Instructor: Genevieve Clutario
Meeting time: Tuesday, 2-4

This course takes a cultural approach to historical developments of Asian diaspora, colonialism, and globalization through the lenses of appearance and performance. We examine performative and cultural arenas including literary fiction, spectacles, and visual texts to examine efforts to strategically use discourses of race, gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and (trans)nationalism to structure and maintain colonial forces. This class pushes us to consider how marginalized individuals and communities also used the same arenas to resist and critique colonial subjugation.

Instructor: Daniel Loss
Meeting time: Thursday, 1-3

Why do American sports differ from the rest of the world?  How did soccer become a global sport?  What explains the distribution of cricket and rugby around the world?  Are sports a form of cultural imperialism?  This course will explore these questions (and more) as we examine the connection between sports and imperialism.  Themes we will cover include race, class, gender, professionalism, and commercialization.  Readings include rule books, novels, poems, periodicals, memoirs, and films.

Instructor: Frances P. Sullivan
Meeting time: Monday, 1-3

This seminar explores the history of Latin American and Caribbean commodity production, including sugar, bananas, coffee, rubber, electronics, and cocaine. Drawing on historical texts, poetry, fiction, and film, we will study the diverse communities created by the women and men laboring in the region’s major export industries. This course invites students to learn about the rich cultural and social histories linking individuals to wider processes of commodity circulation and global capitalism.

Instructor: Erin Pearson
Meeting time: Wednesday, 10-12

This course asks how Americans have made sense of the Civil War.  It begins by investigating texts that reflect the escalating sectional tensions in the decades preceding the war, particularly in regard to slavery.  Moving from secession to Lincoln’s assassination, the heart of the course considers how people grappled with the war in a variety of formats, from speeches and newspaper editorials to diaries, poetry, and photography.  We conclude by examining how the war has continued to shape American culture, in fiction and film as well as in current practices of Civil War reenactment and debates over the Confederate flag.

Instructor: Thomas Dichter
Meeting time: Wednesday, 1-3

The United States currently keeps more people behind bars than any other country. While the US’s emergence as the leader in incarceration rates is relatively recent, the prison has loomed large in American public life for 200 years. In this class, we will approach the prison not as a marginal phenomenon, but as an institution central to American culture. Readings include works of literature by and about prisoners as well as reformers’ pamphlets, sociological studies, government reports, and inmate manifestos. We will trace debates about freedom and captivity from the birth of the penitentiary through the era of mass incarceration.

Instructor: David J. Alworth
Meeting time: Wednesday, 3-5

This course tracks the history of design from the Industrial Revolution to the digital revolution in the United States, and it gives sustained attention to the relationship between this history and American literature, broadly conceived. At least since Edgar Allan Poe published his “Philosophy of Furniture” in 1840, American authors have engaged with the objects and ideas of design thinking. Such engagement has taken many different forms since the mid-nineteenth century: simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from the technological, the industrial, and the machine; obsession with the distinctions among art, craft, and decoration; fascination with cities as designed spaces and with literary art as a designed (if not exactly designer) thing; and attention to the poetics of fashion, advertising, shopping, décor, bric-a-brac, trash, and other superficial matters.

Instructor: Brian FitzGerald
Meeting time: Tuesday, 2-4

This seminar considers the ethical, political, and spiritual questions arising from the existence of wealth and poverty, the rich and the poor, in medieval European culture.  What was the relationship between Christian charity and economic activity in the Middle Ages?  How did the religious values of a simple, austere life inform and conflict with changes in both Church and society?  Drawing on saints’ lives, theological treatises, art and architecture, and the work of poets such as Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, the course will examine how the interaction of spiritual ideals and material realities shaped cultural developments and affected beliefs and practices from late antiquity to the Protestant Reformation.

Instructor: David J. Alworth
Meeting time: Wednesday, 3-5

This course examines a vibrant subgenre of post-World War II American literature. We will read major novels by Kerouac, Nabokov, and Didion as well as less familiar (yet still fascinating) writings by Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Patricia Highsmith, Ralph Ellison, and others. In addition, students can expect to analyze both primary and secondary historical sources, while giving some attention to visual art (e.g. John Chamberlain) and to film (e.g. Bonnie and Clyde).

Instructor: Duncan White
Meeting time: Monday, 1-3

This course considers the way England was transformed through the demise of its Empire after the Second World War through to the present day. From the birth of the welfare state to the rise of Thatcherism, from post-colonial migration to multicultural Britain, from the Swinging Sixties to punk rock and riots, we will track these radical political, social and cultural changes through novels, poetry, theater, film, pop music, photography, fashion, food and sport. We will explore the way Britain sought to retain its influence in the world, through its involvement in the Cold War, its relations with the Commonwealth, and its continuing ‘special relationship’ with the United States, even as what being English or British began to change in meaning. As well as reading literary works by Philip Larkin, Jean Rhys, JG Ballard, Salman Rushdie, China Miéville, and Zadie Smith, we will consider the nation’s popular culture, from The Beatles to The Sex Pistols, from James Bond to J.K. Rowling.

Instructor: Jennifer Brady
Meeting time: Wednesday, 1-3

This seminar asks who was reading, what was read, and how Reading was practiced, imagined, and used in early America. Focusing on moments when reading’s potential to create or divide Communities was under question, “We the Readers” considers how the mundane acts of reading printed sermons, daily newspapers, bestselling novels, political pamphlets, and urban signs were understood to have varying consequences for women, Native Americans, subjects, citizens, and slaves—and through them, a nation.

Instructor: Michael T. Tworek
Meeting time: Monday, 3-5

This course explores the dynamic and diverse movement of people, texts, ideas, and objects across the world during the early modern period (1300-1800). Each week approaches these global exchanges through a case study of a cross-cultural encounter from the Americas and Asia to Africa and Europe. The course will examine the major developments of the period such as the Renaissance, Reformation, Age of Discovery, and the Enlightenment from global and critical perspectives.

Instructor: Steve Biel and Lauren Kaminsky
Meeting time: Thursday, 3-5

On the centenary of the First World War,  this seminar will explore a wide range of representations of the conflict that began in the Balkans but swept through Europe to the Middle East and Russia, to the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, to the Mediterranean, Baltic, and Black Seas, and drew in soldiers and civilians from Africa, Asia, and the Americas. By looking closely at materials across genres and cultural forms, we will examine the contradictions and contingencies of the war that set the stage for a century of political, social, and cultural history.

Instructor: Paul K. Adler
Meeting time: Wednesday, 3-5

This course offers a history of the United States and the Cold War through films made during the conflict. We will examine the Cold War through two themes which drove much U.S. Cold War policymaking, from McCarthyism to Vietnam. The first theme is subversion: the fear that the United States (or our allies) would be quietly infiltrated by Communists and other radicals who would seize power “from the inside.” The second theme is insurgency: the fear of a violent uprising by marginalized communities that would weaken or overthrow free world institutions.

Instructor: Ryan Acton
Meeting time: Wednesday, 1-3

The belief that resources such as education and rewards such as high pay should go to the meritorious is so deeply ingrained in our culture that it provides much of the basic logic and vocabulary for making sense of inequality and hierarchy in everyday life. This seminar historicizes meritocracy as an ideal and practice by focusing on Harvard University since the Civil War. Throughout this period, Harvard has seen its role as training a meritorious elite to lead society. We will study the historical politics of this elitism in the context of class, race, gender, capitalism, and mass democracy.

Instructor: Maryam Monalisa Gharavi
Meeting time: Tuesday, 10-12

This hybrid course combines a studio arts practicum with a history & theory seminar. SEMINAR COMPONENT: We focus on border geographies, urban boundaries, and demarcations that throw light on basic understandings of inclusion and exclusion, selfhood, freedom, property, and how "us" and "them" are defined materially and conceptually along the course of time. The course traces along zones of passage that limit, regulate, and control mobility (including frontiers, enclosures, walls, barbed wire, among others) and theories of the distribution of the sensible (including security, circulation, flow, among others). We will traverse multiple fields of analysis where these terms have been illuminated, including science/geography (space, place, land), social science (zone, territory, state) and the arts/humanities (identity, subjectivity, memory). ARTS COMPONENT: Students will engage with works of art relating to the seminar’s themes and produce works of art of their own. No previous experience in the arts is expected or assumed, and a process-based approach to making work in any medium is encouraged. Students are provided with a small materials budget, shared access to studio space, arts-making workshops, and open studio sessions.

Instructor: Caitlin Hopkins
Meeting time: Thursday, 1-3

The American Revolution ended two centuries ago, but Americans have never stopped talking (or arguing, or singing, or painting) about it. What has captivated so many for so long? Why does the story of the Revolution keep changing? Why is everyone so excited about Hamilton? This interdisciplinary seminar explores public commemoration of the Revolution through various media, from the Bunker Hill Monument and “Paul Revere’s Ride” to Bicentennial protest literature and the lyrics of Lin-Manuel Miranda. Assignments include a scavenger hunt for local memorials and a field trip to the Freedom Trail.

Instructor: Jennifer Schnepf
Meeting time: Tuesday, 2-4

This course introduces students to digital culture in the United States after 1945. In the span of only a few decades, the role of computers in American society dramatically transformed from a complex tool serving the aims of the military to a children’s toy found in the domestic space of the American home. How did authors and filmmakers make sense of this dramatic transformation? We will engage with cultural sources ranging from classic midcentury novels and educational films, to Looney Tunes cartoons and DC Comics in order to formulate answers to this question. Course includes film screenings and field trips.

Instructor: Genevieve Clutario
Meeting time: Tuesday, 2-4

This course examines processes of defining beauty through both cultural productions and historical works during the 20th and 21st Centuries. We will explore how beauty is used to manage bodies, define social hierarchies, and gain or maintain power. We will also investigate how presentations of beauty could also be used as forms of subversion and resistance. Looking at sites such beauty pageants, cosmetic consumer cultures, drag performances, cosmetic surgery, and the transnational production and consumption of beauty vloggers we will investigate how race, gender, sexuality, and class informs definitions of beauty and how definitions of beauty inform constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Instructor: Nicholas Donofrio
Meeting time: Thursday, 10-12

What is crime? Who commits it? When and where is it likely to occur? How should it be punished? And why do we find it so interesting? These are the questions at the dark heart of American crime fiction—questions whose answers have changed considerably over time. Course examines detective stories, spy novels, police procedurals, gangster movies, and more. Readings from Poe, Doyle, Christie, Hammett, and Highsmith; films include Mildred Pierce, The Godfather, and Boyz n the Hood.

Instructor: Terry Park
Meeting time: Thursday, 3-5

From yellow peril invaders to model minorities, Asian Americans have long been the indispensible threat and reliable punch line of U.S. popular culture. In response to these reductive constructions, Asian Americans have crafted their own dynamic cultural expressions in a number of media—from film, television, and music to fashion, sports, and food—that reveal the broad complexity of Asian America and contest the contradictions of the U.S. nation-state. Asian American culture also uniquely sits at the nexus of immigration flows and digital technologies, providing a transnational lens to view the US’s place in the world. This seminar, then, will introduce students to the study and practice of Asian American culture as heterogeneous, hybrid, and multiple. In doing so, students will gain an understanding of the shifting and interlocking tensions among the local, the national, and the global that form the cultural geographies of Asian America.

Instructor: René Carrasco
Meeting time: Monday, 3-5

This course will examine the world of ideas that has shaped Latin America. It is designed to provide students with the necessary tools to think critically about topics such as nationalism, capitalism, literary criticism, historiography, political and economic theory, identity politics, modernity, colonialism/ postcolonialism, gender, and many other topics that have shaped intellectual debates in Latin America and all over the world. We will labor at the intersection where literature, history, politics, theories and practices meet. This course will examine ideas and the practices they inform, as well as practices and the ideas that sustain them, as products of human culture that can be contested and changed.

Instructor: Timothy P. McCarthy
Meeting time: Tuesday, 10-12

In the last generation, scholars have revolutionized our understanding of slavery and freedom in the modern Atlantic world. This sea-change has been the result of a major methodological shift: to view this history through the eyes of slaves rather than the eyes of masters. This course will examine the history of the “black Atlantic” through a diverse range of cultural texts—poetry, pamphlets, court cases, petitions, autobiographies, novels, speeches, and sermons—produced by slaves, free blacks, and abolitionists from the Age of Revolution to emancipation.