This course is a survey course in the history of culture as a human phenomenon and the intellectual history of the concept of culture from pre-history to the contemporary. Culture is viewed from a number of disciplinary perspectives across the humanities and sciences.

The study of culture is a pluralistic activity that takes place not inside the narrow perimeters of a specific discipline but inside and throughout the multiple cultural discourses that surround us. In fact, the field of cultural studies has emerged from the challenges posed to traditional humanistic and social scientific agendas by new research strategies in visual studies; music, anthropology, ethnography, and folklore; feminist studies; comparative sociology and politics; semiotics; social, cultural, literary, and political theory; science studies; colonial discourse analysis; ethnic studies; and the histories of sexualities.