Guided Elective: 1900-Present

Instructor: Tracy K. Smith Monday & Wednesday, 3:00-4:15pm | Location: TBD African American poets have long embraced the private freedoms of the lyric poem—freedom to claim the authority of an uncontested first person “I”; freedom to wrangle language into...

Instructor: Peter Sacks Wednesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location Enrollment: Limited to 15 students. Course Site How has poetry served as one of the most powerful means by which to express the...

Instructor: Jesse McCarthy Thursday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for location Enrollment: Limited to 15 students. Course Site At first glance Henry James and James Baldwin may seem worlds apart. Yet these...

Instructor: Glenda Carpio and Robin Bernstein Monday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: Barker 316 Enrollment: limited to 12 students Course Site This course investigates the history of African American theatre from the antebellum era through the present. Students...

Instructor: Christopher Pexa Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:15pm | Location: TBD Introduction to Indigenous Literary Studies: Poetry, Prose, and Politics" introduces students to critical conversations in English, Indigenous Studies, and related disciplines...

Instructor: Kelly Mee Rich Tuesday & Thursday, 1:30-2:45pm | Location: Sever 102 Course Site What stories do we tell to make sense of our world? This course serves as an introduction to contemporary fiction in English, as well as a survey of approaches to...

Instructor: Sarah Dimick Monday & Wednesday, 1:30-2:45pm | Location: Barker 211 Course Site This course focuses on climate change literature, the most active and popular arena of contemporary environmental writing. Examining a variety of 20th and 21st...

Instructor: Maria Dikcis Wednesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Barker 018 Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Course Site Who gets to count as human? This ostensibly simple question has been complicated anew in the 20th and 21st centuries by a series of...

Instructor: Christopher Pexa Spring 2027 TBD | Location: TBD Spring 2026 Monday, 3:00-5:00pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students This course will examine contemporary writings by Native American and Indigenous authors across the genres of...

Instructor: Glenda Carpio and Tommie Shelby Monday, 12:45-2:45 pm | Location: TBA This course examines the major fiction and nonfiction works of Richard Wright from a literary, philosophical, and political perspective. We will take an interdisciplinary...