Do you live within driving distance of Duke University? Are you a high school student interested in earning college credit? Commuter options are available to local, academically qualified 10th and 11th grade students (2024-2025 school year)! Discover courses from across the arts & sciences and earn college credit alongside Duke undergraduates.
Term 2 classes meet from June 30 - August 8, 2025. Final exams are scheduled for August 9 - 11, 2025.
Course information is occasionally updated. Please continue to monitor the website for any changes.
*The type of film content that is shown for this course is meant to challenge the viewer when it comes to analyzing films that cover more mature themes related to politics, identity, autonomy, etc.
Integrated with the films and filmmakers of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. The art form, style, and technology of contemporary documentary films. Issues of autonomy and power, politics, and public policies. Analysis of outstanding films from around the world. Presentations and discussions by filmmakers.
Meetings: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday: 2:00PM – 4:05PM
Building: Rubenstein Arts Film Theater
Editors are the unsung heroes of moviemaking. As part-artist and part-technician, editors craft the intuitive, unseen architecture of a story.
In this course, you will learn how to understand and use editing as a cinematic language. Through hands-on exercises and critical analysis, we will explore the art of the edit through narrative, documentary, and experimental approaches. You will engage with creative and technical editing processes in both digital and analog mediums to discover and practice crafting cohesive, engaging, and purposeful stories.
Meetings: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday: 2:00PM – 4:05PM
Building: Rubenstein Arts Center 234
The digital text has led to new forms of research and is receiving increasing attention from artificial intelligence (AI). The application of machine learning to text, known as text mining, presents unique intellectual challenges that require major contributions from the humanities. This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary domain of text mining through a humanities-based media-theoretic framework. Students will first learn text data prep skills and practices fundamental to meaningful analysis. The semester will later introduce unsupervised machine learning and topic modeling, and culminate in a group project. Not recommended for advanced CS students.
Meetings: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday: 10:00AM – 12:05PM
Building: Smith Warehouse Bay 12 A228
High school seats are limited. Apply early.
Theoretical approaches to analyzing cultural beliefs and practices cross-culturally; application of specific approaches to case material from present and/or past cultures.
*This course cannot be used towards the CULANTH major at Duke if taken during high school.
Meetings: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday: 12:30PM – 2:35PM
Building: TBA
Prerequisite: AP Literature
“Poetry sharpens our engagement with language, makes us rethink, rewire our relationship with words” (Ishion Hutchinson). Taught by the Blackburn Artist-In-Residence Frances Leviston, this course will invite you to explore and rewire your own relationship with words as a poet, approaching language not as a tool to be used, but as a living intelligence to be collaborated with. With playfulness and pleasure, we will explore the possibilities of language: its sounds and rhythms, its tones of voice, its metaphors and images, and its intimate relation to the body. You will read a diverse range of work by poets including Ocean Vuong, Dunya Mikhail, Natalie Diaz and Kei Miller, and undertake writing prompts and challenges as you work towards your own portfolio of original poems – with plenty of workshop support and feedback along the way.
Meetings: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday: 3:30PM – 5:35PM
Building: Social Sciences 109
Prerequisite: AP Literature
By the end of this course, students will have a created a portfolio of original, creative work on the theme of urban spaces and imagining cities differently.
Assignments include:
- No exams.
daily in-class creative work that will culminate in a portfolio
- peer feedback workshops and revision exercises
- short in-class quizzes or presentations on the reading material
Synopsis of course content:
This course combines learning foundational principles of urban planning and theory, analyzing speculative media that imagines futuristic cities, and creating original work, text or visual, in which students will reimagine urban spaces with a sense of wonder and possibility. Together, we will study how our built environment, and the physical spaces in which we live, define the kinds of lives we lead.
We will draw primarily from David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky’s book Cities Made Differently (2024) to get to the core of the concept of the “city.” Next, speculative media across film and literature, such and Blade Runner (1982) and Black Panther (2018), will help us to begin imagining new and different urban worlds. Key texts in urban planning and city architecture, from authors such as Jane Jacobs, Le Corbusier, and Lewis Mumford, and case studies of formative urban projects like those of Robert Moses in New York City will help ground our inquiry in the history and principles of constructing urban space. Finally, creative writing exercises and workshops, based on prompts from our core text, will help give voice to our alternative visions for the future of where we live.
Meetings: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday: 10:00AM – 12:05PM
Building: Social Sciences 109
Prerequisite: AP Biology
Introduction to neuroscience that explores methods, models, and reasoning that led to discoveries about brain-behavior relations. Students learn and apply concepts in neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, synaptic transmission, the somatic sensorimotor system, vision, emotions, attention & consciousness, memory & learning, sexual differentiation & orientation, and psychopathology. In-class experiences organized around principles of team-based learning, with students collaborating in small teams for readiness assessments and team applications.
Meetings: Monday - Friday: 9:30AM – 10:45AM
Building: LSRC DIBS B029
Historically informed introduction to ethical theories in the Western tradition. Major historical figures (Aristotle, Kant, Mill) are read as well as some contemporary defenders of views inspired by these thinkers. This course is intended to provide a foundation for further study of ethics in philosophy.
Meetings: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday: 10:00AM – 12:05PM
Building: TBD
Prerequisite: Completion of a psychology course at the high school level. AP Psychology preferred.
Effects of social interaction and social processes on a wide range of individual attitudes and behaviors (for example, conformity, leadership, prejudice, aggression, altruism). Emphasis on the logic, reasoning, research designs, and methods by which knowledge is generated. Equal attention to experimental and non-experimental research. Students are required to participate in psychological research.
Meetings: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday: 12:30PM – 2:35PM
Building: TBD