Nineteen New Courses to Launch This Fall at Trinity

Optional courses with no prerequisites span the arts, humanities, social sciences and natural sciences

Group of Duke University students walking and laughing
Centering big ideas and open access, Century Courses create low-barrier entry points that invite students to explore fields that might otherwise feel out of reach.

This is a summary of a story originally published on Trinity College of Arts & Sciences.

Trinity College of Arts & Sciences at Duke University is launching a new set of undergraduate offerings called Century Courses, a cornerstone of the college’s new curriculum that debuted this past fall. These optional courses, with no prerequisites, are designed to introduce students to the intellectual heart of a major by immersing them in the core questions, methods and debates that define a discipline.

Rather than serving as traditional surveys, Century Courses emphasize curiosity, inquiry, and disciplinary thinking, helping students experience what it is like to engage with a field at a deeper level.

The guiding idea behind the initiative is simple yet ambitious: if a student were to take only one course in a major, it should convey what excites scholars and drives research in that field.

“When we were designing the new curriculum, we wanted to provide faculty with the opportunity to design courses that would introduce students to the key features of their discipline,” explains Dean of Undergraduate Education Deborah Reisinger.

Nineteen Century Courses will launch this fall, with offerings spanning the arts, humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. Some courses are team-taught to expose students to multiple scholarly perspectives, while others focus on a single work, concept or longstanding debate.

Each Century Course carries two curriculum codes, enabling students to fulfill multiple requirements at once, lowering barriers to exploration and encouraging academic experimentation. In doing so, the courses reflect Trinity’s broader curricular commitment to access, flexibility, and discovery, offering students a front-row seat to the intellectual life of a discipline and helping them make more informed choices about their academic paths.

Read more about these new courses on Trinity College of Arts & Sciences.