HarvardX

Description This short literature course, based on the first half of the Masterpieces of World Literature edX MOOC, examines how civilizations and cultures of the ancient world defined themselves through literature and how that literature has continued to contribute to our understanding of those civilizations and cultures today.Cities, nations, and empires from antiquity through the…

Description In this breathtaking course, you’ll get to know the music of two beautiful operas — both in their spellbinding artistry and colorful histories.First, you’ll travel to London in 1724, where George Frideric Handel premiered his most famous opera, Giulio Cesare. Meet the performers and experience what it was like to attend the first production, all…

Description Based on the second half of the Masterpieces of World Literature edX MOOC, this short literature course examines how writers reach beyond national and linguistic boundaries as worldly readers and travelers, and how their modern fictions rise to the status of world literature.These masterpieces of modern world literature take part in a tradition of…

Description Travel through central Europe in the 1800s to experience the premieres of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, Wagner’s Das Rheingold, and Verdi’s Otello. A complement to our course on 18th-century opera, you’ll be introduced to opera through an in-depth study of these canonical works. You’ll learn about the musical details of each opera and the cultural…

Description Explore what it means to be human today by studying what it meant to be a hero in ancient Greek times. In this introduction to ancient Greek culture and literature, learners will experience, in English translation, some of the most beautiful works of ancient Greek literature and song-making spanning over a thousand years from…

Description The first in our Professional Certificate Program in Data Science, this course will introduce you to the basics of R programming. You can better retain R when you learn it to solve a specific problem, so you’ll use a real-world dataset about crime in the United States. You will learn the R skills needed…

Description How do we read Shakespeare? Do his plays belong to the past, or the present? To a famed dramatic genius or to readers and audiences around the globe? What do his plays really mean?Moving between the world in which Shakespeare lived and the present day, this course will introduce different kinds of literary analysis…

Description In the first act of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the Ghost of the dead King of Denmark appears to his son, setting off a chain of events that culminates in the play’s notoriously bloody finale. But how would this mysterious figure have been understood in Shakespeare’s time?Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt guides learners through an exploration…

Description In the first act of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the Jewish moneylender Shylock proposes a “merry sport” to the merchant Antonio: he will lend Antonio the money he needs if Antonio agrees to let Shylock take a pound of his flesh should he default. Shylock calls this contract a “merry bond,” and…

Description In this course, we’ll read William Shakespeare’s Othello and discuss the play from a variety of perspectives. The goal of the course is not to cover everything that has been written on Othello. Rather, it is to find a single point of entry to help us think about the play as a whole. Our…