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 2023 HL90 is Tuesday, January 17 at 4:00 pm and students will be cleared to register on Wednesday, January 18. Waitlist admissions will be made on Thursday, January 19. Students can submit an application (for multiple HL90s) by completing this form.
The 530 years since Columbus’s arrival in Hispaniola have paid witness to the fall and rise of empires, the perseverance of colonial structures of power, and the construction and (re)creation of racial, sexual, and gendered identities. In the midst of such change and continuity, this course sets out to ask: what place does Latinx occupy in this long history? What does Latinidad look like when we trace it back 530 years, when we take 1492 to be its starting point instead of the 20th century? How might this look backwards help us understand the current Latinx politics of gender (Latino vs. Latina vs. Latinx), sexuality (the place of queerness and transness in Latinx Studies), and race (Latinidad’s penchant for disavowing blackness and erasing indigeneity)? We will answer... 
In 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,... 
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. 
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 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. 
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... Fall 2022 seminars
HIST-LIT 90FI: Race and Empire in the Americas
HIST-LIT 90FU: British Soft Power from Shakespeare to Dua Lipa
HIST-LIT 90FN: Speculative East Asias
HIST-LIT 90FL: Indigenous in the City
HIST-LIT 90FP: Atlantic Narratives and the Making of the Modern World
HIST-LIT 90FT: A Luta Continua: Legacies of Portuguese Empire
HIST-LIT 90FJ: Modern Europe and Migration
HIST-LIT 90FO: Pacific Worlds
HIST-LIT 90FX: Imagining Latin America
HIST-LIT 90EZ: The Global South Asian Diaspora
HIST-LIT 90FQ: Con Artist Nation: Scams, Schemes, and American Dreams
HIST-LIT 90FS: HIV in Global Perspective
HIST-LIT 90FK: Europe After the Cold War
HIST-LIT 90EV: Sound and Color: Music, Race, and US Cultural Politics
HIST-LIT 90EO: The Reinvention of New York City
HIST-LIT 90FM: Tasting Place: Food and Culture in America
HIST-LIT 90EJ: Espionage: A Cultural History
HIST-LIT 90FB: Asian America in Popular Culture
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 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. Course texts include theory from Frantz Fanon and Gloria Anzaldúa, fiction by... 
Today, 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... 
In the twenty-first century, commentators and historians have argued that with the decline of American power, we are entering the “Asian century”. What does it mean for the future to “look Asian”? Techno-orientalist tropes tend to accompany these speculations, while the historical and geopolitical forces that animate them are ignored. How do imagined futures and alternate worlds depend on the histories they come from? In this course, we examine cultural productions by East and Southeast Asians and their diasporas that imagine speculative, science fictional, magical realist, weird realist, or otherwise non-realist worlds. Paying particular attention to the legacies of militarism and empire,... 
According 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... 
How has the ocean made the modern world? This course asks how stories of the Atlantic intersect with larger threads of world history such as empire, enslavement, and Indigenous dispossession. Mindful that the very word oceanography combines the Greek words for ocean and writing, we’ll investigate how biophysical conditions mediate cultural, historical, and even economic experience. How did Atlantic currents, prevailing winds, and fisheries facilitate the development of racial capitalism? And how do we write and narrate these stories? As we explore the Atlantic Ocean’s role in the making of the modern world, we’ll navigate an archive that spans from the Viking era to the present,... 
As a central player in the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and widely known as the last of the European powers to let go of its grip on its African territories in 1975, Portugal earned a reputation as one of the most violent imperial powers in modern world history. Over 500 years, tactics of violence and coercion were key tools for building its empire across Asia, the Americas, and Africa, particularly for the purpose of enslavement and recruitment of forced indigenous labor, and to establish colonial "order." In this class we examine Portugal’s violent colonial past while also examining a lesser known history of nonviolent resistance to Portugal’s imperial ambitions. We will read a mix of scholarly and primary... 
Outsiders, newcomers, and minorities played a central role in shaping contemporary Europe. In this seminar, we embrace the perspectives of people who moved or were forced to move to, from, and around Europe since the end of World War Two. We begin by investigating the mass population movements that occurred in the aftermath of war. We then examine how the great migration from former colonies and from the Mediterranean during the economic “golden years” of the 1950s and 1960s reshaped societies across the continent, before shifting to the anti-migrant backlash that followed during the recession of the 1970s and 1980s. We conclude by studying the ways that immigrants... 
This course examines the Pacific, not as an object of exploration, but as an agent of oceanic relations. We will begin with the ancestral connections between Pacific Islands, travel through the 18th and 19th centuries as we interrogate the entanglements of European imperialism and native Pacific sovereignty, through to the role of the Pacific in World War II and the Cold War, before landing in the 21st century and the modern Indigenous Oceanic connections of environmental movements. Inspired by Banaban-scholar/activist/poet Teresia Teaiwa’s notion of the “polygenesis” of the Pacific, course texts will be drawn from oral histories, navigational charts, paintings, photographs, poetry, fiction,... 
“Latin America” refers to a geographical region, a culture, a form of racialization, a mode of being, and even a concept. How have these different characterizations imagined Latin America and its diaspora, and what kinds of myths and discourses emerged as a result? How have these imaginaries constructed Latin America as a homogeneous, cohesive whole, and to what effect? What do these representations erase, especially considering the heterogeneous cultural and linguistic traditions in the region? Throughout the semester, we will analyze a broad range of media, popular culture artifacts, and historical sources from the 20th and 21st centuries that include films, comics, photographs, music, and speeches to... 
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... 
With the popularity of shows like Inventing Anna and The Dropout, 2022 might be called the year of the scammer. Yet contemporary con artists come from a long lineage of carnival barkers, snake oil salesmen, and self-proclaimed miracle workers. This class examines the conditions of American capitalism and political populism that gave way to a society of schemers and dupes. We will consider how exploitation and self-invention were ultimately bound up in issues of class, race, gender, and religion. How did swindlers create or subvert stereotypes in search of profits? Who were imagined as the most gullible targets for grifters? These narratives of deceit did not simply function as cautionary tales,... 
As Covid 19 continues to dominate our historical moment, the pandemic has provoked culture wars over personal behavior, political fights over policy and funding, and sharp inequalities of care along national, economic, and racial divides. For the past few years, we have all felt hopeful optimism and then disappointed realism about the latest medical breakthrough, initial concern followed by compassion fatigue, and a widespread sense of helplessness in the face of an unrelenting virus. These dynamics at the intersection of culture, society, medicine, and public health also defined a different global pandemic caused by a different novel virus: HIV. This course considers the global history... 
In the summer of 1989, political scientist Francis Fukuyama infamously declared the “end of history,” marking the “unabashed victory” of liberal market capitalism and defeat of communism. A few months later, East Germans poured through the Berlin Wall. The Cold War was over. But what came after? This course examines the history of Europe since 1989 and questions how the aftermath of the Cold War in Germany, France, and the former Eastern Bloc has shaped politics and culture in contemporary Europe and beyond. Course topics include: post-socialism and Ostalgie, Holocaust memory, neoliberalism, Islam, the 2010s migrant crisis, and right-wing populist and authoritarian movements... 
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)... 
The recent history of New York City is one of crisis, resilience, and rebirth. From the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to the devastation of the pandemic, New Yorkers have experienced tragedy and reinvented their city in its aftermath. This is a cycle with a deeper history: in this course we will focus on how New York City reinvented itself in the Seventies and Eighties. On October 16, 1975, New York City was on the brink of bankruptcy. With nearly five hundred million dollars of debt due the next day and only thirty-four million in its bank, catastrophe seemed inevitable. Fortunately, the city was able to raise funds and avoid bankruptcy. Nevertheless, New York City was and had been a space on fire... 
We often associate specific tastes and foods with particular places, memories, and experiences. What would it mean, then, to center taste in our study of place and culture? How can places be tasted, and tastes be placed? In this class, we explore the relationship between taste and place within American culture, discussing how elements of nation, region, and identity are created, absorbed, and imagined through foods and their represented forms. The word “taste” has multiple meanings: taste is used as a synonym for flavor, a verb for the process of eating, and as a marker of socioeconomic class. Together, we examine these various modes of taste in American culture to consider the role of food... 
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 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... 
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...