Harvard History & Literature

Some more new HL90s coming this fall! Read more about Angela Allan’s “Popular Culture,” which meets Wednesday, 9:45-11:45.

What inspired you to teach this class?

The simple answer is that I really enjoy consuming popular culture! But I really enjoy thinking about it and why it’s popular. While we’re not reading any of the Perry Mason novels in class, one of the things that really struck me is that critic Dwight Macdonald really trashes them in his famous essay “Masscult and Midcult,” but that over 300 million of them were sold and yet most of them are out of print now. They’re fun and easy reads, but what I think is also so interesting about them is how you can see how ideas about law and justice evolved from 1933 to 1970 in subtle ways, even though they’re incredibly formulaic. And because they were so popular, you can see how they would have also helped shape readers’ opinions about big, important things. Popular culture can teach us interesting things, even if they don’t seem “important” as objects themselves.

What’s text are you excited to share with students?

Too many options–I can’t possibly pick! But the great thing about choosing texts for a class on popular culture is that everything was popular at one point in time. But while we’ll be looking at a lot of films, television shows, and comics that have endured because of their popularity, I’m really looking forward spending time with some of the related objects that have largely disappeared (thanks, ebay!). We’ll spend time looking at American Girl catalogs from the 1990s to consider the historical narratives that were being sold to children. We’ll also look at some Star Wars zines from the 1980s to see how people circulated fanfiction and art before the Internet made it easier to connect with fellow fans!

What about recent popular culture?

Students are going to choose the final text of the semester! There are so many places and ways to consume culture that I know there are things that are popular that I’ve probably never even heard of and I’m excited to learn about new things too!

What do you want students to take away from this class?

There’s so much culture available at our fingertips thanks to streaming, and everyone is quick to weigh in with hot takes on social media and the news. I think Barbenheimer is a great example of this from the past summer; everyone had an opinion, even folks who hadn’t seen either film! There is plenty of smart writing about pop culture on the internet, but because of how fast the discourse begins and ends, we’ve really moved to a hot take culture of snap judgments, often in terms of whether something is “relatable” or “problematic.” I hope that by spending time talking about the variety of ways we can approach popular culture from a scholarly perspective, we can think about how things that might seem silly or frivolous are sites for really rich discussion.

So any recommendations for the best pop culture right now?

I’ll take recommendations myself! I have really eclectic taste and actually like a lot of older things. I’m going to an ELO concert with my dad later this year.

How can students learn more?

You can take a look at the Canvas page or send me an email!

Laura Quinton’s HL90, “British Soft Power from Shakespeare to Dua Lipa” returns, Wednesday 3-5: take a look!

What inspired you to teach this class?

I’m British, but I’ve lived in the U.S. for many years. I’m often struck by how fascinated Americans are with British culture – accents, TV shows, movies, musicians, the Premier League, Kate Middleton… the list goes on! American media coverage of British politics and culture is also considerable. In this course, we’ll explore the history of “Anglophilia” in and beyond the U.S. and examine a host of key British cultural products to think deeply about Britain’s past and present influence around the world, during and especially after empire.

What is something you’re excited to share with students?
I’m excited to hear the class’s thoughts on Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk (2017). A global box office hit, the movie stars Harry Styles, Cillian Murphy, Barry Keoghan, Tom Hardy, and many other famous actors. (Nolan’s latest film, Oppenheimer, swept the Oscars earlier this year.) We’ll talk about Nolan’s directorial choices as well as the extent to which the film upholds myths about Britain and the Second World War.

Are you doing any fun projects or assignments?

This year I’m asking students to embark on a British culture “scavenger hunt.” Over the course of the semester, they’ll write 3 short discussion posts on 3 separate moments when they encounter British culture in their daily lives. Did you eat fish and chips for dinner in Harvard Square? Drink tea at Lowell House or watch the Head of the Charles? Read a novel by a British author, listen to “Murder on the Dancefloor,” or watch Bridgerton or Ted Lasso? This is an open-ended, creative assignment – it should be a lot of fun!

What does your class help us understand about the present?

We’ll explore how international influence and power operate not only through formal politics, economics, and military endeavors, but also through subtle, less expected channels, like culture and art. These latter forces have helped Britain stay relevant in the world today.

How can students learn more?

Students are welcome to visit the course Canvas site or email me at lquinton@fas.harvard.edu.

We’ve got lots of new HL90s coming this fall, including Nick Bloom’s “Race & Ethnicity in Twentieth-Century American Thought,” Wednesday 12:45-2:45.

What inspired you to teach this class?

This class is inspired by a desire to introduce students to the incredibly diverse and powerful ways that people in and beyond the United States have analyzed, critiqued, reimagined, and/or sought to transform structures of race and ethnicity in the twentieth century. In my experience, to the extent that students have received a background on this subject, it is typically through the lens of a few important flash points (i.e. the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement) and a few important figures (Du Bois, King, Malcolm X, Morrison). All of these figures and and flash points are extremely important, but we do a disservice to not only the history of how race and ethnicity have functioned in the twentieth century, but also to the history of the ways that people have critiqued and resisted dominant ideas of race and ethnicity, when we limit our understanding of these things to just a few moments/people. Also, the texts we will be reading in this class are not only brilliant critiques of race and ethnicity, but are more broadly speaking some of the most important tracts of political and cultural thought authored in the twentieth century West, and I look forward to introducing students to some of these texts, and seeing what they do with them!

Any texts you’re especially looking forward to sharing with students?

One book that we will read next semester that I am really excited about is “American” in the broader sense of the term, not written in or about the US: the Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James’ Beyond a Boundary. James is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, most famous for his history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins. Beyond a Boundary is a history of the sport of cricket in the Caribbean, which may at first seem like a less serious book than something like Black Jacobins. However, James brilliantly weaves together memoir, cultural analysis, history, and beautifully poetic writing to create one of the most brilliant critiques of race and class ever written, with applications for the United States and beyond. Two other texts I am also especially excited to teach are Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Moses, Man of the Mountain.

What’s something surprising students might not know about this topic?

I think the history of race and ethnicity in the United States, and especially the history of the way that people have thought about and critiqued race and ethnicity, is often taught with a distinctly nationalist and progressive framework: i.e., with the idea that people of color have consistently sought to become more and more included within the dominant framework of US citizenship, and the US has gradually become more inclusive over time. I think this class will disrupt this idea. At various times, indigenous, Black, and immigrant peoples have sought political and cultural futures beyond or against the framework of the United States, and in turn, the United States has been anything but progressive in the way it has dealt with structures of race and ethnicity.

What kind of assignments can students expect?

I like to have students draw upon two primary texts in order to analyze one specific broader theoretical/historical question, ultimately developing their own analysis. In this class, I am especially interested to have students use older texts, from the earlier part of the twentieth century, to analyze more contemporary specific issues, and to develop their own ideas how these older texts’ frameworks/ideas do or do not still apply to a specific, more contemporary problem that may be of interest to them.

What does your class help us understand about the present?

Race and ethnicity continue to be a primary way that our societies are structured in the United States and beyond. Their power derives from the fact that too often these structures are seen as “natural” or “ancient,” when in fact they developed fairly recently in the scope of human history, and they are changing constantly. I think this class can only help students to both understand how existing relations of power around race/ethnicity have come to be, and also to see them as something they have some power over in terms of rethinking and transforming them in their lifetimes.

You mentioned cricket–are you a sports fan?

I love talking and learning about sports and popular music, and I love learning from students about popular culture things that I don’t know about. These things can both bring levity to discussion, and they also add richness to the content of what we are doing, and I always encourage some level of this kind of seemingly “tangential” discussion.

How can students learn more?

You can read more on the Canvas site or send me an email.

We’ve got some exciting new HL90s this fall! Be sure to check out Morgan Ridgway’s “Indigenous Genders and Sexualities in North America,” Monday, 3-5.

Tell us about your class!

“Indigenous Genders and Sexualities” really orbits around two things: first, the diverse experiences and expressions of gender/sexuality by Indigenous peoples across North America and second, that gender and sexuality are tools of power used by empires. While there are stories in the past and present of “third genders” or other forms of sexuality outside the binary, this course is really interested in how queer, trans, two-spirit and other gendered Indigenous peoples tell their own stories on their own terms. So many of these stories take shape in art so we will spend much of the semester looking at paintings, memoir, film, and poetry to being understanding how Indigenous peoples have embraced, protected, and rejoiced in their bodies and relationships. We’ll read these alongside histories from the United States, Canada, and Mexico that reveal how these colonial powers use gender and sexuality to control Indigenous peoples. In the process, I hope we can see more clearly how vibrant and resilient Indigenous peoples, nations, and communities have been and continue to be.

What’s something you’re excited to share with students?

I am perhaps a bit biased because I am also a poet but I’m really excited to share some contemporary Indigenous poets and their collections. Queer and trans Indigenous people have been writing some of the most eclectic and dynamic poetry especially in the last decade and I’m happy to have a chance to shine a spotlight on them. Poetry lets us imagine the unimaginable and is a crucial part of Indigenous life, history, and future. These poets gives us a few guides on what that might look like. Honorable mention goes to a series of Kent Monkman’s (Cree) paintings featuring some rainbow dinosaurs, beadwork, and some ambiguously gendered folks in Christian Louboutins.

What’s something surprising students might not know about this topic?

Many of the foundations of power at a societal and global level come back to gender and sexuality; what people are “supposed” to look like, act like, and the sorts of relationships they have. I hope this class invites students to consider how gender and sexuality shapes every body not just certain ones.

Are you doing any creative projects?

I’m most excited about the final zine project. Zine making has a long tradition of speaking to and imagining gender and sexuality so it is only fitting to continue that here. I am also an artist and I always enjoying bringing creative assignments that let students explore different genres, forms, and styles. Students will also have the option of a more traditional essay but if you want to scratch that creative, interdisciplinary itch, this course will definitely have something for you.

What does your class help us understand about the present?

We will be covering many themes directly related to this moment. Openly presenting, supporting, and/or advocating for different experiences of gender and sexuality in this moment (like in others) can come with incredible risk. Engaging with Indigenous peoples’ stories through poetry, autobiography, painting, film, and political activism, can, I hope, offer students a guide to understand how politics, nationhood, relationships, and love are interconnected. By revealing these connections, we can begin to understand what is at stake for those outside of the binary and the bravery it takes to remain there.

How can students learn more?

You can look at the course Canvas page or send me an email.

We’ve got lots of great HL90s this year! Read more about Emmet von Stackelberg’s “Screen Cultures from Cinema to TikTok,” which meets Thursday, 12:45-2:45.

Tell us about your class!

For the most part, I study the technologies behind really old movies. We’re talking a century old, or older. Black and white, “silent” (but never REALLY silent, since they’d have been shown alongside music, narration, and even sound effects!), and usually a lot shorter than, say, the 163 minute runtime of the new Mission: Impossible. But what’s really interesting is that these early films look an awful lot like TikToks or like Instagram reels or like YouTube videos. And I don’t just mean in that hokey historian way where we say things like “the movie house was the TikTok of 1910!” I mean legitimately striking visual similarities. And so that similarity sparked another question for me: how different are the different screen media of the last 125 or so years, really? What made television new and different from the silver screen? Are computer screens just TVs showing different content? And what did viewers at the time think? I wanted to dial in on the screen technologies themselves and then ask what distinguished the cultures that emerged around them, and trace that over time.

What’s something you’re excited to share with students?

Okay I have many answers, but I’ll limit it to two. So the first object I’m excited to share is film stock, which is a pretty amazing substance, actually. Transparent, flexible, and originally made from cotton, pre-dating basically all the oil-based plastics and films and so on that we take for granted today. It was a complicated technology, relying on very tiny images rendered one after the other on this thin strip, each one projected through a lens onto a screen sometimes hundreds of feet wide, at a speed so fast (and so regular) that our eyes render them in motion, rather than one after another. Perhaps it’s hokey, but that’s pretty extraordinary to me! And you couldn’t have movies without it! The second is an object from my own childhood, the Gameboy. I’m really excited to have one in the room with us to play with and physically understand, as this early portable entertainment object, pre-cell phone, and a very early use of the liquid crystal display that most of our modern devices have. I’m hoping we can spend time thinking about the stuff folks were watching on their various screens across the last 125 years, but also about the larger embodied experience of each of those screens, from really large ones in cinemas to tiny ones on portable game consoles.

What’s something surprising students might not know about this topic?

I’m really taken by the way we think about moving images—whether it’s livestreams or movies or TikToks or video clips—as immaterial and ephemeral. We tend not to think of these as taking physical form, and if we do it’s mostly just the hassle of “oh how do I play this old DVD from mom’s TV room?” But our phones, our TVs, our laptops… they’re all assembled somewhere by human beings, out of materials transported a very great distance—materials extracted from deep underground or synthesized in a lab very far away. And it was no different with the very earliest movies, which were printed on this plastic substance, film, that chemists made. No chemists, no movies. Similarly, no liquid crystals or thin film transistors or lithium, and you can’t scroll endlessly on your phone. I think that will be one thing to puzzle over in this course: have these physical substances, and the technologies they make possible, made a difference in the kind of cultures that emerged around them? What does technology and materiality mean for culture?

A class on screens! Will you be doing any projects involving them?

I’d like to put my head together with the students on the precise details, but it’s possible, if we all can agree, that we might have a little social media account of our own for the course, with students contributing throughout the semester. An HL90GE TikTok perhaps? I don’t think there’s any way for me to not sound like an impossibly old person when I say “course TikTok” out loud, though.

What does your class help us understand about the present?

This course covers so much time, and it deals with an aspect of daily life, screens, that I’d argue has long been virtually inescapable and is perhaps only more so now. So unsurprisingly we’ll be engaging with quite a few really big historical shifts of the last couple of centuries in how we live and communicate… really in how the world has been stitched together by cultural exchange and global economic and ecological change. It deals in the question that I believe is central to almost all history worth doing, which is, “How did we get here?” But in particular, I think a course like this might help all of us (me included!) estrange ourselves just a tiny bit from the screen culture we’re immersed in now—the one typified by the infinite scroll and the omnipresent connection.

Okay, so you have a week on video games on your syllabus! Will students get to play any video games during class?

I’m glad you asked. The answer is yes. We will play one (1) video game, from my own childhood.

How can students learn more?

You can see the syllabus on Canvas or send me an email!

We’ve got lots more HL90s to consider! Emily Gowen told us about her class, “American Education Reforms,” which meets Monday, 9:45-11:45.

What inspired you to teach this class?

I started my career in the world of education reform, and the questions that time in my life raised for me have stayed with me throughout my career as a literary historian. The more time I spend in archives, the more convinced I am that all policymakers, educators, and students could benefit from knowing more about the long history of education reform in what is now the United States. Harvard is an especially exciting place to teach a course like this, because the institution has played such a pivotal role in over 3 centuries of reform movements!

What is a text you’re excited to share with students?

I’m looking forward to reading the student literary magazine from The Perkins School for the Blind with my students. This will be my first time teaching this text, and I’m excited to hear what students think!

What kind of activities do you have planned for the class?

Students will get to do a Harvard site visit in the first couple of weeks of the course. They’ll choose a place or a building on campus and write a short reflection about the way the built environment reflects, obfuscates, or otherwise engages a particular facet of the institution’s educational history. They’ll also have a chance to try their hands at taking a college entrance exam from the late nineteenth-century!

The class goes back in time pretty far! What can your class help us understand about the present?

Every question that rages through public debates about education today makes more sense when we understand the longer history of education reform in the U.S. Though most of the texts we study in this course will be from a long time ago, many of them will feel urgent and familiar to students as they try to make sense of the contemporary educational landscape. Students will learn that efforts to make progress in the world of education have been wide-ranging, diverse, sometimes halting, always fascinating, and often misguided. Recognizing that questions about education have always been hard to answer should not discourage students, but it should help them understand the complexity of the policy landscape, and approach their own educational journeys with curiosity and openness to the lessons history can teach us. The final research project will give students a chance to make these connections explicit. In fact, I encourage students to develop final projects that trace through-lines from the historical sources through contemporary reform movements.

What’s something you’d like to learn?

To get my toddler to sleep at night, I tell her the cat transforms into batman and kills all the bugs in the house, but only once everyone’s eyes are closed. It almost never works, so: what are your most creative suggestions for toddler story time? I’m desperate!

How can students learn more?

You can see the syllabus on Canvas or send me an email!

Registration begins today and some of our most popular HL90s are back this semester! Make sure you check out Hannah Waits’s “Race and Empire in the Americas,” which meets Thursday, 3-5.

Tell us about your class! 

“Race and Empire in the Americas” examines how empire has functioned across the Caribbean, Central America, and North America since the early 1800s. Focusing on the Americas allows us to combine themes from American Studies and Latin American Studies into one course. I love transnational studies because I’ve found that looking at the relationships between places and people can highlight culture and politics that are less visible to us if we just think about a single country or region. Empire is such a useful framework because it keeps our focus on the role of power in transnational exchanges. And race is a vital category for studies of empire because race is central to imperial ways of thinking and ways of building and sustaining (and dismantling) social structures.

What’s something you’re excited to share with students? 

We will spend a few weeks looking at how imperial relationships are marketed to US audiences today by examining media like humanitarian aid commercials and tourism advertisements.

Are you doing any cool projects in class? 

Yes! We will do a short public engagement project to connect course themes to a present-day topic or issue. Students in the past have created K-12 lesson plans, op-eds, advocacy letters, and educational TikTok videos. There will also be several options for the final paper / project. Students can write a traditional paper or select one of several creative options – an oral history interview, screenplay, historical fiction, or online museum exhibit.

What does your class help us understand about the present?

We will cover themes directly related to this moment. We’ll look at the growth of mass incarceration and policing in communities of color. We’ll examine the ways that popular understandings of disease were connected to discourses about race and empire. And we’ll start the very first week with hurricanes to explore how climate change affects communities differently along lines of race and within the structures of empire.

Do you have any hidden talents?

I can juggle — physically, not just metaphorically. I’ve handled bowling pins, rings, and juggling balls. I once tried flaming batons, but that was a little too scary for me.

How can students learn more? 

Students can visit the Canvas site to check out all of the course topics, readings, and assignments. I’m happy to answer any questions that students might have about the class over email. 

Lots of HL90s to consider! Rachel Kirby’s “The South: Histories of a U.S. Region” is back, Monday 12:45-2:45. There’s Dolly Parton, Disney, and a field trip!

What inspired you to teach this class? Tell us a bit about it!

I’m both from the South and my research focuses on the South, so I’m really excited to teach a class focusing on the region – and in New England, no less!

I’m continually struck by the tendency for the South to be discussed as distinct from the nation, rather than as an integral part of national trends, politics, and discourses. We’re going to confront this head on, looking at various instances in which the boundaries of the South become slippery. I’ve structured the class so that each week focuses on a different South, highlighting the fact that the South is not static or monolithic. That said, I know that my syllabus doesn’t cover everything (I initially had a list of over 30 “Souths” that I had to cut down significantly!), so the final project will ask students to identify and examine an additional “South.” For me, studying the South is automatically interdisciplinary. It’s a region with vibrant art, culture, music, and stories, and I’m looking forward to exploring it together.

We heard this class has a field trip. Can you tell us about that?

Of course! Early in the semester, we’ll be visiting the Royall House and Slave Quarters Museum in Medford. So often we think about plantations as specifically southern, but that is just not the case. As a group, we’ll be given a tour of the house and quarters, where we’ll learn about the history of enslavement in Harvard’s own backyard. I hope that this trip helps us better understand the daily life of people who were enslaved, interrogate regional divisions, and look for connections between the course materials and the world around us.

What topics or texts are you excited to share with students?

I’m always excited to talk about Disney. The Walt Disney Company has been such a huge influence in American culture over the last 100 years, so there is no shortage of material to discuss! We’re going to look at a few different ways that Disney has engaged with ideas of the South, and I’m hoping it’ll be generative and, perhaps, surprising.

I’m also making a few shifts from last year’s syllabus, so stay tuned!

Why should a student take this class?

We’re going to talk about Dolly Parton – need I say more?!

On a more serious note, the South provides us with the opportunity to discuss many crucial elements of United States history, culture, and politics that continue to shape the country today. While focusing on the South, this class will offer students frameworks that they can apply to examinations of other regions. And this course will cover a large variety of topics and source types, so there should be something for everyone!

How can students learn more?

You can see sample weeks on Canvas or send an email.

Registration opens this week and one of our most popular HL90s, Duncan White’s “Espionage: A Cultural History” is back this year, Thursday, 3:45-5:45!

What inspired you to teach this class?

When I was growing up in Brussels the parents of one of my classmates were revealed to have been spies for East Germany. It was strange to look back on seeing them at school pickup or cheering on the sidelines at sports events and to think of them living this double life. I have been interested in espionage ever since but it was not until I started writing a book about writers in the Cold War a few years ago that I started to really think about how pervasive spy stories are in our culture, and how we use them to understand the world.

What is a text you’re excited to share with students?

I’m particularly excited to introduce students to the work of John le Carré, if they have not read him before. I think he is one of the great novelists of the last 50 years. There are few more assiduous chroniclers of the cynicism of the Cold War, and of Britain in sharp imperial decline for that matter.

What does your class help us understand about the present?

Espionage is everywhere. Over the last few years I have been addicted to tv spy dramas: The Americans, The Night Manager and especially the brilliant French show The Bureau. At the same time the news has been full of real spying drama, from the Steele dossier to the attempted assassination of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in the sleepy English town of Salisbury. Every week there seems to be a new cyberattack on American institutions, companies and individuals. Espionage is everywhere – and that’s just what clears the surface. All of which raises many questions: what is the relationship between real life espionage and the spy stories we consume for pleasure? Why are we so fascinated by the idea of a secret world? Are spy stories just escapist entertainment? Or do they tell us something more interesting about the societies which produced them?

What’s something surprising students might not know about this topic?

That the CIA has admitted to doing things far crazier than you have probably imagined.

Are you doing any cool projects or assignments?

For the final assignment students will be able to write about their own favorite spy novel or movie. We will be thinking about how these spy stories relate to the ones in class and to the specific historical contexts in which they were created and consumed.

How should students contact you to find out more?

If you are interested please check out the Canvas site here, or drop me an email.

How can students learn more?

Take a gander at our Canvas site, and (of course) get in touch with me and Brian any time!