What does freedom have to do with our ability to read and write? How have writers addressed the conflicting and contradictory concept of race by writing about it? This course will investigate the history and practice of writing about the vexed relationship between race and freedom, the role of writing in political struggles for civil rights and the abolition of slavery, and the quest for a meaningful life and artistic freedom under conditions that deny that opportunity. We will read widely, primarily—though not exclusively—texts from (and about) the African diaspora from the 16th century to the present. Authors will include Ottabah Cugoano, Phillis Wheatley, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Sylvia Wynter, C.L.R. James, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Hilton Als and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah. The final assignment will involve using the resources of the course to produce an original essay on a topic of your choice related to our themes.
This course satisfies the English Concentration "Diversity in Literature" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.
This course satisfies the “1700-1900 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
Instructor: Pamela Klassen Tuesday, 12:00-2:00pm | Location: Barker 269 Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
This seminar focuses on the public memory of settler colonialism and Indigenous dispossession in North America and Turtle Island, with a focus on stories told within museums. We will be oriented by remediation in two senses: telling a story in a new medium and efforts of remedy and repair. In addition to readings and class discussions, we will have multiple class visits with curators and staff at three Harvard museums: the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, the Harvard Art Museum, and the Harvard Natural History Museum. Students will have the opportunity to engage directly with museum collections for their assignments, which will include reading reflections, cultural item biographies and labels, and a summative project in the form of a reflexive podcast, digital project, essay, or another genre of remediation.
Registration information: This course has no prerequisites—I welcome students from any concentration. We will be discussing narratives and systems of colonialism that shape all of us, and various disciplinary perspectives will enrich our conversation. To gain access to the course, you will need to submit a petition via my.harvard.edu. One or two sentences telling me about your interests is enough.
If you have questions about the seminar, you can email me anytime or come to Zoom office hours on January 17, 12-2. Here's my email and Zoom room:
Instructor: Ju Yon Kim Tuesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Barker 024 Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Course Site
This seminar will explore Asian American theater and performance. We will examine how Asian American theater and performance artists have responded to popular images of Asian immigrants and cultures; how Asian American theater companies have cultivated and expanded our understanding of American theater and Asian American identity; and how artists and productions have experimented with conceptions of racial and gender performance.
This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
Instructor: James Engell Wednesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Barker 269 Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Course site
The literatures of race and slavery, gender, empire, democracy, and revolution that shaped our modern world. Excerpts from Dryden, Astell, Behn, Pope, Swift, Montagu, Johnson, Equiano, Gibbon, Paine, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Blake, and Shelley. Some fiction as well.
This course satisfies the English Concentration "Diversity in Literature" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.
This course satisfies the English Concentration "Migrations" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.
This course satisfies the “1700-1900 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
Instructor: Maria Dikcis Thursday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Lamont Library 401 Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Course site
This course will introduce students to critical race approaches to digital culture, primarily through Asian American, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx perspectives on and experiences with settler colonialism, racial capitalism, state violence, war, and empire. Together, we will explore how racial formations in the U.S. have shaped and been shaped by the infrastructures and interfaces of our digital world, as well as how communities of color give voice to their histories, desires, and creativity through digital cultural production. To guide our explorations, each week we will examine several projects that foreground the intersection between race, politics, and culture, including curated digital archives, mapping projects, database storytelling, network visualizations, born-digital literature, and longform, media-rich journalism. Additionally, this course is designed to be very hands-on and oriented toward digital humanistic research (also known as Digital Humanities) as an applied field of knowledge. Students will therefore have the opportunity to experiment with and engineer their own digital tools that center communities of color. (No prior technical knowledge is required.)
This course satisfies the English Concentration "Diversity in Literature" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.
Instructor: Valeria Luiselli Wednesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Lamont 401 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
This course focuses on the histories of extractivism and violence against land and bodies in the Americas, centering on ways in which writing, art and activism have responded to systemic violence across the region.
We will be considering works from across different languages, cultures and disciplines –such as literature, sound art, visual art and performance– and will be grounding our discussions in the history of global commodities, such as gold, silver, coffee, cotton, sugar, bananas, avocados and bodies. Students will write weekly responses to readings, and work on their own hybrid forms of prose, which will be read in class and workshopped collectively.
Authors include: José Martí, Aimé Césaire, Natalie Díaz, Dolores Dorantes, Gabriela Wiener, Audra Simpson, Rita Segato, and Yasnaya Elena Aguilar.
This course satisfies the English Concentration "Diversity in Literature" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.
Instructor: Nick White Thursday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: Lamont 401 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Is there a queer aesthetic? Or is there a particularly queer way to tell a story? Do our lived experiences as queer folk affect the kinds of stories we tell? In this workshop, we will explore how queer writers have endeavored to tell their stories, and then we will craft and workshop our own. Readings to include excerpts or full texts from: Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh, Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness, Jewelle Gómez’s The Gilda Stories, Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, Morgan Thomas’s Manywhere, as well as others. You will write one flash piece and one short story/novel chapter (around 5k words). Your final project will be a substantial revision of the short story/novel chapter.
This course satisfies the English Concentration "Diversity in Literature" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.
Supplemental Application Information: Prior experience writing fiction is helpful but not required. Please submit a writing sample of 3-5 pages of fiction, along with an application letter explaining your interest in this course, any writing experience you feel is relevant, and listing examples of work that moves and/or influences you, explaining why it does.
Instructor: Tara Menon Monday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: TBA Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
This course examines a range of realist novels set in India. We will read novels set during British colonial rule by British writers (Kipling, Forster, Orwell); early examples of anglophone novels by Indian writers (Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan); novels in English by writers who came to global attention after winning the Booker Prize (Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Aravind Adiga); and works in translation by contemporary novelists who write in Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam (Perumal Murugan, Vivek Shanbhag, K.R. Meera). As we read, we will consider issues of identity, religion, caste, gender, politics, the nation, the family. We will also pay careful attention to style and literary form as well as audience, publication context, and reception.
Instructor: Derek Miller Tuesday, 9:45-11:45am Location: Barker 269 Enrollment: Limited to 15 students.
This course examines recent scripted theater by American playwrights. We will consider the shape of the American theater, contemporary theatrical styles, thematic interests in contemporary issues of identity and politics, and more. Readings may include plays by Annie Baker, Clare Barron, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Michael R. Jackson, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Lucas Hnath, James Ijames, and Sanaz Toossi.
This course satisfies the English Concentration "Diversity in Literature" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.
Instructor: Joan Naviyuk Kane Day & Time: Thursday 12-2:45pm Course Website This poetry workshop centers the work of BIPOC writers through intensive study of poetry writing and the writing process, focusing on craft techniques of imagery, rhythm, and poetic structure. This workshop will initially focus on the generation of new work but will move toward revision-based instruction and discussion. Each student will have their poems workshopped at least twice per semester. Students are responsible for reading assigned texts, submitting required work for workshop, reading and writing critiques of fellow students’ work, accessing (livestreamed or archived) readings, reading and (writing about) one poem closely each week, and memorizing and recording two poems.
Supplemental Application Information: Applicants are requested to submit a maximum of 10 pages of poetry (not more than one poem to a page), and a 2-3 page cover letter in which they may address how long they’ve been writing seriously, what previous study they have done in literary arts, any additional experiences that seem relevant to their application, what type of direct criticism and revision they are seeking from the workshop, craft approaches they would like to know more about, and discussion of any other writers in which the writers’ craft and/or ways in which the writers’ work has served as a model for the applicant’s own literary ambitions.
An economist and a humanist, together with professors from the natural sciences, analyze familiar conceptual and policy-relevant issues from viewpoints of their respective disciplines. For example, how do we measure inequality, and at what point does it become problematic (and how do we know)? How then should it be addressed (e.g., tax code, minimum wage)? What are the best policies to confront job losses from technology? What does sustainable growth mean? The goal is not merely to examine four intertwined issues “growth, technology, inequality, and education” but also to understand the distinct concerns and methods of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.
Sections will separately accommodate concentrators in English/Humanities and Economics/Social/Natural Sciences/SEAS. Jointly offered as Econ 1000a/b
This course satisfies the English Concentration "Diversity in Literature" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.
Instructor: Stephanie Burt Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:15 pm | Location: Harvard Hall 202 Course site
Utopias, dystopias, artificial intelligence, life on new planets, and much, much more-- from the late 19th century to the present, *mostly in novels and short stories but also in comics, poetry, games, film and TV.* Likely readings include Mark Twain, H. G. Wells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Robert A. Heinlein, James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Octavia Butler, William Gibson, Nalo Hopkinson, Ted Chiang, Tillie Walden, Charlie Jane Anders, N. K. Jemisin…. We will also be playing a tabletop role playing game as part of the class.
This course satisfies the English Concentration "Diversity in Literature" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.
This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
Instructor: Ju Yon Kim Tuesday & Thursday, 1:30-2:45pm | Location: CGIS South S020 Course site
Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974) was one of the earliest attempts to collect writings that were, to quote the editors, “exclusively Asian-American.” Yet as their lengthy—and controversial—explanation of the selection process makes clear, Asian American literature defies neat categorization. This course is both a survey of Asian American literature and an introduction to ongoing debates about what constitutes Asian American literature. We will study a variety of literary genres and ask how formal and stylistic conventions, as well as shifting sociohistorical circumstances, have shaped conceptions of Asian American literature.
This course satisfies the English Concentration "Migrations" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.
This course satisfies the English Concentration "Diversity in Literature" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.
This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.
All literature was contemporary at some point, but the literature that is contemporary now provides special opportunities for enjoying, questioning, and understanding the world. Literature Today focuses on works written since 2000—since most of you were born. It explores how writers from around the world speak to and from their personal and cultural situations, addressing current problems of economic inequality, technological change, structural prejudice, and divisive politics. We will encounter a range of genres, media, and histories to study contemporary literature as a living, evolving system. The course uniquely blends literary study and creative writing—students will analyze literature and make literature. The conviction that these practices are complementary will inform our approach to readings and course assignments.
Note: English 10 is one of the required Common Courses for the English concentrators. The course is designed as a “gateway” course for first and second year students, but it is open to all undergraduates.
