This course looks at contemporary Indigenous Latin America through literature. It focuses primarily on texts written by Indigenous authors in different genres and languages; and it includes some texts depicting Indigenous peoples from other vantage points, whether it’s in attempts to build solidarity or to revisit historical accounts of national formation––we will ask to what effect. We will analyze the texts’ genre structures and aesthetic devices, as well as situate them in a broader set of literary conversations and traditions. Throughout the course, we will discuss the political stakes of the literary texts we read. We will see the works operate in many ways: for instance, they may build power and resistance, bear witness to the brutalization of Indigenous peoples, or uphold narratives of Indigenous erasure. Land is constantly present in the texts as a position of enunciation, a site of struggle, and a topic of reflection. And so, we will ask: what does it mean to write on stolen land?

This bi-weekly writing workshop is designed as a space to practice writing and presenting in different academic genres: such as journal articles, job market materials, conference presentations, or job talks. We will have each participant submit one chosen piece each semester, and discuss two pieces at each session; written texts will be circulated beforehand, and talks can be presented during the session. Everyone will offer feedback for each other’s work, which we will discuss during our meetings. While the workshop will primarily allow the participants to practice these professional genres, it can also serve as a motivation to stay on track with one’s own writing goals, and a way to get experience with giving feedback to others’ work.

Since at least the nineteenth century, computation and capitalism have co-evolved with each other. In many respects, computers have served the interests of capital, by creating new modes of accumulation and means of automating, managing, and outsourcing labor, as well as new tools for researching, advertising to, and transacting with customers. However, computers have also been described as fundamentally changing or even overcoming capitalism–both for better and for worse. Theorists have credited computers with eliminating work or turning it into play and transforming market exchanges into gift exchanges. Contemporary platforms and artificial intelligence inspire dreams of “fully automated luxury communism” and fears that law and contracts are being replaced by code and neo-colonial or neo-feudal forms of coercion.

In this seminar, we will engage with an outpouring of recent scholarship that attempts to describe and theorize digital capitalism and culture, pairing recent texts with excerpts from canonical works that their authors cite and build upon. In the process, students will gain exposure to key concepts, debates, and methods in the emerging field(s) of critical data studies, new media studies, and platform studies. We will also reflect upon the nature and purpose of theorizing. A series of assignments and workshops over the course of the semester will guide students through the process of identifying a promising research topic, reviewing scholarly literature, articulating an original research question, and writing a review essay or research paper.

A close study of Kafka’s major stories and novels, and how this body of work was received, explicated and interpreted by key figures in post-war France. Relevant excerpts from Kafka’s diaries and correspondence supplement the primary texts, as well as discussions relating to French Existentialism, the Student Movement, and Post-Structuralism.

This course will examine uses of ancient Greek and Roman Classics in the literatures, arts, and thought of Africa and the Black diaspora. We will analyze how African and black diasporic authors and intellectuals have engaged with, revised, and re-imagined the classics of ancient Greece and Rome, both to expose and critique discourses of racism, imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy, and as a rich source of radical self-expression. At the same time, we will study the emergence of scholarship on black classicisms in the last thirty years and the theoretical underpinnings of this field. The course is offered as a research seminar with an incorporated pedagogy workshop: one of the coursework assignments is to develop a syllabus for a course on an aspect of Black classicisms that you might teach in the future and seminar discussions will involve short segments on pedagogy.

The syllabus is arranged thematically, taking in uses of Classics in literature, art, journalism, and politics. Writers, artists, and politicians whose work and ideas we will study include Phillis Wheatley, William Sanders Scarborough, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, W.E.B. Du Bois, Romare Bearden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Rita Dove, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, Ola Rotimi, Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, Wole Soyinka, C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Austin Clarke, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Dionne Brand, and Edwidge Danticat. In addition to works by individual authors we will also consider the circulation of Greek and Roman classical myths, history, and thought in vernacular cultures. Throughout, we will be attentive to the relationship between national contexts and transnational histories and networks, and the phenomenon of classical appropriation in invented modern traditions.

The crisis of representation in postmodernity—closely connected with social and existential alienation and technological development—often manifests itself in terms of “hyperreality,” where any distinction between “the real” and “the simulacrum” is blurred. The boundaries between “reality” and “non-reality” and relevant concepts (e.g. originality, authenticity, mimesis, simulacrum) have been explored and challenged from different but comparable perspectives in philosophy, art, and literature since classical antiquity. This seminar will investigate discourses on, or inspired by “hyperreality” and its epistemological, ontological, and political implications, from antiquity to postmodernity. Authors and thinkers to be discussed include Plato, Descartes, Schopenhauer, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Umberto Eco, Fredric Jameson, Paul Virilio, Bruno Latour, Elizabeth Grosz, Niklas Bostrom, Lucian, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, William Gibson, Philip K. Dick, Christine Broke-Rose, Italo Calvino, Don DeLillo, Julian Barnes.

This course will introduce students to the major writers, canonical works, and important literary movements of Arabic Literature from late antiquity up to the modern period. The course will be structured thematically with special focus on the historical context and cultural tradition within which literary works fit and resonated. The course will consider the development of various literary genres over time (poetry and qasida form, narratives, fiction, Belles-lettres, maqama, shadow plays and Drama, etc.). Selected works of literature will be read in translation, but students with Arabic can work with the original texts in a separate section. Texts will often be discussed vis-à-vis parallel themes in other works of literature whenever relevant (e.g. The Qur’anic and Biblical Joseph, Maʿarrī’s Epistle of Forgiveness and Dante’s Divine Comedy, Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo’s travelogues, etc.) with special attention to the influence of Western Literature on Modern Arabic poetry and prose.

The course is open to both undergraduates and graduate students.

Have you ever fantasized of turning the pages of a Gutenberg Bible with your own fingers?   Or a medieval illustrated Book of Hours?  Or touching a papyrus fragment of Homer?  Or a First Folio edition of Shakespeare?  Or seeing close-up Copernicus’ diagram of the heliocentric universe?   The Houghton Library of Harvard University is one of the world’s greatest repositories of ancient scrolls, papyrus codices, illuminated manuscripts on parchment and paper, early printed books, rare books published since the sixteenth century down until today, and stunning prints and other types of graphic art. In this freshman seminar, we will utilize Houghton’s extraordinary holdings to study first-hand the history of the book in the West as a material artifact from its beginnings in the ancient Near East down to the present day. Each week we will focus upon a cluster of books.   Before class, students will be asked to examine selected books in Houghton’s Reading Room as well as online.  During class-time, we will study the books again as a group. Visiting experts will demonstrate how to unroll a papyrus codex, the technology involved in creating a codex and printing on a hand-pulled press, and the techniques modern conservators use to preserve manuscripts and books. You will emerge from this seminar with a heightened understanding of what a rich thing a book is, and so much more than just a text. And you will have seen and studied close-up some of the most visually spectacular and culturally significant books in all Western history.

Class Notes:

First-Year Seminars are available only to first-year students. You may apply to both Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 First-Year Seminars via the FYS lottery between July 7 and August 7, 2025 at 11:59PM-midnight.

You may apply to as many seminars each term as you would like, but we recommend you apply to at least six in fall and three in spring.

As part of your application, you must provide a brief statement on why you are interested in each seminar. You will be notified of lottery results for both fall and spring seminars at 10am on Mon, August 11^th. If you are unsuccessful in the lottery, you may still join any seminar with open seats. A list of open seminars and instructions on next steps will be available on the First-Year Seminar Program website August 11^th at 12 Noon.

With gender inequities and biases pervasive within and across cultures worldwide, and the global pandemics of gender-based violence and structural violence further intensified by the Covid-19 pandemic, how have individuals, groups, communities, and nations globally fought for (and against) gender justice? How have struggles against gender injustice intersected and conflicted with struggles against racial, ethnic, environmental, health, LGBTQIA+ and other forms of injustice?

Gender justice, as is true of justice more broadly, is often discussed in the abstract, or as a matter of law, political history, protest movements, enfranchisement, and similar phenomena. Yet at its core, justice involves individuals and their experiences – both their suffering and their triumphs – experiences most directly accessed through stories. In this seminar we’ll explore a range of stories and different forms of storytelling on gender justice, from novels and films to memoirs/personal histories, histories, and creative nonfiction. Some narratives with which we will engage are Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Ito Shiori’s Black Box: The Memoir that Sparked Japan’s #MeToo Movement, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, Cho Nam-joo’s Kim Jiyoung, and Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua’s This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Students will be encouraged to write their own stories on gender and justice.

How did ancient Greek heroes, both male and female, learn about life by facing what all of us have to face, our human condition?

How to face death? Concentrating on this central human question, we will explore some of the greatest works of ancient Greek literature in English translation. For the Greeks, a special way to address the problem of death was to think long and hard about what they called heroes in their myths. Our purpose in this course is to extend that kind of thinking to the present. Assignments invite you to engage in personal reflections on the meaning of life and death in the light of what we read in Greek literature about the ordeals of becoming a hero.

The cross-listed course introduces students to Soviet history through several famous works of literature and film. Key periods and events include the Bolshevik Revolution, Civil War, WWII, the post-Stalin Thaw, the Brezhnev years, Glasnost’ and Perestroika, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Along with short historical readings, we will examine works of popular culture, as well as book and films that were unable to be published and shown until Glasnost’ and the post-Soviet period. Among the readings will be Babel’s Red Cavalry, Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, and works by Zamyatin, Solzhenitsyn, Alexievich, and others. Films include, for example, works by Vertov, Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, Kalatozov, and Balabanov.