Discover Classes. Earn Rewards.

Lecture Classes Online

Upcoming schedule view

Explore a diverse range of online lectures in subjects such as history, science, literature, and more, all from the comfort of your own home. Expand your knowledge and engage in thought-provoking discussions with experts in their fields.

8 classes have spots left

The First Marxist: an Introduction to Friedrich Engels

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

From the underground League of the Just of the 1840s through the First and Second International to the rise of mass workers parties at the turn of the 20th century, Friedrich Engels labored tirelessly to turn Marxism into a revolutionary force. Sacrificing his own intellectual ambitions to support Marx, Engels took on the role of sounding board, commentator, editor, ghost writer, and benefactor while the latter labored on his masterwork Capital...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Sociology and Social Control: Intro to Émile Durkheim

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Sociology and Social Control: an Introduction to Émile Durkheim For the pioneering sociologist Émile Durkheim, modern Western society was wracked by a seeming paradox: the more autonomous individuals become, freed from old forms of social control, the more they come to depend on society and the bonds that unite its members. But, what makes a society cohere, particularly one in which so much human interaction is transactional? And, what happens...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Simone Weil: Passion and Philosophy

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Described by Albert Camus as “the only great spirit of our times,” envied by Simone de Beauvoir for “having a heart that could beat right across the world,” and denounced by Susan Sontag as an anti-Semite, Simone Weil has been a subject of widespread fascination since her death in 1942 from (reputedly) self-starvation, undergone in solidarity with the people of occupied France. Activist, political polemicist, Marxist, and, late in life, Christian...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
Discover Classes. Earn Rewards.

Lecture Classes Gift Card

Thousands of classes & experiences. No expiration. Gift an experience this holiday season and make it a memorable one. Lock in a price with the Inflation Buster Gift Card Price Adjuster™

Buy a Gift Card

The Making of the Soviet Union: Revolution, State

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

The Making of the Soviet Union: Revolution, State, and Society With its call for materialist human emancipation, the founding of the Soviet Union sent shockwaves throughout the world. Internationalist at the outset, it provided the ground for thinking about and legislating socialist, feminist, and anti-colonial values simultaneously. The Soviet state offered a legal framework and social citizenship rights with state provisions that were unprecedentedly...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Introduction to Gershom Scholem

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) may be the best known scholar of Jewish Studies in the twentieth century. Above all he is associated with launching the modern academic study of Jewish mysticism. However, Scholem’s study of mysticism was only part of his much broader, far more engaged and systematic thinking about questions of contemporary politics and the Jewish historical condition. An influential political thinker and social theorist, Scholem put...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Calculus: History and Concept

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

“Calculus,” wrote the mathematician John Von Nuemann, “was the first achievement of modern mathematics … it is difficult to overestimate its importance.” What does it mean to say calculus initiated modern mathematics? Beyond mathematics, what influence has calculus had on the wider world? Most importantly, what is calculus—and why does it still stand as the culmination of our mathematics curriculum? In this course, we’ll examine the...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

War, Liberty, and Empire: the Fall of the Roman

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

War, Liberty, and Empire: the Fall of the Roman Republic In the first century BCE, the Roman Republic that had conquered the Mediterranean world entered a period of terminal crisis. Its traditional senate, too corrupt to govern, was usurped by a series of autocrats, whose murderous civil wars culminated in the ascent of Octavian Augustus, the first Roman emperor. Bloody, tumultuous, and traumatic—and concurrent with profound social and cultural...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Race and Technology

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

“Technology, from slave ships to voting machines, has always played a role in the subjugation and control of black people.” So writes sociologist Rayvon Fouché, reflecting on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the “technological failure” of the New Orleans levees. Across contexts like media, medicine, infrastructure, and labor, technologies, both old and new, too often seem like tools for the sorting, control, and oppression of racialized...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Lauren Berlant: Cruel Optimism

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Why do we persist in our fantasies of the kind of good life that threatens to kill us? Why are we often frustrated in our attempts to find relief from precarity, attain sweeter forms of collective life, or even, at minimum, to obtain conditions of mere subsistence? What are the politics of our desires? These questions are central to the work of Lauren Berlant, one of the foremost thinkers at the intersection of contemporary political theory and affect...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Hannah Arendt: On Revolution

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

What is revolution? Is there a distinction between civil disobedience, violent protest, and revolutionary action? What does it mean to found a state? Are foundings always bloody and violent? When Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution appeared in 1963, it was overshadowed by the simultaneous publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem. Inspired by a conference on “The United States and the Revolutionary Spirit” at Princeton University in the spring of 1959...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Dr. Seuss: Art, Politics, and Imagination

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online, New York, NY

Theodore Seuss Geisel, known to most as Dr. Seuss, is one of the most recognizable author-illustrators of children’s literature of the 20th century. His wobbly towers of preposterous composition, his trademark gibberish, puns and tongue twisters, and the endless list of invented places, peoples, instruments, and alphabets were the accompaniments to countless childhoods. However, Seuss’s work is hardly childish escapism. The aesthetic autonomy...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

Gift it!

Shulamith Firestone: The Dialectic of Sex

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Family abolition, love revolution, children’s liberation, the elimination of biological sex: such were the demands of the New York militant “Shulie” Firestone. In 1970, at the age of 25, Firestone published her utopian manifesto The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution before disappearing forever from the scene of politics. With its rejection of the nuclear family, its observation that giving birth is “like shitting a pumpkin,”...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Fredric Jameson: What is Postmodernism?

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom

“The postmodern,” writes Marxist literary and cultural theorist Fredric Jameson, “is the force field in which very different kinds of cultural impulses . . . must make their way.” Adapted from a New Left Review essay of the same name, Jameson’s Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is an ambitious account of how the postmodern has replaced modernism as the “cultural dominant” of late capitalism. In conversation with...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

Gift it!

Social Reproduction Theory: Gender, Labor, & Capitalism

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom

“If workers produce commodities,” the feminist theorist Tithi Bhattacharya asked, “who produces the workers?” It’s a question that lies at the heart of Social Reproduction Theory, a body of Marxist-feminist critique that seeks to identify and describe the labor that’s required to reproduce workers and, as such, capitalist society as a whole. First enunciated in the demand for “Wages for Housework,” Social Reproduction Theory explodes...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

Gift it!

Slavery and Social Death: From the Plantation

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom

Slavery and Social Death: From the Plantation to the 21st Century What does it mean to experience social death? And how has this experience impacted the legacies of slavery in the 21st century? Beyond legal categories of ownership and personal status and structures of economic exploitation, how did personal power and authority operate in that “peculiar institution”? What were, and perhaps continue to be, the cultural and symbolic instruments...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

Gift it!

Happiness and Capitalism: Work, Wealth, and Misery(n)

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom

Happiness and Capitalism: Work, Wealth, and Misery “No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.” So observed the “father” of political economy, Adam Smith, in his classic The Wealth of Nations. Nearly 250 years later, Smith’s self-appointed children, secure in economics departments, central banks, and government agencies, are quick to insist that, in absolute terms,...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

Gift it!

What is Poetry? Poetics, Language, and Feeling

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom

What is poetry, and what is it good for? Today, poetry is often pronounced dead. Yet at the same time, we remain, to cite the New York Times, “poetry curious.” We sense, as Aimé Césaire sensed, that poetry encompasses some “greater feeling” that goes uncaptured by scientific classification and explanation. For Audre Lorde, poetry is that “illumination,” which is “already felt,” and yet “formless, about to be birthed.” But...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

Gift it!

The Ancient Novel? Magic, Myth, and Metamorphosis

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom

Is the novel an intrinsically modern form? Are prose works like Satyricon, Daphnis and Chloe, and The Golden Ass actually ancient novels? These narratives of ancient Greece and Rome offer a kaleidoscopic array of fictions: pastoral tales of erotic exploration; fierce satires of urban life and aristocratic rapacity; fantastical accounts of metamorphosis, abjection, and (maybe) redemption. With their mix of pirates and brigands,...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

Gift it!

Society and the Spirit of Capitalism: an Introduction

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom

Society and the Spirit of Capitalism: an Introduction to Max Weber Max Weber sought to explain nothing less than the emergence of the modern world and the direction in which it was headed. A trailblazer (along with Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim) of the modern discipline of sociology, Weber brought to bear empirically driven methods of comparative analysis to identify and analyze the individual attitudes and social structures that shape and determine...

(29) Beginner 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

Gift it!

Julia Kristeva: Feminism, Abjection, and Theory

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom

Emigrating from the European periphery to its intellectual center, Julia Kristeva exploded like a bomb onto the insular world of French theory. Her first book, Revolution in Poetic Language, put forth a wholly new understanding of human communication—insisting on the non-linguistic rhythmic dimension that undergirds all language. Her emphasis on the body in turn centered the formative significance of the maternal, which, she argues, is repressed...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

Gift it!
Reset all filters.

No results found

Try removing some filters.

Lecture Classes Online are rated 4.6 stars based on 29 verified reviews from actual CourseHorse.com purchasers.

CourseHorse Gift Cards

  • Creative & unique gift for any occasion
  • Thousands of classes & experiences
  • No expiration date
  • Instant e-delivery (or choose a date)
  • Add a personalized message
  • Lock in a price with the Inflation Buster Gift Card Price Adjuster™
Buy a Gift Card
gift card with the CourseHorse logo gift card with the CourseHorse logo
Loading...