Lecture Courses

Instructors: Leah Whittington, Ann Blair Monday & Wednesday, 3:00-4:15 pm | Location: TBD We live in a moment of “crisis” around regimes of preservation and loss. As our communication becomes ever more digital— and, therefore, simultaneously more...

Instructor: Jesse McCarthy Tuesday & Thursday, 10:30-11:45am | Location: TBD Literature has been profoundly shaped by the advent of modern industrial capitalism. Since the Industrial Revolution, traditional social orders focused on local marketplaces have...

Instructors: Neel Mukherjee and Laura van den Berg Monday & Wednesday, 10:30-11:45 am | Location: TBD How to tell a story? How do writers discover character, imagine worlds, and shape narrative time? This open-enrollment creative writing course will focus...

Instructor: Maggie Doherty Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:15 pm | Location: TBD Course Site This course is organized thematically, and loosely chronologically, around the vexed and contested category of American women’s literature. Our readings and...

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...

Instructor: Stephen Greenblatt Tuesday & Thursday, 1:30-2:45pm | Location: TBD We will begin with Shakespeare's brilliant early history play, Richard III , and read works from the full course of his career, sampling all of his major genres: comedies...

Instructor: Deidre Lynch Monday & Wednesday, 1:30-2:45 pm | Location: TBD 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...

Instructor: Stephanie Burt Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:15pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location Course Site The first song on Taylor Swift's first record, released when she was 16, paid homage (by name) to a more...

Instructor: John Stauffer and Roberto Unger Friday, 1:30-3:30 pm | Location: TBD Democracy, inequality, and nationalism in America. The white working class and American politics. Class and race. Identities and interests. Conditions for socially inclusive...

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...