October 2025
DANC 139 SC: Afro-Latinx Social Dance Studies
This interdisciplinary course explores the rich history and cultural significance of Afro-Latinx social dance forms in the United States, with a focus on mambo, salsa, Latin hustle, bachata, and merengue. Through a combination of historical analysis, movement practice, and critical cultural studies, students will examine how these dance styles have been shaped by diasporic movements, racial and ethnic identities, migration patterns, and the politics of space and performance.
ECON 136 SC: Corporate Finance II
The course further develops the understanding of financial markets, financial assets, ethics, and financial products in the presence of regulation. It first expands on the types of financial assets and capital markets, introducing the typical financial products available to investors and their risks. It then develops and discusses trading activities and the ethics and regulations concerning them. Finally, the role of government regulation and the role it plays in generating efficient outcomes will be analyzed.
FGSS 115 SC: Feminist Health and Medicine
This course will introduce you to antiracist, intersectional and transnational feminist critiques of health and medicine. Using an interdisciplinary approach, combining policy analysis with history and memoir, we will explore how systemic and systematic racism and casteism, along with class (and other intersectional forces), shapes gendered experiences of medical systems and health care in general.
FREN 107 SC: Le Français des Professions
This course guides students to professionalization by engaging them in a semester-long, mock job search in the Francophone World. Students combine the work from their undergraduate majors and their knowledge of French and Francophone Studies in preparation for career opportunities in the French-Speaking world. Students perform career development tasks such as giving presentations, practicing interviewing skills, engaging in salary negotiations in French.
HIST/AFRI 168 SC: Medicine & American Slavery
This course explores how slavery shaped American medicine & the invention of race & vice versa. From the 18th to 19th centuries, physicians & naturalists used pseudoscience to justify enslavement & pathologize Black resistance. We examine how medical knowledge was produced in plantations, slave markets, & wars, and how disease outbreaks revealed racialized inequalities. Through primary sources, students trace the legacies of slavery-era medicine in today’s health disparities & racial inequities.
HIST197E SC: Border Sexualities
What are borders, and how do these geopolitical formations shape sexual practices, experiences, and identities? This course examines how people living along the North American borderlands experienced those spaces as sites of both sexual liberation and heavily gendered sexual repression. We will also explore how ideas about sex affected the mapping and policing of international boundaries. Topics include prostitution regulation, reproductive health, violence against women, and queer migration.
HMSC/HIST 124 SC: Cult Crit Freud Edelman
This course examines important works of 20th- and 21st-century cultural criticism as a response to the challenges faced by Western societies (world wars, the dismantling of Empire and the process of decolonization, political struggles against various forms of social inequality). The course pays particular attention to the preoccupation with society as a problem for individual (human) freedom, as articulated in writings by Freud, Lévi-Strauss, Fanon, Adorno, Genet, Said, and Edelman.
ITAL122 SC: Migration in Literature and Film
This course explores the relationship between migration and identity, along the lines of geography, citizenship, race, genealogy, and language. We will read texts and watch films about and by people who have migrated to Italy, moved within Italy, left Italy, or are the migrators’ ancestors. We will identify situations that provoke debate and ask us to grapple with our own preconceived notions of Italian identity today situated against the backdrop of Italy’s history of migration and hospitality. This course is taught in English .
MUS 128 SC: History of the Broadway Musical
This course studies the history of the Broadway musical from its precursors in the late nineteenth-century to contemporary musicals. We will examine shows by various writers which may include Gershwin, Rodgers, Bernstein, Sondheim, Lloyd Webber, and Miranda. We will explore how the structures of the show and musical styles have changed in the past century and discuss how these shows have represented race, gender, and class, and shaped public perception of American history and politics.
POLI 187U SC:Border Justice Lab
This experiential course explores migration through creative, participatory methodologies prioritizing ethical representation and transformative action. Students learn hands-on methods including photovoice, body mapping, poetry, music, digital ethnography, and social cartography to represent migration stories with dignity. Through partnerships with BorderLinks and community engagement, students develop tools for social change.
POLI 187S SC : Orientalism, Disney & The Other
This course examines how Said’s Orientalism operates in contemporary politics, particularly in migrant classification and securitization. Using Disney as cultural lens and field site, we explore how Orientalist logics shape popular culture and migration experiences. Students analyze entertainment-politics intersections while developing postcolonial theory and media criticism skills. An accompanying Disneyland field trip involves ethnographic research on how Orientalism operates in theme parks.
PSYC 117 SC : Lifespan Development
This course dives into major theoretical, empirical, and applied issues in human development across the lifespan, with an emphasis on the person-environment context. We will tackle fundamental questions about the nature of change and consistency throughout life, exploring the expected changes as well as individual differences in social, emotional, and cognitive functioning using a life course perspective.
SPAN 181 SC: Indigenous & Indigenista Films
This course examines Indigenous representations and self-representations in film from the mid-20th century to today across Abiayala (Gunna term for the Americas). We will study White and Mestizo authored films, collaborations with Indigenous communities, and Indigenous-authored works. Focus is on production modes, genres, aesthetics, and the “social life” of films through circulation, distribution, and preservation within their historical and cultural contexts.
WRIT 171 SC : The Rhetoric of Authoritarianism
We’ll study the pull of authoritarianism, a political hallmark of our times, by examining its rhetoric. We’ll read theories of despotism and demagoguery, watch historical and contemporary speeches, interviews, and debate performances, and track current events and administrative policies. We’ll pay special attention to authoritarians’ strategies to establish and maintain credibility, ploys to identify with audiences, responses to perceived threats, and uses of logical appeals and fallacies.
Revised Courses:
ANTH 114 SC: Science, Medicine, & Colonialism
Cross-listing: Previously approved to be crosslisted with STS and Native American/Indigenous Studies (does not need new signature)
ARHI 186C SC: Asian Export Art
New Description: Since the sixteenth century, porcelain, textiles, lacquer, and other luxuries from Asia entered royal courts and people’s homes, shaped consumer tastes and social habits, and forged connections across the globe. This seminar course will examine what we call Asian export art and how cross-cultural encounter and exchange shaped the visual and material culture of the early modern and modern world. We will also trace the history of Asian art collections in the United States. One required field trip.
ARHI 186M SC: Seminar in Modern Art
New Description:Topic changes with each offering. For spring 2026, the topic is “Crip Aesthetics.” Taking “crip” as both noun (a derogatory term reclaimed by disability justice activists) and verb (akin to queering), this course approaches modern and contemporary art through the lens of critical disability studies. We will discuss what new paradigms and aesthetics emerge when disability and access are not afterthoughts but starting points. Previous coursework in art history preferred but not required.
ENGL 120 SC: Eighteenth-Century British Literature
New Title: The 18th Century in Adaptation
New Description: This course introduces students to British and Anglophone literature in the long 18th century (1690-1830) through investigation of 18th century fiction, poetry, and archives and 20/21st century adaptations of 18thC stories. Grounding our conversations in postcolonial, queer, and disability studies scholarship, we will discuss how 18thC literary experiments responded to the British empire, plantation economies, the age of revolutions, shifting gender norms, and new understandings of the body.
ENGL 191 SC:Poetry Writing Workshop
New Title: Poetry, Form, and Process
New Description: This creative writing seminar, geared toward poetry, introduces students to experimental and constraint-based forms, including procedural, ritual, conceptual, and durational writing. We will look how authors use constraint and experiment to expand the field of the possible, will borrow their methods to write poetry, and will develop constraint-based projects of our own. This course is a workshop course in whichstudents will write new poems every week and submit 3-4 poems to workshop with the class.
HMSC/HIST 123 SC: Intro Phil Hist Culture
New Description: This course focuses on major works in late- and post-Enlightenment (19th-century) thinking about culture: Kant’s Third Critique, Schiller’s Aesthetic Education, Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, E.B. Tylor’s Primitive Cultures, and Huysmans’ Against Nature. It addresses the emergence of the idea of culture in the context of political struggles over the modern relationship between individual and society and the contingent historical factors responsible for these struggles.
HUM195 SC: Asian Philosophical Traditions
New Description: This seminar is for the Humanities Institute Fellows on this year’s theme “Asian Philosophical Traditions” We will discuss works by visiting speakers, sometimes with the speakers themselves. Attendance of the program’s events during the semester is required. The topics covered will include philosophical texts, ideas, and concepts in the Classical Chinese, Classical Indian (including Buddhist), Near-Eastern, and Zoroastrian traditions.
MS 057 SC: Introduction to Game Design
New Title: Game Design
New Description: Play is everywhere: from ants staging mock battles, to lobsters flipping rocks for pleasure, to children inventing games of skill and chance. What might it mean, then, to intentionally design experiences of play? In this intermediate course, students will explore game design as both a formal and artistic practice. Through a play-centric, iterative approach, students will create a variety of non-digital games to examine how mechanics, narrative, and aesthetics shape meaning and play.
New Prerequisite: Art 141, MS 053, or Instructor Permission
NEUR 155L:Sel Tpcs in Computational Neuro
New Description: This course will introduce foundational models that were developed to understand the relationship between brain and behavior. We will learn about these models by reading scientific papers, running simulations, and fitting them to real data sets.
New Prerequisite: A course in programming (such as CSCI004), and math (such as MATH031 or higher), and an upper-division quantitative course (such as NEUR133L or BIOL175), and permission of the instructor. This course is designed for juniors and seniors.
PHIL 144 SC: Logic
New Description: An introduction to the identification and formal evaluation of arguments. We will, in addition, investigate scientific and probabilistic reasoning, though no prior technical competence is assumed.
SPAN 177 SC: Theater and Social Change
New Description: This class examines the stage as a space of struggle that reveals the intersections of gender, sexuality, and nationality in Spain and Latin America, with attention to how spectacle and performance contest power structures, amplify marginalized voices, and shape as well as preserve collective memory in the public sphere, thereby fostering civil dialogue. We study Lorca’s impossible theater, Argentinian theater of crisis, Astrid Hadad’s performances of Mexicanidad, Juan Mayorga’s plays, and others.
WRIT 197J SC: Special Topics in Writing
New Title: Write Like a Child
New Description:How can writing from the point of view of a child help writers develop their craft and technique? How can one realistically capture the authentic voice of children, adolescents, and teens or write about children without sentimentalizing or romanticizing them? Given the assertion that childhood yields a lifetime of writing material, the ability to write from the child’s point of view is a valuable technique for any writer to master.
New Core Courses
CORE B
The Classical Transatlantic
This course juxtaposes North and West African traditional storytellers and traces the migration of their traditions across the Atlantic into the modern Era. We’ll look to the Moroccan hlayqi, whose corpus includes classical Arabic epics and 1001 Nights, and to the West African griot whose narrative practice connects with Afro-Caribbean from the colonial period to the emergence of Hip-Hop. We will examine the legacy of these storytellers as chroniclers of their communities which continues today
CORE B
Queer Latinidad in the Americas
Through an interdisciplinary cultural studies lens, we study conceptualizations, manifestations, and the workings of queerness in the United States and Latin America. We analyze a novel, poems, films, songs, photographs, and art. We explore questions of linguistic and cultural translation as we situate each text within sociopolitical debates about the meanings and possibilities of queer Latinidad in the Americas. Students expand their own course interests via an independent research project.
CORE B
Papermaking: Culture & Community
This course blends studio experimentation with global material histories, inviting students to explore paper as an expressive, conceptual, and handmade medium. Through hands-on techniques, readings, and critical dialogue, students examine papermaking as an artistic practice and cultural process. The course culminates in a limited-edition portfolio of student-made paper with original written research, synthesizing material practice and inquiry.
CORE B
Staging Resistance
This course considers the role of drama in challenging structures of power, examining examples of how theatre and public spectacles have been utilized to control or to contest the political stage. Students will study US American plays, in written, stage, and filmed forms, researching and analyzing the transition from the page to the stage, and ultimately attempt to mount their own short production of one of these works.
CORE B
Justice in Theory and Practice
This course considers the ways philosophers, political scientists, historians, and others have explored justice as a concept and in the real world. We will begin by examining multiple and distinct theories of justice. We then apply these theories to specific examples of justice and war, a long-standing area of concern. Most of the topics in the second part of the semester will be selected and facilitated by student groups. Students complete an independent research project on topics related to issues of justice in current times.
CORE B
Health Behaviors
This course explores how certain various behaviors (e.g., physical activity, sleep) contribute to health. We will read and critique the literature from various fields, including psychology and sociology. We will also explore the question of what contributes to health through popular press pieces and film. Topics of study include physical activity, sleep, meditation, and relationships.
CORE B
Abundance Economics
Can human societies achieve greater material prosperity while improving environmental and social outcomes? This class explores “limits”-oriented arguments (e.g., Paul Ehrlich, Club of Rome, degrowth) and “abundance”-oriented perspectives (e.g., Julian Simon, Bjørn Lomborg, ecomodernists), alongside empirical work on technological change, energy systems, environmental quality, and institutional constraints. Students will design and execute a substantial related project at the end of the semester.
CORE B
The Digital World
This course will examine questions that arise from extant and potential advances in digital technology, including: Could AI systems pose risks to humanity’s efforts towards justice, to its development, or even to its survival? How could such risks be mitigated? Would adopting a digital currency be wise, or even possible? Could a virtual world be as real, or as valuable, as the physical world? We will examine these topics from the perspectives of philosophy, computer science, and economics.
CORE B
Uncovering Scripps Stories
This class begins with a survey of the founding principles and histories of women’s colleges in the United States; next it turns to focus specifically on Scripps College, by developing tools for revealing and exploring stories of Scripps College people through learning how to access, evaluate and interpret Scripps College archival materials in Denison Library, as supervised by Prof. Hao Huang with expert guidance from Director Jennifer Martinez-Wormser.
CORE B
Children’s Literature
Children’s literature often inculcates virtues, values, and morality, as well as conveying ideas about culture and identity. This course studies children’s reading, character formation, and aspirations for social change. Starting with tools for gaining literacy, students examine children’s literature in historical/cultural context. Students will develop projects rooted in archival research and literary analysis, supplemented by concepts from developmental psychology and the philosophy of education.
CORE B
Queer History in California
This course is an historical survey of LGBTQIA+ culture and civil rights in 20th-century America with special emphasis on California, where pivotal firsts and significant controversies steered national dialogue in the Gay Liberation Movement. Topics will be interdisciplinary, as they intersect with race, ethnicity, religion, class, federalism and law. This course incorporates an application of Foucauldian analytical methodologies and training in the use of primary archival sources.
CORE B
SWANA SoCal in the Archives
Southern California is home to nearly one million people with roots in Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA). These include substantial Arab, Armenian, and Iranian communities, some of which date to the 19th century. Yet, despite this longstanding presence, SWANA life in Southern California has often gone unrecognized. This course explores the structural roots of this invisibility and the ways that scholars, artists, and writers have sought to recover and engage with archival traces of SWANA SoCal.
CORE B
Toxic
Toxins are everywhere. They can be found in wildfire smoke and ash, in pesticides sprayed on crops, in home cleaning products, and many other places. But if toxins are everywhere, they do not always take the same form, nor do they affect everyone in the same ways. Drawing from anthropology, history, gender studies and STS, this Core course asks: What are the social, historical, and political trajectories that shape our encounters with toxins? How do toxins, in turn, shape our social worlds?
CORE B
How to Be a Spy
This course explores the failure of spying in the United States and in the United Kingdom since World War Two. It asks, why does grooming sociopaths and pathological liars never work? In examining events like MK Ultra, support for the Mujahideen and 9/11, and men like double-agent Kim Philby and counter-espionage fanatic James Jesus Angleton, we will discover why espionage damages the nation it is trying to protect.
CORE B
Gender and Labor
This course seeks to examine how people experience gender - what it means to be a man or a woman - in their work life. Gender operates both in paid and non-paid work spaces, shaping the way work is defined, organized, rewarded, and experienced. Drawing on ethnographic stories and media sources, we will explore lived experiences and narratives of people performing various forms of work, including manufacturing, care, domestic, entertainment, and digital work.
CORE B
Language of Music
This course examines how we have come to understand music and literature as distinct art forms. We will read drama and fiction that features musical performance alongside poems
titled as “songs,” and ask how references to music affect our understanding of literary texts. We will consider music as a tool of social formation, commentary, and protest. In studying texts that have migrated from page to stage and screen, we will explore the transformative effects of musical setting and adaptation.
CORE B
How to Play Video Games
This course introduces students to a variety of methodological approaches for playing, thinking, and writing about video games. We will examine video games as textual, algorithmic, personal, and political media. In addition to reading, students will play and reflect on a variety of games. Through assignments that explore writing about games as an iterative process, students will develop skills in close play analysis, game studies research, and academic writing.
CORE B
Food Preservation in Cultures
In this course, we will learn about the different ways in which food is preserved around the world and examine the impact of preserved foods on local cultures and cuisines. We will read and discuss scholarly articles addressing food preservation from, but not limited to, cultural anthropology, sociology, and archeology. The course will culminate in a final project in which each student investigates a specific food culture and demonstrates a food preservation technique from it.
CORE B
Death
What is death? Why do we care about it? Is death bad? Should we fear it? Why do we mourn the dead? What ought to be done with the dead? Has death changed? Can one be dead? Drawing upon philosophical, historical, psychological, religious, and pop culture perspectives, we will investigate death.
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