Faculty of Arts & Sciences

Five professors. 2500 years. Thirteen essential works. Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Descartes, Mozart, Rousseau, Austen, Nietzsche, Kafka, Joyce. Join the conversation.

Five professors. 2,500 years. Twelve essential works. Beckett, Woolf, Dostoevsky, Wagner, Mary Shelley, Hume, Shakespeare, Augustine, Tacitus, Herodotus, Sophocles, Homer. Join the conversation.

With readings from Gilgamesh and The Odyssey to Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk, this course explores how great writers refract their world and how their works are transformed when they intervene in our global cultural landscape today.

Contemporary speculations regarding print-plus or post-print publishing represent just the latest in the legion of mutations undergone by that most venerable and resistant of literary supports: the book. This Humanities Studio explores the past, present, and future of books as designed and programmable artifacts from both a historical and hands-on perspective. Book making in a broad array of consolidated and experimental forms will serve both as object of critical study and focus for projects, as students explore and evaluate claims about the history of books by making them in paper, pixels, and other media.

The contemporary city is constituted by multiple overlapping realities articulated across built form and imagined space, individual experience and collective memory, embodied sensation and digital mediation. Often, these multiple realities are invisible or illegible. However, realities always leave traces, to be excavated and reconstructed. The Mixed-Reality City is a combined seminar and workshop in which students pursue studies of urbanism-in-the-making through means and methods emerging in the digital arts and humanities, including: data narrative, digital ethnography, adversarial design, and critical technical practice. The course focuses in equal parts on unpacking discourses and developing interpretative digital artifacts.

Notions of "love" and "freedom" have persistently informed works of literature, visual art, and music since antiquity, exhibiting a complex variety of meanings, functions and values. The aim of this course is to investigate exemplary works that highlight some of the major tensions and questions related to distinct formulations of these two key terms. In reviewing a broad range of material, attention is paid throughout to specific historical, social, and cultural differences.

Six hundred years of world history through the prism of twelve encounters between "the West" and "the Rest" -- beginning with the clash between Portuguese buccaneers and Chinese eunuchs in 1517 and ending yesterday. Human History takes globalization personally, but views it from at least two very different perspectives-those of the professors. (We also show how to resurrect the dead.)

Visual information today is superabundant thanks to our smartphones, tablets, and other screen-based gadgets. But few of us recognize how thoroughly our habits and experiences of looking have been conditioned by interfaces with long and complex histories. Participants in this new Framework Course, developed as part of the Humanities Project at Harvard, will approach looking through a consideration of key technologies from its history, such as the telescope, the television, and the easel painting. Students will learn about the hidden intricacies of looking and hone skills of visual, material, and spatial analysis through encounters with aesthetic objects from Harvard's collections.

Our world is steeped in sound, but we must learn to pay attention to listening. Sounds produce emotions, mark out spaces, call up memories; silence can be deafening; voice is a marker of identity. This course will sharpen our ears. We explore the sonic world through diverse readings and creative projects with sound. Discussions and assignments will open our minds (and ears) to listening practices, what the arts teach us about listening, and how we describe our experiences as listeners. We examine the relationships between sound and time, community, responsibility and attentiveness, and explore the soundscape in which we live.

This course introduces "reading" as a wide-ranging practice of interpretation, applicable to social phenomena and historical narratives as well as to literary texts. Participants in this introduction to the humanities will examine a range of texts, from poems and political journalism to graphic novels and blogs, both to practice close and subtle reading and to see how these texts seek to establish rules for their own interpretation. Rather than look at a particular artistic tradition or literary history, we will develop a set of "all-terrain" interpretive skills that can be deployed on a range of intellectual and cultural objects.