Classes

HIST-LIT 90FZ: The South: Histories of a U.S. Region

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2024

Instructor: Rachel Kirby
Meeting time: Monday, 12:45-2:45 pm

The South is a physical place with debated boundaries, populated by a diverse set of people who navigate and enliven the region. Simultaneously, “the South” is a layered cultural category that has been imagined and evoked over time in ways that are dynamic, evolving, and contradictory. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to our study of moments, ideas, places, and events that illuminate various aspects of the region, we will question what types of social and political work are carried out by the category of “southern” as employed by people both in and outside of the region.... Read more about HIST-LIT 90FZ: The South: Histories of a U.S. Region

HIST-LIT 90FU: British Soft Power from Shakespeare to Dua Lipa

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2024

Instructor: Laura Quinton
Meeting time: Wednesday, 3:00-5:00 pm

British Soft PowerToday, the United Kingdom is considered one of the world’s “soft power superpowers.” How did this small island come to wield such outsize global influence? From Voltaire’s rhapsodizing about eighteenth-century England to present-day infatuations with James Bond, Harry Potter, and the Royal Family, this course explores how British art and culture have historically produced alluring national images. What “British” qualities have captured the world’s imagination, and to what extent are they a fantasy that overlooks dynamics of class and multiculturalism? What countries, leaders, and popular audiences around the world have latched on to these images, and to what end? Have they launched revolutions... Read more about HIST-LIT 90FU: British Soft Power from Shakespeare to Dua Lipa

HIST-LIT 90FI: Race and Empire in the Americas

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2024

Instructor: Hannah Waits
Meeting time: Thursday, 3:00-5:00 pm

Race and Empire in the AmericasThis course explores the culture and politics of imperialism in the Americas from the early 19th century to the present, with particular attention to race and ethnicity. We ask how formal and informal imperial relationships developed by looking at French, British, and especially United States imperialism across the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. Focusing on topics like revolution, migration, military occupation, tourism, climate change, and humanitarianism, we examine how empire functioned on the ground for those who imposed it and those who resisted, appropriated, or accommodated it.... Read more about HIST-LIT 90FI: Race and Empire in the Americas

HIST-LIT 93AE: Prison Abolition and Prison Literature

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2024

Instructor: Thomas Dichter
Meeting time: Monday, 12:00-2:45 pm

This class explores the relationship between the movement to abolish incarceration and the literary production of people inside prisons. How can prison abolitionism and prison literature serve as lenses for better understanding one another? For the past 50 years, prison abolitionists have insisted on asking fundamental questions about the nature, function, and efficacy of imprisonment. We will put their challenges to the carceral state in conversation with the works of incarcerated writers over the past two centuries. Authors will include Angela Davis, Alexander Berkman, Chester Himes, Malcolm X, Clyde Bellecourt, Patrisse Cullors, and Marlon Peterson. We will also work intensively with archival materials—in particular, we will collaborate on digitizing and organizing original materials from the 1973 takeover of the Massachusetts State Prison at Walpole by the prisoners’ labor union.... Read more about HIST-LIT 93AE: Prison Abolition and Prison Literature

HIST-LIT 90EJ: Espionage: A Cultural History

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2024

Instructor: Duncan White
Meeting time: Thursday, 3:45-5:45 pm

EspionageOver the course of the twentieth century the spy thriller became a central part of our culture, changing the way people imagined how the state operates in secret. Why are we attracted to stories of paranoia and conspiracy? What is the history of this genre, and how is it intertwined with the history of espionage? Does espionage fiction glamorize the work of spy agencies? Or help challenge it? The course is divided into four units. The first will consider the origins of the spy thriller and how the obsession with espionage fiction was connected to the creation of the Secret Services in Britain, reading stories by Baroness Orczy, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Rudyard Kipling. The second unit shift its focus to British spies in the Cold War... Read more about HIST-LIT 90EJ: Espionage: A Cultural History

HIST-LIT 90AN: God Save the Queen! Ruling Women from Rome to the Renaissance

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2024

Instructor: Sean Gilsdorf
Meeting time: Monday/Wednesday, 1:30-2:45 pm

God Save the QueenThis seminar will explore female rulership in Europe from the late Roman empire to the age of Elizabeth I. Discussion of varied texts and images (most of them primary sources in translation) will reveal the role of queens within their societies, their relationship to broader social and cultural institutions such as the Christian Church, and the ways in which queens were celebrated, criticized, and imagined by writers and artists of their time. 

HIST-LIT 90BR: Work and Labor Across the Americas

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2024

Instructor: Dennis Hogan
Meeting time: Tuesday, 3:00-5:00 pm

This seminar introduces students to the history of work and workers in the Americas. We will examine work and labor and their intersections with colonialism, imperialism, and slavery from the nineteenth century through today. The course will also ask how working people have represented themselves, and how they have intervened to change their own lives, and, sometimes, the...

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HIST-LIT 90GO: Protest and Decolonization in Latin America and the Caribbean

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Instructor: Jorge Sanchez Cruz
Meeting time: Wednesday, 12:45-2:45pm

Protest and DecolonizationThis course studies the “afterlife” of colonialism, exploring forms of protest that emanate from indigenous territories and subjectivities and within indigenous community-making and knowledge production. From the Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, the Zapatista movement, the Oaxaca Commune, the Bolivian collective Mujeres Creando, to indigenous protests in Venezuela, this course unpacks the relationship between aesthetic practices (such as indigenous video, art, and literary production) and practices of decoloniality found in the everyday and in the momentum of the multitudes. With attention to how subjectivity and indigeneity are conditioned by race, class, sex, gender, and capitalism, this class will engage with critical race studies, decolonial studies, feminist studies, gender studies, and cuir/queer studies. While the course will be conducted in English, Spanish language materials will be available for students who wish to fulfill History & Literature’s language requirement.

HIST-LIT 90GN: The Global Cold War

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Instructor: Jules Riegel
Meeting time: Tuesday, 9:45-11:45 am

Global Cold WarThis course examines the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1991, including the superpowers' strategies in Europe and the so-called “Third World.” While addressing U.S. and Soviet foreign policy and political ideologies, this course also considers the Cold War’s impact across the globe, considering topics such as decolonization and human rights, as well as its cultural effects. Finally, we will examine the continuing effects of the Cold War on the world today, covering topics such as movements for nuclear disarmament, fears of another Cold War–style superpower confrontation, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Readings may include accounts by atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki; anticolonial and countercultural writings from Patrice Lumumba and Ho Chi Minh to the Weather Underground; and literature, art, music, and film grappling with fears of nuclear war.

HIST-LIT 90GM: Hollywood’s Seventies: The U.S. on Film, 1970-1980

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Instructor: Steven Biel
Meeting time: Wednesday, 12:45-2:45 pm

Hollywoods SeventiesA period of cascading crises—the Watergate scandal, the OPEC oil embargo, the U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War, stagflation, high unemployment, deindustrialization—the 1970s also produced extraordinary achievements in American film. Changes in the studio system, the demise of the Production Code’s longstanding censorship regime, the emergence of a younger generation of filmmakers, new film technologies, and other factors internal to the movie industry contributed to what some scholars refer to as “Hollywood’s last golden age.” So did the broader conflicts and transformations wrought by the 1960s and their immediate aftermath. This course explores how films of seventies responded to, represented, and affected their crisis-inflected times. It is organized around three overlapping themes... Read more about HIST-LIT 90GM: Hollywood’s Seventies: The U.S. on Film, 1970-1980

HIST-LIT 90GL: Zombies, Witchcraft, and Uncanny Science

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Instructor: Patrick Sylvain
Meeting time: Monday, 9:45-11:45 am

ZombiesThis course delves into the captivating realms of zombies, witchcraft, and uncanny science, exploring their cultural significance, historical contexts, and literary representations. Through an interdisciplinary approach, students will critically examine these paranormal phenomena as they appear in culture. We begin by delving into the origins and evolution of zombies, tracing their roots in Haitian folklore and their emergence as contemporary pop culture icons. Next, the focus shifts to witchcraft, studying its historical and cultural significance across different time periods and societies, encouraging critical thinking about the power dynamics, gender roles, and societal anxieties surrounding witchcraft.... Read more about HIST-LIT 90GL: Zombies, Witchcraft, and Uncanny Science

HIST-LIT 10AB: Introduction to the Medieval World

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Instructor: Brian FitzGerald and Sean Gilsdorf
Meeting time: Tuesday and Thursday, 1:30-2:45 pm

HL10: Medieval StudiesThis course provides a journey through the cultures, peoples, objects, and ideas of the millennium commonly described as "medieval", extending from the reorganization of the Roman world in the fourth century to the transformations of the Mediterranean world order in the fifteenth. While historians often emphasize the divisions and dislocations of this era, there also were important continuities and similarities between the societies around, and on either side of, the Mediterranean Sea.... Read more about HIST-LIT 10AB: Introduction to the Medieval World

HIST-LIT 93AA: Queer Archives

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Instructor: Lauren Kaminsky
Meeting time: Wednesday, 9:45-11:45 am

Queer histories are all around us, but rarely do they announce themselves as such. This research seminar offers training in archival methods with a focus on historical subjects who deviate from dominant historical narratives. In centering “queer” archival traces, we will read along the grain with dissident voices representing minoritized gender and sexual subjectivities, while also cultivating a practice of reading against the grain as a way of attending to the exclusionary operations of representational practices.... Read more about HIST-LIT 93AA: Queer Archives

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