Welcome Class of 2028!
We're excited to introduce you to Hist & Lit and to welcome you to campus soon!
Meet with a concentration adviser!
As part of Orientation, we'll be hosting two informal events for students interested in learning more about Hist & Lit.
- On Tuesday, August 13, 2-3pm join us over Zoom for an introduction to the concentration. We'll provide an overview of the program, answer questions, and TKTKTKTK.
- On Thursday, August 29, 2-4pm drop by the Hist & Lit office in Barker Center 122 to chat with a concentration adviser and {MAYBE} meet peer advisers.
- You are also welcome to schedule an individual appointment any time with a concentration adviser, either over Zoom or in person. Schedule a conversation here!
What classes can I take?
The best way to get to know Hist & Lit is to enroll in one of our HL90 seminars, which are capped at 15 students. We also have HL93 research seminars, part of the Mindich Program in Engaged Scholarship. We've got a lot of exciting ones this fall, and have saved at least 3 seats in each course for first years. To enroll, submit a petition on my.harvard!
Fall 2024 Seminars
Spring, 2026
Instructor: Nicholas Bloom
Meeting time: Tuesday, 9:45-11:45 am
In his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois famously wrote that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” This course is a survey of the work of...
Instructor: Emily Gowen
Meeting time: Monday, 12:45-2:45 pm
Education is often understood as a lever for social change, but ideas about what constitutes a good education have long been hotly contested. What is more, the seeds of today’s most urgent...
Fall, 2025
Instructor: Jules Riegel
Meeting time: Tuesday, 9:45-11:45 am
Almost eighty years after the end of World War II, its legacies are alive as ever. The conflict was fought across much of the globe, ravaging landscapes and ecosystems and wiping villages, towns...
Instructor: Chloe Hawkey
Meeting time: Monday, 9:45-11:45 am
From cowboys to “tech bros,” images of the American West are everywhere—and they have been for a long time. The data of geological surveys and census reports have never been able to outweigh...
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...
Fall, 2024
Instructor: Emmet von Stackelberg
Meeting time: Thursday, 12:45-2:45 pm
The way we see the world is growing inseparable from the way our screens show that world to us. It would be almost impossible to avoid screens for even a single day. This course follows...
Instructor: Angela Allan
Meeting time: Wednesday, 9:45-11:45 am
Studying popular culture reveals much about the society that creates, consumes, and critiques it. How do ideas circulate in mass media? Can popular culture create social change? Who determines...
Instructor: Hannah Waits
Meeting time: Thursday, 3:00-5:00 pm
This 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...
Instructor: Duncan White
Meeting time: Thursday, 3:45-5:45 pm
Over 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...
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...
Spring, 2027
Instructor: Sean Gilsdorf
Meeting time: TBD
This 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...
Fall 2024 Seminars
Fall, 2024
Instructor: Lilly Havstad
Meeting time: Wednesday, 12:45-2:45 pm
Oral histories engage with sources that offer perspectives, life experiences, and ways of knowing that official written records can overlook or actively seek to erase from the historical...
Instructor: Alan Niles
Meeting time: Tuesday, 9:45-11:45 am
Harvard’s beginnings included a promise to educate both “English and Indian youth.” From its inception, however, Harvard’s endowment included Native lands expropriated through war, theft, and...
Instructor: Thomas Dichter
Meeting time: Thursday, 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...