English 178n. The American Novel Since 1900

Instructor: Namwali Serpell
Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:15 pm | Location:  TBD
Course Site

This course is a survey of the American novel since 1900: its forms, patterns, techniques, ideas, cultural contexts, and intertextual networks. We will pay special attention to questions of aesthetics, epistemology, and ethics—e.g. what is beautiful? how do we know? what should we do?—in the American milieu over the course of the twentieth century and beyond.

We will read around ten authors selected from among the following: L. Frank Baum, Don DeLillo, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lisa Halliday, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Valeria Luiselli, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cormac McCarthy, N. Scott Momaday, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Vladimir Nabokov, John Okada, Thomas Pynchon, Marilynne Robinson, Philip Roth, Leslie Marmon Silko, Jean Toomer, Nathaniel West, Richard Wright, Edith Wharton...

This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students. 

English 145a. Jane Austen's Fiction and Fans

Instructor: Deidre Lynch
Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:15 pm | Location:  TBD
Course Site

When, at the end of the eighteenth century, Jane Austen began to write, the novel was still liable to be dismissed by serious readers and writers on both moral and aesthetic grounds. Austen’s achievement helped to transform the genre, helping establish fiction as the form that (paradoxically enough) explains reality and as the form that explains us to ourselves. In this class we'll read all six of Austen’s novels and study the contribution they made to the remaking of modern fiction. Though our emphasis will fall on these works’ place in the literary culture of Austen’s day and on their historical contexts in an era of political, social, and literary revolution, we’ll also acknowledge the strong and ardent feelings that Austen’s oeuvre continues to arouse today. To that end, we’ll do some investigating of the frequently wild world of contemporary Austen fandom and the Austenian tourism, shopping, adaptations, and sequels that nurture it. At the same time, we’ll also remember that Austen knew fandom from both sides; part of our work this semester will be to learn about the early-nineteenth-century cultures of literary appreciation in which Austen both enrolled the heroines of her fiction and enrolled herself.

This course satisfies the “1700-1900 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

English CACD. The Art of Criticism

Instructor: Maggie Doherty
Wednesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site

This course will consider critical writing about art–literary, visual, cinematic, musical, etc.—as an art in its own right. We will read and discuss criticism from a wide variety of publications, paying attention to the ways outlets and audience shape critical work. The majority of our readings will be from the last few years and will include pieces by Joan Acocella, Andrea Long Chu, Jason Farago, and Carina del Valle Schorske. Students will write several short writing assignments (500-1000 words), including a straight review, during the first half of the semester and share them with peers. During the second half of the semester, each student will write and workshop a longer piece of criticism about a work of art or an artist of their choosing. Students will be expected to read and provide detailed feedback on the work of their peers. Students will revise their longer pieces based on workshop feedback and submit them for the final assignment of the class.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm EDT on Sunday, April 7)

Supplemental Application Information: Please write a letter of introduction (1-2 pages) giving a sense of who you are, your writing experience, and your current goals for your writing. Please also describe your relationship to the art forms and/or genres you're interested in engaging in the course. You may also list any writers or publications whose criticism you enjoy reading. Please also include a 3-5-page writing sample of any kind of prose writing. This could be an academic paper or it could be creative fiction or nonfiction.

English 90ln. Harvard and Native Lands

Instructor: Alan Niles 
Tuesday, 9:45-11:45am | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site

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 satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

Note: Interested students should petition to enroll on my.harvard. In your petition, say a few words about your interest in the course (including concentrations you are considering if you are undeclared), any requirement the course may satisfy, and whether you have taken any other History & Literature seminars. Please contact the instructor if you have any questions.

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

English 296r. Repetition

Instructor: Derek Miller
Tuesday, 9:45-11:45 am | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site

This course considers the relationship between art and repetition. We will go beyond the repetition of content—sequels; adaptations—to explore repetition as artistic form (such as the sonnet or a musical theme and variations) and repetition as an essential practice for producing (editing and revising) and consuming art. We will investigate the varieties of repetition in the arts and consider how a general theory of art and repetition helps us better understand art as a human practice. Examples include literature, theater, music, and visual art, but students are expected to pursue their own interests in course assignments.


English CACF. Get Real: The Art of Community-Based Film

Instructor: Musa Syeed
Wednesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 student
Course Site

“I’ve often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us,” the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami said, “unless it’s inside a frame.” For our communities confronting invisibility and erasure, there’s an urgent need for new frames. In this workshop, we’ll explore a community-engaged approach to documentary and fiction filmmaking, as we seek to see our world more deeply. We’ll begin with screenings, craft exercises, and discussions around authorship and social impact. Then we each will write, develop, and shoot a short film over the rest of the semester, building off of intentional community engagement. Students will end the class with written and recorded materials for a rough cut. Basic equipment and technical training will be provided.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm EDT on Sunday, April 7)

Supplemental Application Information: Please submit a brief letter explaining why you're interested to take this class. Please also discuss what participants/communities you might be interested in engaging with for your filmmaking projects. For your writing sample, please submit 3-5 pages of your creative work from any genre (screenwriting, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, etc.)

English 90ls. Literacy Stories

Instructor: Deidre Lynch
Tuesday, 12:45-2:45 pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students.
Course Site

This seminar explores literacy, literacy instruction, and literacy movements past and present, in theory and practice. Engaging with recent fictions and memoirs by authors such as Elena Ferrante and Ocean Vuong, with African-American slave narratives, and with materials from the history of alphabet books and children’s literature, “Literacy Stories” investigates the rich, ambivalent ways in which literature has depicted the literacy needed to consume it. Given under the auspices of the English Department and Harvard’s Mindich Program for Engaged Scholarship, “Literacy Stories” also involves collaborations with various community organizations devoted to literacy advocacy and instruction.

This class will give us the opportunity to reflect—something we’ll do in part by learning about the many ways of relating to texts that flourish beyond the limits of Harvard Yard—on the contradictory ways in which we value reading. We’ll consider, for example, the friction between solitary and social reading: how the pleasures of this activity lie sometimes with how it separates us from others and sometimes with how it connects us. We will be thinking about literacy’s long-standing association with individual self-determination and thinking about how that association is put into question whenever people’s reading matter gets weaponized as an instrument of their domination. Literacy, the literary and theoretical texts on the syllabus will alike remind us, has a politics. Learning to be literate often involves experiences of unequal power relations and exclusion. Reading with (rather than “to” or “at”) others is an ethical challenge—one that all humanities concentrators and all students interested in social justice ought to explore.

Note: This course can be credited toward the Graduate School Education’s secondary field in Educational Studies. This course may also be credited towards the Harvard College Certificate for Civic Engagement.


English 151an. The Age of the Novel

Instructor: Tara K. Menon
Tuesday & Thursday, 10:30-11:45 am | Location:  TBD
Course Site

What does the novel still have to offer? As newer genres—movies, television, Youtube, TikTok—compete for our attention, why do people still immerse themselves in long works of prose fiction? And why do certain nineteenth-century British novels continue to captivate so many readers to this day? In this course, we will read four nineteenth-century novels by four authors that many consider to be the greatest writers that have ever lived: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. We will pay close attention to technique: how do these novels work? And we will also explore social and political themes: what are these novels about? At every stage, we will consider the unique capacities of narrative fiction: what can the novel do that other genres can’t? Implicitly and explicitly, this course will argue first, that these superlative nineteenth-century novels let us see the world (not only then but also now) in new ways, and second, that the novel is a tool for thinking that beats all others. Alongside these texts, we will watch film, television and theatre adaptations as well as read contemporary criticism to better understand the enduring legacy of these canonical works.

This course satisfies the “1700-1900 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

English 187nd. Indigenous Literatures of the Other-than-Human

Instructor: Christopher Pexa
Monday & Wednesday, 1:30-2:45 pm | Location:  TBD
Course Site

“Indians are an invention,” declares an unnamed hunter in Gerald Vizenor’s (White Earth Ojibwe) 1978 novel, Bearheart. The hunter’s point, as Vizenor has explained in interviews and elsewhere, is not that Indigenous peoples don’t exist, but that the term “Indian” is a colonial fiction or shorthand that captures, essentializes, and thus erases a vast diversity of Indigenous lives and peoples. This course begins from the contention that other categories, and maybe most consequentially that of “nature,” have not only historically borne little resemblance to the lived lives of Indigenous people but have been used as important tools for capture and colonization. We will begin with European writings on the “noble savage” who lives harmoniously in a state of Nature, then move to Indigenous writers and thinkers whose work refuses this invention, along with its corollary category of the supernatural. We will spend most of our time reading 20th- and 21st- century Indigenous literary depictions of other-than-human beings and Indigenous relationships with those beings, highlighting how forms of kinship with them are integral to Indigenous ways of understanding difference, to acting like a good relative, and to Indigenous practices of peoplehood. Readings may include works by Billy-Ray Belcourt, Ella Deloria, Louise Erdrich, Stephen Graham Jones, Leslie Marmon Silko, Leanne Simpson, Kim TallBear, and Gerald Vizenor, among others.

This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students. 

English CAFR. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Writing this Present Life

Instructor: Claire Messud
Thursday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site

Intended for students with prior fiction-writing and workshop experience, this course will concentrate on structure, execution and revision. Exploring various strands of contemporary and recent literary fiction – writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk, Chimamanda Adichie, Douglas Stuart, Ocean Vuong, etc – we will consider how fiction works in our present moment, with emphasis on a craft perspective. Each student will present to the class a published fiction that has influenced them. The course is primarily focused on the discussion of original student work, with the aim of improving both writerly skills and critical analysis. Revision is an important component of this class: students will workshop two stories and a revision of one of these.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm ET on Sunday, April 7)

Supplemental Application Information: Please submit 3-5 pages of prose fiction, along with a substantive letter of introduction. I’d like to know why you’re interested in the course; what experience you’ve had writing, both in previous workshops and independently; what your literary goals and ambitions are. Please tell me about some of your favorite narratives – fiction, non-fiction, film, etc: why they move you, and what you learn from them.


English 91r. Supervised Reading and Research

The Supervising Reading and Research tutorial is a type of student-driven independent study offering individual instruction in subjects of special interest that cannot be studied in regular courses. English 91r is supervised by a member of the English Department faculty.  It is a graded course and may not be taken more than twice, and only once for concentration credit. Students must submit a proposal and get approval from the faculty member with whom they wish to work.

Proposed syllabi and faculty approval must be submitted and verified by the English Department Undergraduate Office by the Course Registration Deadline.

English 99r. Senior Tutorial

Supervised individual tutorial in an independent scholarly or critical subject.

Students on the honors thesis track will register for English 99r in both the fall and spring terms. 

English 90lv. Consciousness in Fiction from Austen to Woolf

Instructor: James Wood
Monday, 3:45-5:45pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site

In this seminar, we’ll be looking at the ways in which a range of writers represent the mind on the page: the mind at thought, in agitation, at rest, at prayer, in distress, in rebellion, and just doing nothing (or apparently nothing). This examination allows us to scrutinize just over a hundred years of novelistic development and experiment – from 1813 to 1927, from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf – a period that might rightly be considered the high-point of the novel’s rise. We will discover that as the novelistic treatment of consciousness changes, so the idea of what a mind (or a self) is, also changes: the form (the means of representation) modifies the content (what is represented). What might seem at first like a fairly small thing – a question of novelistic technique – will turn out to have massive and far-reaching consequences for our sense of self. 

This course satisfies the “1700-1900 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

English CIHR. Reading and Writing the Personal Essay: Workshop

Instructor: Michael Pollan
Monday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site

There are few literary forms quite as flexible as the personal essay. The word comes from the French verb essai, “to attempt,” hinting at the provisional or experimental mood of the genre. The conceit of the personal essay is that it captures the individual’s act of thinking on the fly, typically in response to a prompt or occasion. The form offers the rare freedom to combine any number of narrative tools, including memoir, reportage, history, political argument, anecdote, and reflection. In this writing workshop, we will read essays beginning with Montaigne, who more or less invented the form, and then on to a varied selection of his descendants, including George Orwell, E.B. White, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace and Rebecca Solnit. We will draft and revise essays of our own in a variety of lengths and types including one longer work of ambition. A central aim of the course will be to help you develop a voice on the page and learn how to deploy the first person—not merely for the purpose of self-expression but as a tool for telling a story, conducting an inquiry or pressing an argument.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm EDT on Sunday, April 7)

Supplemental Application Information: To apply, submit a brief sample of your writing in the first person along with a letter detailing your writing experience and reasons for wanting to take this course.

English CLLW. Life Writing

Instructor: Louisa Thomas
Tuesday, 9:00-11:45am | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site

How does one tell -- vividly, interestingly -- the story of a life? How do we access a private life, or situate it in a public world? What if the subject is dead, or is famous, or is a dog, or is oneself? How do we ask the right questions in interviews, or know where to begin? This course will examine the art of writing narrative nonfiction about individual lives. We will read and discuss examples of profiles, biographies, and memoir/personal essays, paying special attention to structure, language, and style. We will also read and discuss each other’s work. Students are expected to produce (and to revise) two pieces of longform nonfiction writing. Readings by authors such as Hilton Als, Rachel Aviv, Robert Caro, Hermione Lee, Hua Hsu, and others.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm EDT on Sunday, April 7)

Supplemental Application Information: To apply, please write a letter introducing yourself and explaining your interest in the course. Include a few examples of profiles, nonfiction books, or essays that you admire, along with a sentence or two explaining why. No other writing sample is required.

English CNYA. Creative Nonfiction Workshop: Young Adult Writing

Instructor: Melissa Cundieff
Thursday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site

In this workshop-based class, students will consider themes that intersect with the Young Adult genre: gender and sexuality, romantic and platonic relationships and love/heartbreak, family, divorce and parental relationships, disability, neurodivergence, drug use, the evolution/fracturing of childhood innocence, environmentalism, among others. Students will write true stories about their lived lives with these themes as well as intended audience (ages 12-18) specifically in mind. For visual artists, illustrating one’s work/essays is something that I invite but of course do not require. We will read work by Sarah Prager, Robin Ha, ND Stevenson, Laurie Hals Anderson, Dashka Slater,  and Jason Reynolds.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm EDT on Sunday, April 7)

Supplemental Application Information: Applications for this class should include a 2-3 page (double-spaced if prose, single-spaced if poetry) creating writing sample of any genre (nonfiction, fiction, poetry), or combination of genres. Additionally, I ask that students submit a 250-word reflection on their particular relationship with creative writing and why this course appeals to them. This class is open to students of all writing levels and experience.

English CTV. Writing for Television: Developing the Pilot: Workshop

Instructor: Sam Marks
Monday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site

This workshop introduces the television pilot with a focus on prestige drama and serialized comedy.  Students will excavate their own voice and explore the structure and execution of pilot writing through a first draft of their own original script. With intensive reading and discussion of student work we will examine elements of TV writing, such as treatments and outlines as well as character, dialogue, tone, plot, and, most importantly, vision.  Over the semester, we’ll turn ideas into worlds and worlds into scripts. 

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm EDT on Sunday, April 7)

Supplemental Application Information: Prior experience in dramatic writing is encouraged, though not necessary. Please submit a 5-10 page writing sample (preferably a play or screenplay, but all genres are acceptable). Also, write a few sentences about one of your favorite television shows and why you wish to write for TV.

English CLR. Introduction to Screenwriting: Workshop

Instructor: Musa Syeed
Tuesday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site

The short film, with its relatively lower costs of production and expanded distribution opportunities, has become one of the most disruptive, innovative modes of storytelling--and is often an emerging filmmaker's first step into a career. This course will introduce students to the basics of short form screenwriting, including narrative theory/structure, character design, and dialogue/voice. In the first quarter of the semester, we will hone dramatic techniques through several craft exercise assignments and in-class writing. In the following weeks, students will write two short screenplays. Throughout the semester, we will be workshopping and doing table reads of student work, discussing screenplays and craft texts, and screening a wide array of short films. The emphasis will be on discovering a sense of personal voice and completing two short screenplays (under 20 pages).

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm EDT on Sunday, April 7)

Supplemental Application Information: Please submit a brief letter explaining why you're interested to take this class. You may comment on what films/filmmakers inspire you and what kind of subject matter you may be interested to write about. For your writing sample, please submit 3-5 pages of your creative work from any genre (screenwriting, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, etc.)

English CDB. Poetry Workshop

Instructor: Reginald Dwayne Betts
Section 1: Tuesday, 9:00-11:45 am | Location: TBD
Section 2: Tuesday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site- Section 1
Course Site- Section 2

This workshop will be an exploration into the ways that poets in the past have reckoned in print with the personal and the public, while also provided students with a fundamental understanding of what the public/private dichotomy is, as seen through the works of James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Yusef Komunyakaa, Lucille Clifton, Jack Gilbert and others, with the ultimate goal being to produce a body of work of their own that is aware of both its referents and singularities. Students will be expected to produce drafts on a weekly basis.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm EDT on Sunday, April 7)

Supplemental Application Information: Please submit a portfolio including a letter of interest, up to ten poems, and a list of classes (taken at Harvard or elsewhere) that seem to have bearing on your enterprise.

English CNFJ. Narrative Journalism

Instructor: Darcy Frey
Fall 2024:
Thursday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students.
Course Site
Spring 2025: TBD

In this hands-on writing workshop, we will study the art of narrative journalism in many different forms: Profile writing, investigative reportage, magazine features. How can a work of journalism be fashioned to tell a captivating story? How can the writer of nonfiction narratives employ the scene-by-scene construction usually found in fiction? How can facts become the building blocks of literature? Students will work on several short assignments to practice the nuts-and-bolts of reporting, then write a longer magazine feature to be workshopped in class and revised at the end of the term. We will take instruction and inspiration from the published work of literary journalists such as Joan Didion, John McPhee, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and John Jeremiah Sullivan. This is a workshop-style class intended for undergraduate and graduate students at all levels of experience. No previous experience in English Department courses is required.

Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm ET on Sunday, April 7)

Supplemental Application Information:  Please write a substantive letter of introduction describing who you are as writer at the moment and where you hope to take your writing; what experience you may have had with journalism or narrative nonfiction; what excites you about narrative journalism in particular; and what you consider to be your strengths and weaknesses as a writer. Additionally, please submit 3-5 pages of journalism or narrative nonfiction or, if you have not yet written much nonfiction, an equal number of pages of narrative fiction.

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