History & Literature

Stack of novels

The History & Literature concentration provides a structured, interdisciplinary education to ensure that students acquire knowledge of broad historical periods, major works, and key themes in their fields, as well as focused study of particular texts, events, authors, or themes according to students' unique areas of interest. 

Director of Studies: Lauren Kaminsky
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Associate Director of Studies: Angela Allan
Associate Director of Studies: Duncan White

Gateway Courses

Spring 2024

HIST-LIT 10AB: Introduction to the Medieval World
Sean Gilsdorf and Brian FitzGerald

This course provides a journey through the cultures, peoples, objects, and ideas of the millennium commonly described as "medieval", extending from the reorganization of the Roman world in the fourth century to the transformations of the Mediterranean world order in the fifteenth. While historians often emphasize the divisions and dislocations of this era, there also were important continuities and similarities between the societies around, and on either side of, the Mediterranean Sea. The first week of the course will offer a very brisk introduction to the broad political and religious history of Europe and the Mediterranean world from 400 to 1500, while the rest of the semester will be something of a medieval "tasting menu"—a chance for you to become familiar with a variety of important phenomena, ideas, and objects, and to develop your palate in new and unfamiliar ways. We will travel virtually through a series of medieval spaces and places—houses of worship, homes, palaces, schools, marketplaces, and the open road—exploring medieval books and objects in Harvard’s collections as well as texts ranging from a Christian retelling of the Buddha’s life, to an Arab gentleman’s account of the Vikings, to twelfth-century tales of fairies and werewolves.

HIST-LIT 90GM: Hollywood’s Seventies: The U.S. on Film, 1970-1980
Steven Biel

A period of cascading crises—the Watergate scandal, the OPEC oil embargo, the U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War, stagflation, high unemployment, deindustrialization—the 1970s also produced extraordinary achievements in American film. Changes in the studio system, the demise of the Production Code’s longstanding censorship regime, the emergence of a younger generation of filmmakers, new film technologies, and other factors internal to the movie industry contributed to what some scholars refer to as “Hollywood’s last golden age.” So did the broader conflicts and transformations wrought by the 1960s and their immediate aftermath. This course explores how films of seventies responded to, represented, and affected their crisis-inflected times. It is organized around three overlapping themes—work and family, crime and punishment, power and corruption—and examines how 1970s cinema engaged with anxieties about familial and national decline, feminism and anti-feminism, “the white ethnic revival,” and the racial politics of “law and order.” The syllabus includes Hollywood and independent films by Robert Altman, Charles Burnett, Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, Barbara Kopple, Barbara Loden, Sidney Lumet, Gordon Parks, Jr., Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and others, in conversation with work by cultural, political, and social historians and film scholars.

HIST-LIT 90GN: The Global Cold War
Jules Riegel

This course examines the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1991, including the superpowers' strategies in Europe and the so-called “Third World.” While addressing U.S. and Soviet foreign policy and political ideologies, this course also considers the Cold War’s impact across the globe, considering topics such as decolonization and human rights, as well as its cultural effects. Finally, we will examine the continuing effects of the Cold War on the world today, covering topics such as movements for nuclear disarmament, fears of another Cold War–style superpower confrontation, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Readings may include accounts by atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki; anticolonial and countercultural writings from Patrice Lumumba and Ho Chi Minh to the Weather Underground; and literature, art, music, and film grappling with fears of nuclear war.

HIST-LIT 90GL: Zombies, Witchcraft, and Uncanny Science
Patrick Sylvain

This course delves into the captivating realms of zombies, witchcraft, and uncanny science, exploring their cultural significance, historical contexts, and literary representations. Through an interdisciplinary approach, students will critically examine these paranormal phenomena as they appear in culture. We begin by delving into the origins and evolution of zombies, tracing their roots in Haitian folklore and their emergence as contemporary pop culture icons. Next, the focus shifts to witchcraft, studying its historical and cultural significance across different time periods and societies, encouraging critical thinking about the power dynamics, gender roles, and societal anxieties surrounding witchcraft. The final segment of the course delves into the realm of uncanny science, exploring scientific advancements that push the boundaries of what is considered normal and rational through topics such as genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and transhumanism. The course will also examine ethical questions surrounding scientific experimentation and its impact on society. Texts will include works by Afia Atakora, Nalo Hopkinson, George Romero, Arthur Miller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and H. G. Wells.

HIST-LIT 90FJ: Modern Europe and Migration
Matthew Sohm

Outsiders, newcomers, and minorities played a central role in shaping contemporary Europe. In this seminar, we will embrace the perspectives of people who moved or were forced to move to, from, and around Europe since the end of World War Two, with a focus on questions of migration after the Cold War. We will begin by investigating the dislocation and mass population movements that occurred in the aftermath of war and at the end of empire. We will then consider how race and religion were used as instruments of exclusion, and as nativist political tools, in the 1970s and 1980s. The second half of the course will examine immigrant life in Europe in the 1990s and 2000s, before concluding with a deep dive into the ongoing global migration crisis. Throughout the course, we’ll look for connections between the history of postwar Europe and present-day debates surrounding immigration, race, religion, and national belonging. We will access this history through fiction, poetry, memoirs, diaries, film, and music.

HIST-LIT 90DH: Students at the Barricades: Student Activism in Global Perspective
Lilly Havstad

What is the role of the student in the struggle for global justice? How does student activism differ from other forms of activism, and how does it intersect? Has student activism changed over time, and do different student movements exhibit different characteristics? This course will explore the role that students have played and continue to play in social justice movements around our world. Throughout our transnational study of student mobilization over time, we will discuss the role that student movements play in altering social values, practices, and institutions. Through our engagement with primary sources including protest music, literature, and film, alongside our reading of secondary sources including academic and public scholarship, some of the topics we will discuss include anti-Vietnam War activism; the intersection of U.S. Civil Rights and anti-apartheid activism in South Africa; and climate justice movements.

HIST-LIT 90GO: Protest and Decolonization in Latin America and the Caribbean
Jorge Sanchez Cruz

This course studies the “afterlife” of colonialism, exploring forms of protest that emanate from indigenous territories and subjectivities and within indigenous community-making and knowledge production. From the Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, the Zapatista movement, the Oaxaca Commune, the Bolivian collective Mujeres Creando, to indigenous protests in Venezuela, this course unpacks the relationship between aesthetic practices (such as indigenous video, art, and literary production) and practices of decoloniality found in the everyday and in the momentum of the multitudes. With attention to how subjectivity and indigeneity are conditioned by race, class, sex, gender, and capitalism, this class will engage with critical race studies, decolonial studies, feminist studies, gender studies, and cuir/queer studies. While the course will be conducted in English, Spanish language materials will be available for students who wish to fulfill History & Literature’s language requirement.