PLAI courses ask students to engage critically and across disciplines with key themes, ideas, or problems. The interdisciplinary nature of the courses invites co-teaching and challenges students to think consciously about and to explore the various theoretical and methodological structures they are asked to employ in humanities scholarship. Our courses also pay particular attention to the resonances of their various subjects beyond the classroom by inviting critical assessment and engagement with the 'public life' of the themes, ideas, problems under investigation.