What shapes societies and human cultures? How do human experiences, beliefs, and power systems evolve over time? Explore the forces that influence social structures, identities, and interactions, and examine how history, ideas, and institutions shape the world around us.
Uncover areas of study that deepen our understanding of social and historical systems, spark new ideas, and lead to impactful discoveries.
Anthropology studies humankind from a broad comparative and historical perspective. It studies the biological evolution of the human species and aspects of the biology of living human populations, the comparative study of living primates, and the origins of languages and cultures.
Critical theory involves the attempt to better understand power, conflict, and crisis and to achieve change, emancipation, or distance from the beliefs, presuppositions, forces, forms, conventions, conditions, assemblages, and institutions of human life.
The Gender & Sexuality Studies Program is a dynamic interdisciplinary program that draws upon faculty and courses from over twenty departments across several schools. We offer an undergraduate major and minor and a graduate certificate cluster in Gender and sexuality Studies.
Our world-class department owes its reputation to outstanding faculty dedicated to teaching and research, as well as engaged students who take advantage of learning opportunities in and beyond the classroom.
Religion shapes and is shaped by every other dimension of human society. It is impossible to fully understand politics, law, history, or science without understanding religion.
As the broadest of all of the social sciences, the Sociology department provides a wide range of practical and marketable skills, including critical analysis, statistical methods, theory, and field research.
The Science in Human Culture Program offers undergraduate students the choice of an adjunct major or a minor field meant to prepare them to confront the impact of science, medicine, and technology on society and their own lives.
Check out some examples of courses that concentrate on social and historical inquiry.
As a student, you can delve into the study of the social and historical constructs through interdisciplinary coursework, internships, community projects, and extra-curricular activities. You also can collaborate with faculty on cutting-edge research.
Born in Jackson, Mississippi to parents who immigrated from India, Abhi Nimmagadda ‘25 moved to Hyderabad, India when he was three. When he was 10, the family relocated to their current home in Crown Point, Indiana. A polyglot who speaks English, Tamil, Telugu, Spanish and Latin, Nimmagadda considers Telugu — his mother’s language — his native tongue. Nimmagadda considered a range of majors at Northwestern, including civil engineering, earth sciences, gender studies, and legal studies. He credits a course with anthropology professor Shalini Shankar as a watershed moment in determining his field of study.
Read about Nimmagadda's scholarship to pursue graduate studies in South Asian Studies.
Prior to taking this class, I had not called myself Asian. The class gave me a way to articulate my experience. It was also a great community of people from many different backgrounds similarly committed to studying inequality and building a more just world.”
Get to know some of our dedicated professors who are passionate about teaching and nurturing your success as a student.
The Osborn Professor of Sociology appreciates the ways her colleagues in the sociology department work to improve the student experience: “This is a good place to be nurtured in your ideas.”
Daniel Immerwahr, the Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities, appreciates how faculty in the history department engage undergraduate students more deeply than in a traditional classroom: working and thinking alongside them.
Professor of History Michael Allen says his colleagues are not just award-winning scholars but also popular writers, serious teachers, and great collaborators.
The Carlos Montezuma Professor of Anthropology shares how an anthropology background can enhance education in fields like medicine, law, and business. Taking risks and exploring new topics, like anthropology, can change a student's path.
Professor Benton is interested in the patterns of inequality in the distribution and politics of care in settings socialized for scarcity, such as complex humanitarian emergencies and longer-term development projects. In courses like Modern Plagues, she and her students investigate how the complex interactions among social, political, environmental, and economic factors influence the history of infectious disease and the efforts to address them.
Professor Carrillo is the co-director of the Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN), which promotes interdisciplinary research and education on sexuality. His current research focus is the interaction between amateur genealogists and archival documents, and the social implications of the proliferation of genealogy as a global phenomenon. He is also investigating the sexualities of straight-identified men who are sexually interested in both women and men, as part of a larger project on the paradoxes of sexual identity as a social construction.
Professor Young aims to reduce maternal and child-undernutrition in the first 1000 days, especially in low-resource settings. Currently she studies the challenges of household water insecurity around the globe. She has led the development of the Household Water Insecurity Experiences (HWISE) and the Individual Water Insecurity Experiences (IWISE) scales, the first cross-culturally valid tool to measure household water insecurity. These scales have been implemented in over 50 countries by more than 100 governmental, policy, research, and civil organizations.
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In Weinberg College's monthly podcast, Weinberg alumni share their career experiences. Listen to what they have to say about the study of social and historical inquiry.
Gender shapes our lives in many ways, often unnoticed. This course introduces the sociological analysis of gender as a key element of social organization and inequality in the U.S. We’ll explore the causes and effects of gender inequality in institutions like family, education, and the labor market. The course concludes with a comparison of gender inequality in the U.S. and other countries, examining how social norms and policies influence these inequalities.
Analysis of talk in interaction based on examination of audio and video recorded data and associated transcripts. Conversation, action, turn, sequence, relevance, social structure, qualitative methodologies.
This course covers the concept of love from theological, historical, philosophical, and biblical perspectives.
Sometime during the fall of 1857, a young single woman from rural Vermont discovered she was pregnant. There seemed no possibility she could marry the man involved. What happened next involved multiple family members, train travel, and a legal and medical controversy that tore apart a community.
In this class, we explore the roles of gastronomic heritage in defining identities around the world. We start from the premise that foods themselves are historical records that capture histories of taste, trade, and experimentation. Through case studies in the US and around the world, we consider how people make choices about what to grow, what kind of foods to prepare, and how to serve them, and how these choices are deeply bound up with processes of identity-making.
We will study the theory and practice of Greek and Roman medicine, looking at ancient texts in translation, ancient artifacts and materials, and some modern scholarship. As a term project, students will learn to think as ancient physicians, diagnosing and prescribing treatments for patients from the Hippocratic case studies. During class discussion, we will engage critically with primary sources and examine the differences between ancient and modern science from a balanced historical perspective. We will also investigate the social, cultural, and economic forces that have affected the development of western medicine throughout its history.
Sailors played a paradoxical role in France's empire. On the one hand, they were the agents of empire, spreading French civilization throughout the world. On the other, they were often drawn from the lower classes of society, and from Brittany, a region of France that was itself a kind of colonized space, where residents mostly spoke Breton rather than French. The sailor was also closely associated with supposedly asocial behaviors: criminality, same-sex sexuality, rampant non-monogamous heterosexuality, and interracial relationships. In this class, we will explore these paradoxes of the figure of the sailor in French literature and film of the 19th and 20th centuries, through the works of Jules Verne, Pierre Loti, Jean Epstein, Ousmane Sembène, and R. F. Fassbinder.