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 record. This research seminar will explore the methods, theories, practices, and controversies that have shaped oral history as an academic field, while paying close attention to the contributions and critiques from activist oral history practitioners. In weekly readings and discussions, students will gain an appreciation for this (at times fraught) history, while also gaining a foundation in current best practices for doing oral history. Students will also have multiple opportunities for putting their oral history training into practice. The first half of the course will be focused on student engagement with oral history theory and scholarship alongside existing oral history collections (as primary sources) towards developing an understanding of the field and studying various models for doing oral history. In the second half of the course, students will develop and execute an oral history project that will involve: background research, research design, interviewing (with digital recording), transcription, and presentation of research findings in both oral and written formats. Over the semester, students will learn how to incorporate oral histories into their research, with attention to research ethics and an understanding that oral history research cannot be conducted independently of other methods of historical research. Students will practice oral history methods, engaging with oral sources to learn ways of “close reading” oral histories. 

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 coercion. Drawing inspiration from Harvard’s own Legacy of Slavery initiative and the Land-Grab Universities website, this class will conduct original research on Harvard’s long history of involvement with Native communities and Native lands. We will work hands-on with archives at Harvard and other area institutions, developing research skills in navigating collections, reading early handwriting, and interpreting colonial documents. Readings and class activities will engage New England colonialism, the long history of Indigenous dispossession and resistance, and the political struggles of Indigenous communities today. We will closely examine texts including poems, speeches, oral narratives, maps, short stories, and deeds, exploring the centrality of land and environment in colonial and Indigenous histories and literatures. In the second half of our class, we will work collaboratively to design and execute group or individual research projects. Previous iterations of this course in Fall 2022 and Fall 2023 gathered data on Harvard’s land transactions and resulted in a set of student-driven research projects on sites, properties, and individuals connected to Harvard’s Indigenous pasts; our research will build on that work.

This course is also offered through the English Department as English 90LN.  Credit may be earned for either English 90LN or Hist-Lit 93 AD, but not both.

Instructor: Thomas Dichter
Meeting time: Monday, 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 as lenses for better understanding one another? For the past 50 years, prison abolitionists have insisted on asking fundamental questions about the nature, function, and efficacy of imprisonment. We will put their challenges to the carceral state in conversation with the works of incarcerated writers over the past two centuries. Authors will include Angela Davis, Alexander Berkman, Chester Himes, Malcolm X, Clyde Bellecourt, Patrisse Cullors, and Marlon Peterson. We will also work intensively with archival materials—in particular, we will collaborate on digitizing and organizing original materials from the 1973 takeover of the Massachusetts State Prison at Walpole by the prisoners’ labor union. We will further explore the artistic and political creativity of incarcerated people by engaging with visual art, music, and the “American Prison Newspapers, 1800s-present” digital archive.