As part of Brown 2026, faculty are developing new courses in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States’ founding. Professors across multiple departments have also designated existing courses for inclusion in the curriculum.
Spanning from religious studies to classics, 22 courses offered in spring 2025 are designated as part of the Brown 2026 curriculum. For a class to be included in Brown 2026, it must discuss topics associated with the initiative, like democracy in the U.S. or the legacy of the American Revolution. But there are no strict guidelines for inclusion in the program, according to Seth Rockman, associate professor of history and Brown 2026 steering committee member.
When designing the curriculum, democracy is interpreted “in the broadest possible sense,” said Karin Wulf, director and librarian of the John Carter Brown Library and Brown 2026 co-chair. She added that she is focused on how Brown 2026 sparks conversations that go beyond history and explore the “role of a university in and for democracy.”
Rockman envisioned a curriculum that would “develop very organically,” and give rise to “new kinds of courses that would bring together faculty.”
In spring 2026, Rockman will co-teach “The American Revolution” with English professor Philip Gould. The interdisciplinary course, which was previously taught in spring 2024, will be part of the Brown 2026 curriculum. In the course, Rockman said he plans to practice “intellectual disagreement” and “interdisciplinary inquiry” with examples from American history.
This semester, Gould’s course, “ENGL 1512A: Freaks of Nature: Emerson, Thoreau and the Transcendentalists,” is also part of the Brown 2026 curriculum.
“Transcendentalism is a uniquely American movement and many of its ideas are still with us today,” Lillian Castrillon ’27, a student in Gould’s course, wrote in a message to The Herald. “It feels even more important to maintain that self-reliance right now as authoritarianism is on the rise in our own government.”
Castrillon added that she didn’t know the course was part of the Brown 2026 curriculum, but it “makes sense as an addition to it,” she said.
Kai La Forte ’28 also did not know that one of his courses, “POLS 0821: How to Think in an Age of Polarized Politics,” was part of the curriculum. But La Forte said its ties to American democracy are clear.
“I can’t overstate how relevant the content of this course is to American democracy,” La Forte wrote in a message to The Herald. “Openness and civil discourse — major points of emphasis in the curriculum — are not only foundational to the democratic process as a whole, but were pillars of the country’s founding.”
“We could really use more courses like these in the Political Science department; courses that don’t particularly stress what to think about politics, but how to think.”
Rebecca Graham, postdoctoral research associate and Brown 2026 coordinator, is creating new courses for the initiative. In fall 2025, Graham will teach a first-year seminar called “American Revolution in Popular Culture,” which will work with popular media like “Liberty Kids,” American Girl Dolls and “Hamilton” to engage students with modern perceptions of the American Revolution.
“The class is an opportunity to model historical thinking about the ways that we remember the past and how those ways change over time,” Graham said. In alignment with the 2026 curriculum, the last two weeks of the new course will focus on the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States.
Curriculum for Brown 2026 will expand outside of the classroom, including the Brown 2026 Reads Initiative. For the pilot of this program, the steering committee picked recently-published faculty books that involved Brown 2026 topics and distributed them across students registered for the program, Wulf said.
The current selection of events and classes is “the tip of the iceberg,” she added. “Our goal is to have at least one Brown 2026 initiated event every month.”
