HL90 Seminars
What are HL90 Seminars?
HIST-LIT 90 Seminars are discussion-based, writing-intensive, interdisciplinary courses usually capped at 15 students. They are taught by members of our Tutorial Board and Committee on Degrees. First-year students and sophomores interested in History & Literature are encouraged to take HL90 Seminars to get to know the concentration. These courses can be used to satisfy distribution requirements in History & Literature, and students have the option to count one HL90 or HL10 on any topic for concentration credit regardless of field.
Deadline for applications to a Spring 2022 HL90 is Wednesday, January 19 at 11:59 pm and students will be cleared to register on Thursday, January 20. Waitlist admissions will be made on Friday, January 21. Students can submit an application (for multiple HL90s) here.
Magic had long been an integral part of how people made sense of the world around them, but between 1450 and 1750 some 80 to 100,000 people (mostly women) were executed under charges of witchcraft in western Europe alone. During the same period, a literal witch hunt threatened the lives of elderly or widowed women, peasants, Indigenous healers, and West African Muslims. In this course we will explore what magic and witchcraft meant and how the charge of witchcraft came to be so deadly in western Europe, North America, colonial Latin America, the Caribbean, and West Africa in the world before 1800. Such fears of witchcraft might seem odd or alien to us now, but understanding witch hunts... 
Fall 2021 seminars
HIST-LIT 90EV: Sound and Color: Music, Race, and US Cultural Politics
HIST-LIT 90EY: Human Rights and Humanitarianism in the Modern World
HIST-LIT 90FB: Asian America in Popular Culture
HIST-LIT 90EW: Migrants and Displacement in the Modern Middle East
HIST-LIT 90ES: Prison Abolition
HIST-LIT 90FA: Radical Education
HIST-LIT 90EU: The Rise of the Far Right in Europe
HIST-LIT 90EX: Queer Latinx Borderlands
HIST-LIT 90EZ: The Global South Asian Diaspora
HIST-LIT 90EI: Islam in Early America
HIST-LIT 90FG: Dictatorship and Resistance in Latin America
HIST-LIT 90EJ: Espionage: A Cultural History
HIST-LIT 90EK: American Noir
HIST-LIT 90EO: The Reinvention of New York City
HIST-LIT 90AT: The Postwar American Road Narrative
HIST-LIT 90EQ: Nuclear Imperialisms
HIST-LIT 90DR: American Speeches
Although race is often presumed to be a visual phenomenon, it is also created and produced through sound. But what does race sound like? What might we learn when we attune our ears to the music and noise that race makes in popular music, on the stage, and in literature? How can texts like songs, films, and novels both reinforce and challenge cultural hierarchies and arrangements of social power? This course explores the sonification of race and the racialization of sound, music, and noise in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present. The first unit will consider examples ranging from blackface minstrel shows (the nineteenth-century nation’s most popular form of entertainment) to the noise ordinances that governed sonic life in... 
Human 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. We will consider a variety of theoretical approaches... 
The release of Crazy Rich Asians in 2018 was a significant cultural moment for Asian America: the first major Hollywood picture with a predominantly Asian American cast in over twenty years, the film was an immediate box office success, and followed by a proliferation of mainstream Asian American productions, including The Farewell, Indian Matchmaking, and Minari. This recent growth of Asian American media is especially remarkable, given that Asian America has been relatively invisible in the history of American popular culture. Why has there been such a limited range of Asian American representations, and how do we consider the significance of contemporary representations of Asian America... 
This course follows people who moved (or were made to move) in, to, or from the Middle East and North Africa between the late nineteenth century and the present. It brings together a diverse group, including enslaved people, religious pilgrims, nomads, genocide survivors, refugees, experts, migrant laborers, revolutionaries, exiles, and, indeed, no shortage of people who might fall into several of these categories. Through these different forms of mobility and displacement, the course will trace the end of the Ottoman Empire, European colonialism, and national liberation across the region.... 
Is prison abolition a serious proposal, an aspirational ideal, a trendy slogan, or a blueprint for social transformation? This interdisciplinary and community-engaged course situates the prison abolition movement in deep historical context and explores its current relation to the politics of criminal justice reform. We will study the movement’s connections to slavery abolitionism, anti-lynching activism, Indigenous struggles for sovereignty, and the Black Power movement. We will examine the emergence of the modern prison abolitionist movement in the 1970s, as well as more recent developments concerning immigration detention, Black Lives Matter, and COVID-19. Our readings will include interdisciplinary scholarship on the carceral state in addition to protest... 
In this seminar, we will think together about education as a site of radical imagination, turning to learning spaces from the 20th century to the present where people have envisioned and attempted to bring about different worlds. Major topics of the course will include: education and social change, critical pedagogy, the imagination, abolition, and worldbuilding. Beginning in the 1920s, we will look at Black Mountain College, Highlander Folk School, and the Modern Schools alongside thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois and Ella Baker who connected education to the practice of freedom. We will then turn to educational experiments in the 1950s to 1970s—Freedom Schools, the Black Panthers’ schools, and free universities—that were part of the Civil... 
Far-right movements have, in recent years, gained striking momentum across Europe. From France’s anti-immigrant National Front and neo-Nazis in Germany to efforts to rehabilitate Franco and Mussolini in Spain and Italy, forces of extreme nationalism, xenophobia, and imperial nostalgia have increased in prominence as well as popularity. The current moment is not the first time that the continent has experienced a rise in right-wing extremism. Fascism, from the 1920s onward, offered violent, totalitarian solutions to the tensions of mass politics and populist resentment in polarized societies. How do today’s reactionary political formations relate to their fascistic forebears? What social and cultural dynamics is each responding to, and, perhaps just as significantly, what historical legacies... 
What does Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny have to do with 16th century Mexico criminal archives? What does the Netflix series Pose (2018) have to do with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848)? They converge in the queer borderlands, Chicana lesbian Gloria Anzaldúa’s spatial framework. Just as border studies has taught us that such encounters and crossroads exist far beyond literal borders, so too does this course delink from any geographical space, instead deploying Anzaldúa’s framework to provide an account for two major arcs while centering gender and sexual non/normativity. First, how the competing Latin American and North American ideas about race have shaped Latinx communities since Spanish colonialism... 
Over 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... 
Muslims first arrived on the shores of the Americas at the turn of the sixteenth century, yet their long history in the western hemisphere has been largely forgotten. For centuries Islam was the second-most widely practiced monotheistic religion in the Americas, after Catholicism; some Muslims came from Spain to escape persecution at the hands of the Inquisition for continuing to practice their religion, while others were taken captive and forcibly crammed into the hulls of ships on the West African coast and transported across the Atlantic, where, in 1522, they participated in the first uprising of enslaved men and women in the Americas on a sugar plantation on the island of Hispaniola (the site of present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). From the very beginning of European... 
As we face resurgent authoritarianism around the world, culture remains a critical tool of resistance against the perils of dictatorship and its legacies. Latin America’s long history of tyranny, repression, and impunity reveals that—in national traditions where fiction has often addressed either explicitly or allegorically what journalism did or could not—culture has mediated moments of historical trauma as countries grapple with the consequences of state terrorism and general instability. In this seminar, we will focus on the military dictatorships that swept the Southern Cone in the 1970s and their aftermaths to reflect on the role of cultural resistance in keeping democracy alive and ensuring human rights abuses... 
Midcentury 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.... 
Traditionally, the postwar American road narrative has been associated with figures like Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, and seen as representing a modern libertinism inseparable from white privilege and angst. As we will see in this seminar, white male writers and drivers do not have a monopoly on the road; it has also been a powerful element of storytelling for writers of color. The imagery and experience of the road assume very different meanings for different people; what is an opportunity for carefree adventure for one person is a source of precarity for another. Looking at works such as Jesmyn Ward’s novel Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), Misha Green’s 2020 adaptation of Lovecraft Country for HBO, and contemporary music... 
This course will examine nuclear narratives in global contexts as reminders and remainders of empire. Are nuclear futures only tied to whims of unpredictable world leaders, or are they already part of our daily realities? Whose stories of nuclear proliferation are told, and whose are suppressed? Drawing on government propaganda, activist writing, television, fiction, photography, poetry, and film from 1945 to the present, this course will explore the cultural and material legacies of radiation around the world. From American “atomic culture” of the 1940s and ‘50s to Cold War era peace movements in the Pacific Islands to nuclear disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima, we will assess whether nuclear cultures have changed over time by using a place-based investigation of nuclear... 
This course will explore speeches across the sweep of American history, examining them both as windows into their own era and as texts created to inform and persuade. We will ask who speaks and how and the ways that has evolved over time, and we will seek to identify the enduring and changing elements of effective oratory from Jonathan Edwards to Frederick Douglass to contemporary commencement addresses and campaign speeches. Assignments include the composition and delivery of a speech.