Classes

HIST-LIT 93AC: Vanishing Arts: Watching, Researching, and Writing about Performance

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Instructor: Laura Quinton
Meeting time: Thursday, 9:45-11:45 am

Vanishing ArtsEven before the curtain drops, the show is disappearing: in this moment alone, individual performers and wide-eyed spectators come together for an unrepeatable experience. This course offers an introduction to methods for researching and writing about the living, ephemeral arts of theater and dance. Along with reading foundational historical and theoretical scholarship on performance, we will examine how a variety of primary sources – such as critical reviews, images, set designs, digital recordings, interviews, and memoirs – allow us to reimagine a range of past performances. What are the intellectual, practical, and ethical challenges, as well as the creative possibilities, of researching histories of dance and theater? And how do performing arts stage cultural values and speak to ideas about national, racial, and gender identities in particular contexts? We will spend time outside of the classroom, discovering performance at Houghton Library, the Harvard Art Museums, and the Museum of Fine Arts. We will also attend and write about multiple live shows in the Boston area.... Read more about HIST-LIT 93AC: Vanishing Arts: Watching, Researching, and Writing about Performance

HIST-LIT 90FJ: Modern Europe and Migration

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Instructor: Matthew Sohm
Meeting time: Wednesday, 12:45-2:45 pm

Modern Europe and MigrationOutsiders, newcomers, and minorities played a central role in shaping contemporary Europe. In this seminar, we will embrace the perspectives of people who moved or were forced to move to, from, and around Europe since the end of World War Two, with a focus on questions of migration after the Cold War. We will begin by investigating the dislocation and mass population movements that occurred in the aftermath of war and at the end of empire. We will then consider how race and religion were used as instruments of exclusion, and as nativist political tools, in the 1970s and 1980s.... Read more about HIST-LIT 90FJ: Modern Europe and Migration

HIST-LIT 90DH: Students at the Barricades: Student Activism in Global Perspective

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Instructor: Lilly Havstad
Meeting time: Wednesday, 9:45-11:45 am

Student ActivismWhat is the role of the student in the struggle for global justice? How does student activism differ from other forms of activism, and how does it intersect? Has student activism changed over time, and do different student movements exhibit different characteristics? This course will explore the role that students have played and continue to play in social justice movements around our world. Throughout our transnational study of student mobilization over time, we will discuss the role that student movements play in altering social values, practices, and institutions.... Read more about HIST-LIT 90DH: Students at the Barricades: Student Activism in Global Perspective

HIST-LIT 90GK: Performing Latinidad: Race, Sex, and Excess in Contemporary U.S. Culture

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Instructor: Jorge Sanchez Cruz
Meeting time: Thursday, 3:00-5:00 pm

Performing LatinidadHow have Latinx communities been imagined and produced in U.S. popular culture, history, and literature? To answer this question, this course attends to the construction—inclusions and exclusions—of Latinidad. Paying attention to historical, juridical, discursive, and affective contributions to such construction, the course also situates performance—embodied, literary, cultural, artistic—that either affirms such assemblages or disrupts its formation. In that sense, the course explores anti-performances, refusals and disavowals of a homogenous construction that also attempt to expand if not re-construct Latinidad and the field of Latinx studies overall. To think Latinidad, then, is to grasp also into questions of race, sex, and excess that unsettle the performance and identity of Latinidad.... Read more about HIST-LIT 90GK: Performing Latinidad: Race, Sex, and Excess in Contemporary U.S. Culture

HIST-LIT 90GA: Slavery and Historical Memory

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Instructor: Nicholas Bloom
Meeting time: Thursday, 9:45-11:45 am

Slavery and Historical MemoryThis course will consider some of the ways that scholars, artists, and activists have attempted to address key problems in the study of Black life and slavery in the early Americas, and especially the early United States. Namely, how can one begin to tell the story and the legacy of a people whose lives have been so severely distorted and erased by primary historical records—records which were primarily composed by people invested in maintaining and reproducing Black enslavement? And to what extent should one trust those primary documents in telling the story of even the most powerful people and institutions in these societies?... Read more about HIST-LIT 90GA: Slavery and Historical Memory

HIST-LIT 90GI: Transpacific Empires

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Instructor: Adhy Kim
Meeting time: Monday, 12:45-2:45 pm

Transpacific EmpiresThe term “transpacific” denotes the interrelation between East Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas as geographies and geopolitical territories shaped by power struggles. In this course, we will examine historical and cultural artifacts that attest to past and ongoing imperial arrangements from the twentieth century to the present. How have U.S., Japanese, and other empires structured the exchanges, intimacies, transformations, and tensions linking diverse peoples across Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas? What are the social, cultural, political, and economic reverberations of colonial invasions, hot wars, cold war, migrations, and racial formations? And how does the transpacific enrich our study of both Asia and Asian America?... Read more about HIST-LIT 90GI: Transpacific Empires

HIST-LIT 90GJ: Contesting Citizenship in the United States

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Instructor: Lila Teeters Knolle
Meeting time: Wednesday, 12:45-2:45 pm

Contesting CitizenshipThis seminar centers citizenship as a deeply contested and dynamic status whose meanings have changed over time. Our study will begin with the historical, philosophical underpinnings of citizenship in the United States but will quickly turn to the ways that marginalized groups have contested the confines of American citizenship. We will ask: How have the rights and obligations of US citizens changed over time? Who has been able to claim citizenship, and who has been barred from it? We will evaluate how race, gender, and immigration status have affected individuals’ calls for citizenship. The course considers the history of naturalization laws, assimilation efforts, expatriation, and dual citizenship. We will also evaluate the creation, effects, and challenges to birthright citizenship policies.... Read more about HIST-LIT 90GJ: Contesting Citizenship in the United States

HIST-LIT 90GD: The History of American Journalism

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Instructor: Morgan Day Frank
Meeting time: Tuesday, 3:00-5:00 pm

The History of American Journalism“You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” media baron William Randolph Hearst supposedly declared in 1897, pushing the US towards war with Spain. Although in many respects Hearst’s infamous “yellow journalism” can be understood to anticipate the media’s worst present day excesses – an early example of “fake news” – in other respects Hearst’s grand proclamations can be seen as an expression of the media’s most noble ambition: its desire to shape public opinion. This seminar will explore key moments in the history of journalism to better understand the role journalism plays in the contemporary US. For instance, we will compare political discourse in colonial America to political discourse as it’s currently practiced on Twitter. We will read abolitionist newspapers before the Civil War and investigative “muckraking” reporting at the turn of the twentieth century and consider how political and exposé journalism function today.... Read more about HIST-LIT 90GD: The History of American Journalism

HIST-LIT 90GC: Race and the Environment in the Atlantic World

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Instructor: Hannah Cole
Meeting time: Monday, 9:45-11:45 am

Race and the Environment in the Atlantic WorldThis course explores how the ecologies of the Atlantic World became ground zero for the global processes of racialization, colonization, and capital accumulation. Focusing on topics such as European landfall, the Middle Passage, plantation slavery, Indigenous and maroon resistance, mineral extraction, and tourism, we will study how the racialization of people became tied to the transformation of natural environments. At the same time, we will examine how racialized, colonized, and enslaved people formed life-sustaining relationships with the flora and fauna of the New World, placing a particular emphasis on Caribbean ecologies. We will analyze theoretical works by Sylvia Wynter and Kathryn Yusoff, primary sources including Columbus’s letters and Esteban Montejo’s Biography of a Runaway Slave, and fictional works by Michelle Cliff and Octavia Butler.... Read more about HIST-LIT 90GC: Race and the Environment in the Atlantic World

HIST-LIT 90FL: Indigenous in the City

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Instructor: Morgan Ridgway
Meeting time: Tuesday, 3:00-5:00 pm

Indigenous in the CityAccording to census data, nearly seven out of every ten Indigenous people live in or near cities. Despite this number, a prevailing narrative locates the Indigenous person some place far away from urban life. While the reservation and rural areas are critically important in Indigenous histories, presents, and futures, cities provide another lens through which to understand Indigenous life in the United States. Given the sheer numbers of Indigenous people in cities, why is the prevailing narrative one of rurality? How does urbanity shape the experiences of Indigenous peoples in the twentieth century? How do Indigenous people figure into the expansion of urban centers? And, how is indigeneity memorialized in urban space and to what ends?... Read more about HIST-LIT 90FL: Indigenous in the City

HIST-LIT 90EZ: The Global South Asian Diaspora

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Instructor: Vikrant Dadawala
Meeting time: Monday, 3:00-5:00 pm

The Global South Asian DiasporaOver the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, people of South Asian heritage emigrated out of their ancestral homelands in vast numbers, giving rise to one of the world’s largest and most geographically scattered diasporas. An estimated thirty million people of South Asian heritage live outside the Indian subcontinent today, with significant communities in the United Kingdom, the United States, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, East Africa, and the Middle East. How and why did South Asians choose to settle in new countries? In what ways did the act of emigration transform their sense of religious, ethnic, caste, and racial identity? How did their lives become bound up with those of other displaced or colonized people – in Africa, the Caribbean, and in the Americas?... Read more about HIST-LIT 90EZ: The Global South Asian Diaspora

HIST-LIT 90EY: Human Rights and Humanitarianism in the Modern World

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Instructor: Yan Slobodkin
Meeting time: Wednesday, 3:00pm - 5:00pm

Human Rights and HumanitarianismHuman rights and humanitarianism are fundamental to modern political ethics. Yet the moral consensus surrounding these terms obscures an often disturbing history. This course is an introduction to human rights and humanitarianism as frameworks for understanding European, imperial, and global history from the enlightenment to the present day. Rather than uncritically accepting a triumphalist narrative, we will explore how these concepts were constructed over time, asking how they were used in practice, whose interests they served, and how they enabled inequality and exclusion along axes of race, gender, class, and nationality even as they promised a more just world.... Read more about HIST-LIT 90EY: Human Rights and Humanitarianism in the Modern World

HIST-LIT 90EK: American Noir

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Instructor: Angela Allan
Meeting time: Tuesday, 9:45-11:45 am

American NoirMidcentury America saw the explosion of a genre on the page and screen—the hardboiled crime novel and the film noir. Noir represented a foil to postwar optimism: its protagonists were cynics and loners. Filled with lurid crimes and deeds, noir suggested a dark underbelly to American society and its promises of domestic fulfillment, economic stability, and institutional support. Husbands and wives plotted each other’s murders; the city streets beckoned with sin; and the police were no match for the private detective. Yet even while these stories foregrounded alienation, they had a mass cultural appeal to American audiences. This class will examine noir not only as an aesthetic—brutality disguised in beauty—but also as a social commentary on American life in the 1940s and 50s.... Read more about HIST-LIT 90EK: American Noir

HIST-LIT 90FY: Culture Wars

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2023

Instructor: Steve Biel and Lauren Kaminsky
Meeting time: Monday, 12:45-2:45 pm

Culture WarsIn 1992, former Nixon speechwriter and presidential candidate Pat Buchanan claimed that the United States was engaged in “a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.” The idea that the nation was embroiled in a culture war with nothing less than its soul at stake has its contemporary origins in the upheavals of the 1960s. Culture warriors took on the defense of “color blindness” against affirmative action and “identity politics”; of “family values” against feminism, homosexuality, and abortion; of literary and artistic canons and scholarly “standards” against “trendiness” and “political correctness.” Through polemics, speeches, essays, memoirs, fiction, television, films, and photography,... Read more about HIST-LIT 90FY: Culture Wars

HIST-LIT 90FW: Carceral Empire

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2023

Instructor: Balraj Gill
Meeting time: Thursday, 9:45-11:45 am

Carceral EmpireMass incarceration is a catastrophe in the United States, especially affecting Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and poor communities. Different forms of carceral confinements have long been an integral part of the formation of the United States and other settler colonies in the Americas. In this course, we will focus on the history of Indigenous confinements. While the incarceration of Indigenous peoples today resembles the incarceration of other minoritized peoples, it has similar and distinct historical genealogies that can be traced to coercive practices designed to exploit their labor and eliminate lifeways, knowledge systems, tribal identification, and relationships with homelands. From the enslavement of Taíno people in the fifteenth century, to the formation of reservations and reserves in the United States and... Read more about HIST-LIT 90FW: Carceral Empire

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