Teaching Resources

This webpage collects syllabi, module outlines, seminar plans, assignment ideas, and classroom activities related to histories of atheism, secularism, and humanism. Materials are from a variety of teaching contexts, disciplines, and countries. We hope that browsing this page inspires others to introduce aspects of these histories into their teaching.

Many thanks to the ISHASH members who have generously shared their teaching materials. These resources complement the ISHASH bibliography and our list of recent books published in the field.

We’re always open to new ideas, so if you have teaching materials that incorporate histories of atheism, secularism, and humanism (and you are willing to share them), please get in touch with us by email.

Atheism

Joseph Blankholm (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)
Syllabus (2020)

This course traces the historical development of the set of ideas we now call atheism and takes account of its varieties in the world today. In addition to the history of atheism, the course looks at related contemporary topics, such as religion-like secular communities, Islamaphobia, and the possibility of an atheist spirituality.

One semester course designed for undergraduate degree in Religious Studies. Syllabus and materials are in English.
Readings are organized mostly chronologically, and each week’s reading focuses on a problem that atheist thinkers have tried to resolve or that their writing has raised for those who want to understand atheism.
Nearly all of the texts on the syllabus are primary sources written by nonbelievers of one sort or another, but they do not all agree. This encourages students to avoid mistaking the arguments they find in the readings for a stable or “correct” perspective, and instead, to recognize a robust internal debate.

Atheists: A Social History in the West

Callum Brown (University of Glasgow, UK)
Course handbook including essay questions (2019-20)

This course examines the conceptual issues about, and long-term history of, those without religion in the West – sometimes known as the “nones” – from Ancient Greece and Rome to the present day. It looks at how to detect them, what demographic characteristics they held, why few women appear in the historical record until the late 20th century, and the impact of legal and ecclesiastical impediments to being without faith. The course moves though the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the early modern period, the Enlightenment and industrialisation, to examining – despite the anti-atheist panics of the Cold War – the causes of the rising numbers in twentieth-century modernity and postmodernity, concluding with studying the massive growth of atheists in the early 21st century.

Two semester course designed for final-year (upper-division) undergraduate degree in History. (Last taught 2019-20.) Material is in English.
Key themes include ecclesiastical and state power, gender, class, ethnicity, sexual freedom and fertility control. The course uses sources of various kinds which “reach” the voices of the nones: personal testimony in court cases, in autobiography and memoir, in essays and scientific exposition, and in oral history testimony.
The course emphasises approaching atheism as an experiential issue rather than as a philosophical or ideological position, and push first-hand testimony and social history of the personal to the forefront.

História do Ateísmo

Ricardo Oliveira da Silva (Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil)
Course handbook for undergraduate course (2022)
Outlines for public online course ‘Ateísmos, Descrenças Religiosas e Secularismos’ – 2024 (jpg) and 2025 (jpg)

The undergraduate course is made up of four units: Introduction to the study of atheism, ancient atheisms, modern atheisms, and a history of atheism in Brazil.

One semester non-mandatory course designed for undergraduate degree in History. Syllabus and materials are in Portuguese.
A free 40-hour online course offered to the public beyond the university. Syllabus and materials are in Portuguese.

Identity and Belief in Victorian Britain

Clare Stainthorp (Queen Mary University of London, UK)
Full syllabus peer reviewed and published with supporting essay by Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom (2024).

How did religious minorities navigate their role as “other” in Christian-majority Britain? Orientated by this question, this syllabus focuses on how identity and belief were expressed in texts written by individuals associated with minoritized communities in nineteenth-century Britain, including secular groups that rejected religion.

Designed for final-year (upper-division) undergraduate degree in English Literature in the United Kingdom. Material is in English.
Topics and texts include: Religious Seeking (Francis William Newman, Marie Corelli, and Annie Besant), Religion of Science and Humanity (William Winwood Reade), Atheism (James ‘B. V.’ Thomson and Constance Naden).
The midterm assignment – a show-and-tell research exercise for which students read digitized nineteenth-century periodicals – could be adapted for many other teaching contexts.

Mapping the Diversity of the German Secularist Field

Katharina Neef (Leipzig University Germany)
Assignment and further reading (2025)

The students’ task is to browse and compare the websites of the leading German secularist organisations, the Giordano-Bruno-Foundation and the German Humanist Association. The websites show that the two institutions represent the two polar ideal types of freethought organisations – the social and the ideological type.

The uploaded document is in English; the materials are in German.
This assignment exemplifies the entanglement of form, content, forms of action, and (un)successful strategies, as they generally shape social phenomena; makes visible organised secularism as a worldview and part/parallel of the religious field; and invites students to reflect on the unreflective normality of a non-religious everyday life in East Germany.

Materialism

Joseph Blankholm (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)
Syllabus (2018)

This course covers influential works in the tradition of ontological materialism, focusing on breadth over depth. Goals of the course include exploring whether it makes sense to talk about such a tradition, and develop a conceptual vocabulary and grammar for making this tradition legible, comparing it to others, and articulating its relationship to religion and secularism.

One semester course designed for undergraduate degree in Religious Studies. Syllabus and materials are in English.

Nonreligious Worldviews

Atko Remmel (University of Tartu, Estonia)

The course is a blend of intellectual historical and social scientific approaches, aiming to give an overview of the historical development of nonreligious lines of thought to highlight their influences in contemporary society. Special attention is paid to nonreligion in Estonian history and the contemporary situation.

The subject is usually taken in the second year of bachelor’s studies. Syllabus and materials are in Estonian (and not available for download).
Historical part of the course includes a general overview of the historical development from antiquity until today, with reading assignments exemplifying the development since the 16th Century onwards (Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, de La Mettrie, Marx, Feuerbach, Russell, Dawkins, and local Soviet atheist authors).
Obligatory midterm assignment – analysing a historical text, interviewing a nonreligious person, or submitting a presentation on a topic of choice in agreement with the lecturer.

Religionskritik und Atheismus in der Neuzeit

Carolin Kosuch (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany)
Syllabus (2024)

‘Religious Criticism and Atheism in the Modern Era’ is a Master’s seminar that explores the history of religious criticism and atheism in the Western world, highlighting how traditions of nonreligion emerging from Christian and Jewish contexts have profoundly shaped European intellectual and cultural history.

One semester course designed for masters degree. Course materials are in German, and core readings include both German- and English-language publications.
While European history is often narrated through a Christian or Jewish lens, this seminar shifts attention to their critical “Others.” It examines the development of Western religious criticism and atheism as influential (though often minority) intellectual traditions. The seminar was designed to explore Christian- and Jewish-based forms and practices of nonreligion within a broader conceptual framework, aiming to develop a more nuanced understanding of the historical formation and diversification of nonreligion in Europe.
The course focuses on: Comparative intellectual and cultural histories of religious critique and unbelief; Concepts of secularity, secularism, anticlericalism, and atheism; Biographical case studies; The lived practice, or “doing,” of religious criticism and atheism
Key texts included works by David Biale, Stephen Bullivant and Michael Ruse, Lisa Dittrich, Todd Weir, and Dorothea Weltecke.

Secularism

Joseph Blankholm (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)
Syllabus (2024)

This course provides an advanced introduction to the secular, secularization, secularism, and secularity. It aims to provide and overview of secularism and its related concepts, show how they have evolved and depend on one another, and explore their significance for the study of religion.

One semester course designed for undergraduate degree in Religious Studies. Syllabus and materials are in English.
Readings in this course are primarily from the twenty-first century. The readings debate (and participate in the evolution of) the codependent but distinct meanings of the secular, secularization, secularism, and secularity.