Faculty of Arts & Sciences

Considering a range of texts by and about soldiers and veterans, policy makers and protesters, reporters and refugees, the course explores Americans' contested and changing understandings of the experiences and meanings of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Texts include popular films, documentaries, journalism, fiction, letters, diaries, government documents, and war memorials.

This seminar examines the "spirit of 1968" in Prague, Paris, and Berlin. It examines specific protests in these cities in the context of widespread challenges to state control, capitalism and racism. The seminar show how political critiques were expressed through nonconformity in dress, sexuality, and gender. It explores the anger and passion of '68 through an analysis of films, music, manifestos, and memoirs. The course reflects briefly on the legacy of the protest mentality of 1968.

The "Great Migration" of millions of African Americans out of the U.S. South in the twentieth century radically transformed both migrants themselves and the broader American culture. Examining letters, novels, poetry, oral histories, music, visual culture, and scholarship, we will ask: How did migrants negotiate the promises and perils of the urban North? How did migrants shape modern culture? How did they reformulate African American identity amidst this process of urbanization?

This course examines the cultural and political movements that defined post-imperial English culture. Reading literary texts by Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, and Sam Selvon, as well as movements in feminism and youth culture (such as punk rock), this course asks how England redefined itself amid the demographic, cultural and political shifts that marked the demise of the largest empire in human history.

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.

While often cast as a marginal concern or stigmatized as antithetical to national ideals of rugged individualism and autonomy, disability has in fact played a decisive role in shaping American culture. This seminar will examine how the historical development of disability as a social category - from the Civil War through the Disability Rights Movement - reflects changing attitudes toward citizenship, race, democratic participation, and labor.

This course proposes an analysis of the different myths and fantasies that have been created about the Caribbean and of the historical and cultural realities surrounding these myths. Through a close reading of literary, artistic, critical, and historical texts we will examine topics such as: race, ethnic, and gender identity constructions; the rise of the plantation economy; and the imagining of a pan-Caribbean solidarity.

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.

Southern Ireland charted a unique course through the twentieth century. It began the century as a quasi-colonial part of the United Kingdom, and ended it the "Celtic Tiger," the success story of the European Union. This course explores that history through literature, historical documents, and scholarship. In particular, it asks: how can we make use of the insights of postcolonial theory to understand the Irish twentieth century? We'll consider the core themes of language, violence, sexuality, and economics.

This seminar will trace the history of detective fiction, from the emergence of the detective as a literary hero (Poe, Dickens, Collins) through the popularization of the genre (Doyle) and its twentieth-century reinventions (film noir, the police procedural). Along the way, we will examine the relationship between genre and history: why did detective fiction rise to popularity in Victorian England, and why has its legacy so endured?

Part of the A.R.T.'s National Civil War Project, this new course explores how a diverse cohort of contemporary playwrights and composers (Suzan-Lori Parks, Ruth and Jim Bauer, Timothy Patrick McCarthy, Matthew Aucoin) are using history to find creative ways to tell the story of the American Civil War on stage. It brings together several parts of Harvard-the classroom, the library, and the theater-to explore the dynamic relationship between archival discovery and artistic creation.

Charlemagne long has been seen as the mythic father of nation-states and precursor of a united Europe. We will approach Charlemagne not simply as a legend, however, but as a compelling historical figure. Beginning with the rise of the Frankish monarchy and the emergence of the Carolingian dynasty, we will turn to consider the figure of Charlemagne himself and the kingdom that he controlled, before exploring Charlemagne's historical, political, and symbolic legacy.

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.

Introduction to interdisciplinary methods and to topics in students' chosen fields. Required of all concentrators. Open only to concentrators.

An individually supervised study of selected topics in the student's chosen field in History and Literature.

Research and writing of the senior thesis; preparation for the oral exam.