First-Year Seminar Program
In this section, we have highlighted first-year seminars that are taught by faculty in the Division of Arts & Humanities. First-year students have until 11 am EST on August 25 to apply for a fall seminar. Visit the website of the First-Year Seminar Program for further information!
A&H FIRST-YEAR SEMINAR PROGRAM 2023-24
FALL 2023
Please check the Spring 2024 tab for new seminars!
SPRING 2024
Broadway Musicals: History and Performance
Carol Oja (Department of Music)
First-Year Seminar 34V 4 credits
This seminar will explore a core group of Broadway musicals. Historical, musical, and theatrical discussions will be paired with student performances and staging of individual scenes; stagings will be done under the guidance of Allegra Libonati from the A.R.T. Institute. There will be a consistent emphasis on race. The seminar will touch on signal moments over the course of the “Golden Age” of the musical, stretching up to the present day: Oklahoma! (1943), South Pacific (1949), West Side Story (1957), A Chorus Line (1975), Wicked (2003), and In the Heights (2008). Blending historical study and hands-on practice, this seminar aims to offer a wide range of perspectives on the interpretation and performance of Broadway musicals.
Prerequisite: Student musicians and actors are welcome in the course, as are students who love to watch shows but not necessarily perform in them. Ability to read music is desirable but not required.
Note: This is a Radcliffe First-Year Seminar and will include optional co-curricular activities related to the seminar topic. The seminar will meet on the Radcliffe campus, Knafel Center, room 104.
Faith and Fiction in American History
David F. Holland (Harvard Divinity School)
First-Year Seminar 60H 4 credits
This seminar uses key literary works to explore some of the most difficult and demanding questions in the religious history of the United States: Does God have a special relationship with the United States? Is sin an individual responsibility or a social flaw? Why has American religion been so frequently concerned with sexuality? How has religion shaped racial identities and tensions? How does it inform domestic relationships? How do non-Christian immigrants find a place and a voice in a nation with deeply entrenched Christian traditions? To explore these and other areas of concern, we bore into the faith-inflected cultures of American history through the imagined narratives of some of its most celebrated writers, including the likes of Catharine Sedgwick, Harriet Wilson, Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, Rudolfo Anaya, Pearl Abraham, Ayad Akhtar, and Marilynne Robinson. I will offer mini-lectures to contextualize these works in their historical moment. We will read some scholarly work to sharpen our tools of analysis, but mostly we will read and talk about the novels themselves. The seminar aims to be both analytically rigorous and aesthetically rewarding.
Fashion in the Ancient Mediterranean World
Irene Soto Marín (Department of the Classics)
First-Year Seminar 65N 4 credits (spring term)
The aim of this seminar is to explore the manufacture, trade, and social function of objects of fashion in the Ancient Mediterranean World. More than a tool for aesthetic purposes, clothing, cosmetics, and hair performed significant functions as markers of status and class, as well as social identity. Furthermore, the manufacture of jewelry, perfumes, and makeup in antiquity represented some of the most highly skilled ancient industries, and textiles and garments were the most widely traded and highly valued goods in antiquity. We will encounter how men, as well as women, were subject to fashion in personal adornment.
While this seminar has a particular focus on material from Pharaonic and Graeco-Roman Egypt, we will also engage with objects coming from the rest of the Eastern Mediterranean basin, as well as Central Asia and Britain. We will cover topics such as the production and trade of textiles, dyes, and make-up, and explore the ways in which they were utilized as signs of wealth, financial investment, and other symbols of power and identity. The types of objects we will encounter in the seminar are archaeological (such as textiles, wigs, and beauty implements), as well as sculptural. Papyrological and literary texts will further illuminate our discussion of the daily use, manufacture, and purchase of textiles in antiquity.
Over the course of the term, we will furthermore encounter the influence that ancient textiles retrieved from archaeological excavations exert on modern and contemporary fashion designers like Fortuny, Matisse, Versace, and Dior.
Fun With Writing… or, Writing for Weirdos
Phillip Howze (Department of Theater, Dance, and Media)
First-Year Seminar 64Q 4 credits
Writing can be fun. Writing can be weird. By “writing”, we don’t only mean the act of putting pen to paper, or fingers to computer keys to type. Writing is the conscious act of choosing words or texts or images and composing them in such a way to create an intended effect. Yes, writing is a deliberate and emotional process… but not one which has to be necessarily painstaking. What if, first and foremost, writing was fun? This is the question we’ll explore and enact while getting to know our fellow classmates in this generative, art-oriented first-year seminar. We’ll read obscure yet celebrated writers whose work is distinctly wild, unconventional, compassionate, and opaque. In addition, each week we’ll create both individually and together, engaging methods of writing across a variety of forms – from gaming and poetry to food and stage plays – to reacquaint ourselves with the weird joys of what it might mean to craft ourselves creatively, personally, politically, and collaboratively with one another. Come prepared to break the rules.
“Ignorant Schoolmasters and Experts“
Doris Sommer
(Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and Department of African and African American Studies)
First-Year Seminar 64Y 4 credits
What is the best way to teach, by guiding students guide toward discovery or by explaining what teachers know to students who should learn? The alternative answers have fueled millennial debates. One side defends facilitators who may or may not be experts in the target subject. They provide enough instruction to ignite curiosity, but no more since heavier hands can crush student initiative and instill resentment for school. The other side endorses the transfer of knowledge from teachers who master a subject, set standards, and evaluate progress. Today’s proposals innovate insofar as they recover, recombine, and rename sometimes forgotten pedagogies developed over a long durée. From a humanist perspective, the current and renewable debates about how to teach raise questions about forgetfulness, gaslighting, and about the dynamics of professionalization in education. Our seminar will consider the trail of controversies, the effects on teaching and learning, as well as opportunities to enhance current practices. Readings include both standard and neglected texts with a standing invitation to “go off on a tangent” and supplement assigned readings with student-researched materials. We start with a contemporary political philosopher who considers what is at stake for democracy in these educational debates.
Religion, Neuroscience, and the Human Mind
David C. Lamberth (Harvard Divinity School)_
First-Year Seminar 63E 4 credits
More than a 150 years after Darwin’s epochal account of evolution, over 85% of the world’s 7 billion people are still religious, and the percentage is growing. What does religion do for human beings? What does an evolutionary and biologically informed understanding of the mind and brain lead us to think about where religion fits in human life? Harvard’s first psychologist, William James, engaged these questions in the late 19th century, bringing the cutting edge of empirical psychology to the philosophy of religion. Today these same questions animate the field of neuroscience, where researchers are showing how affectivity, emotions and our evolutionary past come together to form the “self” philosophers have long thought to be primarily “rational.” This seminar brings together the thought of James, writing at the turn of the 20th century, with the work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio writing today to ask what kinds of beings we are, how our minds function, and what religion contributes to human individual and societal experience? The course takes up philosophy of belief, affect, and emotion, and touches on the biology of the brain and homeostasis. It also does a bit of history of philosophy, by comparing James with Damasio. We conclude by assessing contemporary views of religion from evolutionary psychology (Boyer, Atran) and cultural anthropology (Geertz, Luhrmann, Asad) in light of James’s and Damasio’s models of the human mind.
Gojko Barjamovic (Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations)
First-Year Seminar 60R 4 credits
Business as a way of life has existed for thousands of years. In The Beginnings of Business we explore where many of the practices that we tend to take for granted today come from. What are the origins of money? What causes trade to occur and thrive? How has trust been built, and what are the ways in which people have sought to cheat (and avoid being cheated)? We’ll investigate these questions through the lens of multiple disciplines—archaeological and textual evidence from the ancient world, economics, history, and anthropology. By understanding what was needed to create businesses in the past, we’ll be able to understand modern limitations that exist in the world today.
The Chinese Language, Present and Past
C.-T. James Huang (Department of Linguistics)
First-Year Seminar 33R 4 credits
Prerequisite: Some experience of the Chinese language is required as a pre-requisite for taking the seminar (e.g., a minimum of one semester of prior formal instruction, or as a heritage speaker of Mandarin or any Chinese dialect). To fully satisfy this seminar, you must (a) complete each reading assignment and have questions ready before class, (b) actively engage in class discussion. In addition, students will complete a term project (individual or collaborative) on a topic in consultation with the instructor.
This seminar offers an opportunity to learn about the Chinese language, by observing and analyzing its linguistic structure, history, cultural tradition and social relevance. With a partially hands-on approach, we shall look at the fundamental principles that make up the sound system and govern the grammar of Mandarin, with particular attention to those features that distinguish Chinese from English and other languages, including its system of tones, its writing system, its word-order and syntactic patterns, and how the language has developed in over 2000 years of its recorded history. Looking deeper, we see how the study of Chinese may contribute to our understanding of language as a central component of human cognition. The seminar is designed for students with some experience of the Chinese language (e.g., with some prior formal instruction or as heritage speakers of Mandarin or any other Chinese dialect). The analytical skills acquired will be of use as an aid to improve on one’s proficiency, or in preparing for study in linguistics, translation, East Asian study, and/or artificial intelligence.
The Symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich
Anne C. Shreffler (Department of Music)
First-Year Seminar 63C 4 credits
The symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75) are just as relevant and controversial today as they were during the composer's lifetime. Shostakovich's fifteen symphonies span his entire creative life; starting with his First Symphony, which made the 19-year old composer famous overnight, and ending with his Fifteenth, completed four years before his death. As a public genre, the symphony was the perfect vehicle for Shostakovich to react to his tumultuous times and explore the human psyche. The ups and downs of Soviet politics and culture indelibly shaped Shostakovich's career: the innovative fervor after the Russian Revolution, Stalinism ("Socialist Realism" and the Terror), the Second World War, the post-Stalin "Thaw" after 1956, all the way to the height of the Cold War. Shostakovich was at times encouraged and supported by the Soviet regime, and at other times, reprimanded and punished severely. But Soviet audiences always treasured his work because they heard in it deeply felt emotions that could not be publicly acknowledged. Today's audiences react just as strongly, for different reasons. In the seminar, we will listen closely to all fifteen of Shostakovich's symphonies, learning about their musical features and the political contexts in which they were born and received. We will focus on three main themes: 1) composing in a totalitarian state, 2) how music can be said to "narrate," and 3) the orchestra as sound world.
Note: We will work from scores and selected recordings, and will attend a live performance of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Vegetal Humanities: Paying Attention to Plants in Contemporary Art and Culture
Carrie Lambert-Beatty (Department of History of Art and Architecture and Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies)
First-Year Seminar 63W 4 credits
This class invites you to practice a new kind of plant-consciousness. Our guides will be contemporary artists and thinkers who are encouraging new relationships between human and vegetal life, or recalling very old ones. Suddenly, we have plant protagonists, gardens in galleries, and botany-based forms of philosophy, architecture, music and more. Following the lead of these culture-makers and their work, we will draw on the new science of plant communication and learning in this class; uncover plant-based histories and renew ancient understandings of human-plant relations. But plants themselves will also be primary sources, as each student follows a sequence of exercises to deepen understanding of a plant "interviewee"—one they'll grow at home from an unidentified seed. At the same time, we will ask critical questions: with climate crisis upon us, in a time of social inequity, poisonous politics, and mass dislocations, why this attraction to plants? Is the vegetal turn a diversion from tough human problems? Or is there reason to think a cultural change could, even now, change the fate of nature?
Wood(s): An Ecology of Asian Art
Rachel Saunders (Harvard Art Museums)
First-Year Seminar 65L 4 credits Enrollment: Limited to 12
What good is art history in the face of environmental destruction and climate change? How can the close investigation of works of art, produced in times and places far removed from our own, address the vast “failure of collective imagination” that novelist Amitav Ghosh has identified as the core obstacle to our ability to respond ethically and effectively to our non-human co-habitants on earth? This intra-disciplinary seminar intentionally entangles scientific and art historical approaches to real objects in both the art collections of the Harvard Art Museums and the living collections of the Arnold Arboretum. We will focus on how one special class of especially long-lived earthly beings— namely trees—provide living links to distant pasts and futures that no single human can experience, what their persistence can reveal about relationships between other humans and other environments, and what individual case studies can show us about our role as members of a vast embodied network of living beings. During the semester students will have the opportunity to meet with a number of faculty and professionals, including museum curators, conservators, and exhibition designers, as well as the Director of the Arnold Arboretum, its Keeper of Living Collection