Social Sciences

Explore faculty and student work in economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, and other disciplines shaping our understanding of society.

FAS Overhaul Brings Deep Cuts to Social Sciences, Phillips Brooks House

After a final round of layoffs, University leaders say 165 staff jobs were eliminated across the division.

by Lydialyle Gibson

The failed effort to enact cap and trade legislation to fight global warming

A distinguished panel considers why Congress failed to pass economy-wide measures to cap carbon emissions.

Harvard programs bring students together with inmates and their neighborhoods

Courses and programs bring Harvard students and scholars face-to-face with inmates and the communities they come from.

by Elizabeth Gudrais

Abigail Donovan and Laura Prager, pediatric psychiatrists and authors

The pediatric psychiatrists’ book depicts emergency-room experiences with mentally ill children.

Harvard's Bruce Western advocates new prison, rehabilitation policies

Sociologist Bruce Western rethinks incarceration in America

by Elizabeth Gudrais

Harvard Law's Michael Klarman on gay-marriage litigation and politics

On activism, litigation, and social change in America

by Michael J. Klarman

Alexander Hamilton Rice, Amazon explorer, by Mark Plotkin

Brief life of an Amazon explorer: 1875-1956

by Mark J. Plotkin

The passion for procedures to fix ailing arteries and hearts may be misguided

How gaps in medical knowledge affect matters of the heart

by Alice Park

Harvard faculty experts discuss gun violence as a public-health matter

Four Harvard experts convened at the School of Public Health to debate public-health approaches to the topic of gun violence.

HarvardX offers Justice, Classics courses

New Harvard online courses go beyond quantitative subjects to include "Justice," ancient Greece

Bernard Bailyn's "The Barbarous Years" reviewed by Daniel K. Richter

The “mixed multitudes” of early Colonial America—and the Native Americans

by Daniel K. Richter