Harvard History & Literature

What’s that we spy in the course catalog? One of our popular HL90s! Duncan White told us more about his class, Espionage: A Cultural History, which meets Mondays, 9:45-11:45.

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. He died earlier this year and 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. Just a few days ago a British spy was arrested in Germany for passing information on to the Russians. 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.

A returning favorite HL90 seminar! Drew Faust talks to us about what she learned from being the President of Harvard and how it impacted her class, American Speeches.

Tell us about your class!

American Speeches will explore speeches across the sweep of American history both as windows into their historical moment and as texts in and of themselves — in other words, as both history and literature. We will be asking how people across four centuries have sought to persuade others, so in many ways this is a course about an essential tool of leadership. 

What made you want to teach this class?

When I was contemplating my return to teaching after 11 years as university president, I thought about what I had learned in that role that might be shared in an undergraduate class.  I had spent a lot of time writing and delivering speeches, and I found that I often reflected on speeches I had encountered in my work as a historian and what had made them effective—or not.  I got excited thinking about how that might be captured in a course. I also knew that students in the College had expressed great interest in having more opportunities in the curriculum related to speaking—in addition to existing courses and requirements on writing, reasoning and calculating.  I imagined designing a course that reflected self-consciously on oral communication — not as a public speaking course but as a more general investigation of how speeches work.

What do you hope students will take away from this class?

I hope students will leave this course with a deeper understanding of the traditions of American oratory, with insight into how effective speaking works, and with new critical self-consciousness about the speeches they hear and the speeches they will almost certainly be delivering over the course of their lives.

For more information, see the syllabus on Canvas or send an email.

Buckle up–one of our popular HL90s is back this semester! Patrick Whitmarsh teaches The Postwar American Road Narrative, Thursdays, 3-5.

Tell us about your class!

This course examines the road narrative as it has been taken up by writers of color. Together, we will study the ways that writers (as well as filmmakers and musicians) adopt this narrative mode to critique the racial injustices built into the laws and infrastructure that dictate travel in the post-World War II United States.

Do you have a text you’re especially excited to read with students this semester?

I’m looking forward to reading Hari Kunzru’s novel White Tears with students. It’s a dark, haunting, challenging text, and has a little bit of something for everyone: road novel, ghost story, techno-thriller, detective fiction, family drama, and more.

Do you have any activities planned?

One cool activity in our course is the “road trip playlist.” For each class, students will listen to one or two songs, not all about the road but all relevant to topics and issues we will discuss in the course. By the end of the semester, we’ll compile a set of brief commentaries on each track. You can’t go on a road trip without a good playlist!

How can students learn more?

If students would like to learn more about the course, I’ll be holding two informal drop-in Zoom sessions on August 18 and 19 from 1:00-2:00 EST. If you can’t make these sessions, you can also feel free to send me an email. I’m happy to answer any questions about the course! You can also see the syllabus on the Canvas page here.

We’ve got lots of exciting HL90s coming this fall! Jennifer Alpert told us all about her new course, Dictatorship and Resistance in Latin America, which meets Mondays, 12:45-2:45.

What inspired you to teach this class?

I have dreamt about teaching a class like this for years because there were very few courses on Latin America available to me as an undergraduate and graduate student and they mostly focused on “high-brow” literature, avant garde cinema, and other kinds of art that seemed inaccessible for mass audiences. I always wanted to learn about widely watched films/TV or best-selling books, street art, and other forms of expression that reached large portions of the population. In this class we will investigate the role popular culture and fiction have in mediating the traumatic experience of state terrorism, repression, and genocide, and how these forms resisted state violence and conferred agency to nations that were being attacked by those intended to protect them. Despite returning to democratic forms of government decades ago, Chile, Argentina, and many other countries in Latin America are still grappling with the consequences of dictatorship. The fictional and artistic works being produced right now continue to reveal the persistence of these national traumas (spoiler: we’ll discover how).

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

The films! As a film scholar and a total cinephile, watching and talking about movies gives me life!

Do you have any cool projects or activities planned?

YES! Throughout the semester, we’ll be engaging our “creative muscle” as we caption film screenshots, create memes, and make short video responses to make our bodies and voices keep the people who were forcibly disappeared alive. For the final assignment, students can choose between writing a paper or crafting a creative project such as a short film, a museum exhibit or film series, a set of educational TikToks, a podcast, or any other idea that might come to their mind. The sky is the limit!

What does your class help us understand about the present?

The attack on the Capitol on January 6 seemed to come as a surprise, but many Latin Americanists who study dictatorship predicted what could happen. Studying historical and cultural processes in specific times/places helps us to develop the tools and methodologies to “read” other regions and historical moments and there are always connections and comparisons to be drawn.

What would students be surprised to learn about you?

I worked in the film industry before becoming a professor (at Pixar and the Academy of Motion Pictures, where I was even invited to celebrity-watch at the Oscars red carpet). I am also a popular culture fan and have not missed a season of 90-day Fiancé!

How can students learn more?

Students are invited to check out the syllabus on Canvas, and to contact me with any questions at jalpert@fas.harvard.edu—I am happy to chat via email or set up a virtual office hours appointment.

More new HL90s to check out! Tommy Conners shared more about Queer Latinx Borderlands and also some tv recommendations!

Tell us about your class!

“Queer Latinx Borderlands” is an intro to Latinx Studies where queer describes both the what and the how: not only are a lot of the cultural texts, films, poems, and documentaries we’ll study queer, but our look into the histories of race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship will try to pick apart their normativity and highlight their impacts on the many facets of Latinidad.

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

Carmen María Machado’s 2019 memoir In the Dream House. Not only does it center on an abusive queer relationship between women (a topic that hardly gets any attention, generally speaking), it does so by playing with different genres and styles of writing like horror, sci-fi thriller, erotica, utopia, and even choose-your-own-adventure. The idea of a dream house always makes me rethink the idea of queer safe space, too—who is it safe for and from, how do we know it’s safe?

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

The US Customs and Border Patrol have jurisdiction within 100 miles of any border—a space where nearly 2 out of 3 people in the US live, Boston included. But with the expansion of that zone of policing can come an expansion of the generative analysis a framework of borderlands offers. Following in the footsteps of Chicana lesbian Gloria Anzaldúa, this means tracing, critiquing, and moving beyond the intersecting forces of, for example, North American and Latin American ideas of race, straightness, and masculinity. For “Queer Latinx Borderlands,” these intersections will bring us to Junot Díaz’s Dominican New Jersey, Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Latinas of indigenous descent in the American West, and Raquel Salas Rivera’s Puerto Rican Philadelphia (to name a few!).

Why should students take this class?

You should take this class if you’re interested in what Queer Studies gains by studying the histories and cultural production of Latinx communities, and what Latinx Studies gains by focusing on gender and sexually nonconforming artists, thinkers, and activists.

The Netflix series Pose is on the syllabus. Why focus on the Black and Latinx queer ball culture of the eighties and nineties in a seminar about borderlands?

Pose is SO good and pulls together some seriously fascinating topics: queer kinship, gender performance, trans activism, the HIV/AIDS crisis. I also love it because it’s so full of joy, too: the joy of house making, competing, strutting, winning a perfect 10…You’d also best believe part of our conversation will be discussing what house we’d belong to—Abundance or Evangelista?!

How can students learn more?

Be sure to check out the course Canvas site to see all we’ll be getting into and send an email to thomasconners@fas.harvard.edu with any and all thoughts and questions!

Classes start in just a few weeks! We’re ready with lots of new HL90s we’re excited to share! Up first, read more about Vikrant Dadawala’s class, The Global South Asian Diaspora:

Tell us about your class!

This class offers students a chance to think about migration, labor, and literature in a global and comparative spirit. Our popular understanding of the South Asian diaspora tends to be based on very recent history. This class will explore older stories of South Asian migration that aren’t as well known–indentured laborers brought in to work in Caribbean sugarcane plantations after the
abolition of slavery, sailors who jumped ship in London or New York City, and merchants
who lived on the shores of east Africa. We will read literature in English as well as in translation
from five South Asian languages.

Is there something you’re especially looking forward to share with the class?

I’m looking forward to our sessions in Weeks 3 and 5, that reconstruct nineteenth-century voyages across the Indian Ocean using a mix of autobiographies, diaries, and other fragmentary sources. I think of myself as a well-travelled person. But my experience of international travel has always involved the banal routine of applying for a visa, sitting still inside an airplane for a few hours, and queuing up to get my passport stamped at my destination. This is not how humans travelled for most of history! By the end of the semester, I hope students can have a real sense of what it was like to sail across a vast ocean towards an unknown destination – whether as a “lascar” in the crew of a British clipper or steamer, or as an indentured “coolie” who has signed away his or her freedom for the next five years.

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

That east Africa was described by a colonial official in 1901 as the “America of the Hindu.” Or that the word “shampoo” was introduced to English by Sake Dean Mahomed, a Bengali Muslim who migrated to England in 1784, and wrote what is probably the first book in English by a South Asian author. Or that Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis on temporary visas comprise close to sixty percent of the population of the contemporary United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Do you have any cool assignments planned?

For the final project, students are free to write about any book of their choice, placing it in conversation with the historical context from which it emerged. Meanwhile, as we move from region to region, we’re going to keep track of the new musical forms and dishes that emerged from interactions between South Asian migrants and local traditions. My favorite of these dishes is definitely roti canai, from Malaysian Indian cuisine. I’m also very impressed by the cheerful bawdiness of chutney soca music from Trinidad.

How can students learn more about the class?

You can see the syllabus by visiting the Canvas site for the class. If you have any questions, feel free to email me at vikrant_dadawala@fas.harvard.edu or set up an appointment to meet in person or virtually.

We’ve got one final HL90 to share before applications to enroll in one are due tonight. Catherine Nguyen shared more about her new class, “Asian America’s Vietnam War,” the texts that made the cut, the texts that might have, and food!

What inspired you to teach this class?

I’m excited to be teaching a seminar on the history and literature of the Vietnam War! When I was trying to figure out what class to offer as a HL90, I was looking around the course offerings at Harvard, and I saw that there is a history course on the Vietnam War. The syllabus provides a thorough account of American history and Vietnam War, and if I were a student, I would definitely take it. At the same time though, I was struck by the few Vietnamese names included. As a second generation Vietnamese American and as one who never had an opportunity to take a Vietnam War class, I was looking for more, for narratives that might speak to my family’s history and to my own experience. Given the opportunity to teach a Vietnam War seminar through History & Literature, I worked to design a course that put front and center the Vietnamese experience—the opposing sides, soldiers and civilians, and the diaspora in the United States, France, and Australia. Moreover, the Vietnam War affected the larger Southeast Asian region and is a major moment for Asian American history, so we’ll be reading narratives from the Southeast Asian diaspora and Asian America. So, my hope is that the seminar and its syllabus will offer you something that speaks to the complexity of the Vietnam War and its aftermath.

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

The boat narrative is the story of the Vietnam War and of the Vietnamese refugee. I’m excited to share with you the different ways that authors and artists have represented the boat narrative because it reflects an important history at the same time working through how the boat narrative is carried through in the diaspora and through the second generation. For example, we will be looking at a short story by a Vietnamese writer who lives in France but writes in Vietnamese alongside a picture book by a Vietnamese American author and an online interactive drawn by a Vietnamese Australian artist. We’ll think through what does each medium offer and how might it be constructing a particular vision or memory of the boat narrative.

Do you have any cool projects planned?

Given that we’re going to explore a lot of different things in the seminar—Maya Lin’s the Vietnam War Veterans Memorial to Hmong American stories—the final project is open in its subject and possibilities, as you can pursue a research paper or a creative project with an artist statement. So you can develop a podcast on generational memory, write a family memoir, draw a comic on Southeast Asian American student experiences, and more.

The seminar also has a mini-speaker series, and we will be inviting emerging scholars of critical refugee studies as well as creative artists who work in mix media, poetry and photography. This is required of students and provides you with the opportunity to have a conversation with them about how they approach the legacies of the Vietnam War in their work.

It always feels like there’s too much to read and not enough time. What are some other works that you considered assigning?

Thanhha Lai’s Butterfly Yellow that’s about a Vietnamese girl in Texas; Ocean Vuong’s poetic On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous; Quan Barry’s epic She Weeps Each Time You’re Born; Aimee Phan’s We Should Never Meet that tracks stories between Vietnam and Little Saigon in California; Viet Thanh Nguyen’s story collection The Refugees; and Thi Bui’s beautifully drawn The Best We Could Do.

What’s your favorite Vietnamese dish?

That’s such a difficult question, but it would be bánh cuốn, rolled not folded and with all the trimmings. Ngon quá!

How should students contact you to find out more?

I’d love to see you at the Shopping Week Info Session TODAY at 1:00-2:00pm ET on Zoom. And if you’ve any further questions, feel free to email me at chnguyen@fas.harvard.edu.

We’ve got another new HL90 to check out this spring! Arianne Urus shared more about her class, “Islam in Early America.”

Tell us more about your class and what students can expect to learn.

Bringing together the Spanish Inquisition, Atlantic slavery, West African politics, and European imperialism, this course will examine how Islam and Muslims have been present in the Americas for centuries, even if this history is largely forgotten. While focused on the early modern period, the course concludes with a reading of Malcolm X. Together, we will open up questions about the connections between the past and present place of Muslims in the United States and the Atlantic World more broadly.

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

I’m looking forward to reading the autobiography of Omar ibn Said. Originally from West Africa, ibn Said was enslaved in the Carolinas and wrote his autobiography in Arabic in 1831. Rhiannon Giddens has created an opera, “Omar,” based on his life,  composing music with Arabic and African influences as well as African American folk traditions. Considering the text and the opera side by side, we can think about how the position of Muslims in the United States today might have influenced Giddens’s opera as well as how ibn Said’s experiences as a Muslim in early America might complicate twenty-first-century narratives about Muslim Americans.

How can students learn more about the class?

My canvas site is published and I have a shopping week event on Wednesday January 20 at 3pm. Interested students an also reach out via email asurus@fas.harvard.edu

HUAC beware! Lauren Kaminsky and Steve Biel told us about their returning HL90, Red Scares; read more about the relationship between politics and culture, and get a sneak preview of Zoom outfits to come.

Tell us about your class!

In this class we’ll explore the anti-radical impulses and movements in US history that culminated in the convulsions known as the First and Second “Red Scares.” The First Red Scare, precipitated by World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, followed on fears and persecution of anarchists, socialists, and other labor radicals in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. In the Second Red Scare after World War II, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Senator Joseph McCarthy, the FBI, and others conducted widespread investigations of suspected communists and purged “subversives” from all levels of government, the entertainment industry, public and private schools, colleges and universities. Beginning with mid 19th-century fears that revolutionary uprisings could spread from Europe to the United States, “Red Scares” explores anxieties about subversion and perversion in American politics and culture. 

What does your class help us understand about the present? 

Why was an insurrectionist at the front of the mob storming the Capitol last Wednesday carrying a sign saying “THE REAL INVISIBLE ENEMY IS COMMUNISM”? Subverting American democracy in the same of protecting the nation against subversion is not a new phenomenon, and, as we’ll explore in this course, the specter of hidden communists and other radical enemies reaches deep into U.S. history.

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

Red Scares have been inextricably tied up with histories of racism and xenophobia. So much of this course will focus on how anti-radical rhetoric and politics targeted marginalized groups, including African Americans, immigrants, gays and lesbians, and others.

Is there a particular text you’re excited to share with students?

During the early Cold War, “bad” mothers were a particular cause for concern among social observers. The 1952 Hollywood film My Son John presents us with a mother whose excessively close attachment to her son turns him into a homosexual and Communist spy.

Do you have any cool assignments planned?

One of our essay assignments asks students to use documents from the poet Langston Hughes’s FBI file to explore how investigators constructed a relationship between social justice activism and communist subversion. 

Anything else students should know?

This is what we look like when we teach this class:

How should students contact you to find out more?

Check out the Red Scares Canvas site, sign up for our joint office hours, or email Steve and Lauren!