Last updated 01.09.24
The Art of the Con
Ian Shank
Scammers, flimflammers, snake oil salesmen: no matter what you call them, con artists have long haunted the American imagination––from the pages of The Great Gatsby to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. And with good reason. “The con,” writes critic and journalist Jia Tolentino, “is in the DNA of this country.” In this course, we will study con artists both real and invented, exploring what these larger-than-life characters––and our culture’s boundless fascination with them––reveal about American notions of ambition, opportunity, and success. In unit one, we will begin by familiarizing ourselves with some of the ways that contemporary writers and thinkers have tried to define the con artist, and then apply these ideas to the story of Anna Delvey––a self-styled “wealthy German heiress” who spent her early twenties defrauding a series of banks, hotels, and wealthy New York acquaintances with little more than empty IOUs. Next, we will consider the role of the con artist in popular media, both as a literary archetype and a target of cultural commentary. Texts will include Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, its film adaptation, and coverage of the now-infamous Fyre Festival from Hulu, Netflix, and Vanity Fair. Finally, in unit three, students will research a con or a popular portrayal of a con of their choosing and make an argument about what it reveals about one or more facets of American life.
Course Syllabus: The Art of the Con
Breaking the Norm
Ethan Goldberg
“I would prefer not to,” utters Bartleby in response to the workplace demands of his lawyer boss in Herman Melville’s eponymous short story from 1853. More than 150 years later, Bartleby’s refrain would become a rallying cry for the Occupy movement that sparked an international debate about the globe’s capitalist norms. But what, in the first place, are norms, and how do they get established, enforced, and altered throughout history, so that what we consider normal today might be abnormal in the future? Why does the normal quickly become the normative? What might we learn by breaking norms, or recognizing the plights of those who deviate from them? This course will explore various norms and their transgression in literature, film, cultural theory, and philosophy. In the first unit, we will close-read short literary works such as first-wave feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) and Harlem Renaissance novelist Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), examining racial, gender, and mental health norms that prompt us to question what is an “appropriate” response to seemingly unreasonable circumstances. In the second unit we will turn to norms of sexuality, applying theoretical lenses from queer theorist Michael Warner and film critic Laura Mulvey to films like Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019). Does acceptance into mainstream social institutions like marriage come at the cost of more radical change and the celebration of true difference? Do standard ways of looking in visual media and film perpetuate the sexual objectification of women? And in the third unit, after reading Soviet literary critic Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique” (1917) and excerpts from the French literary critic Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1957), we will learn to defamiliarize the normal, making it suddenly strange in the process. Exposing the normal as mere prevalence or habit will free students to research how an artwork of their own choosing depicts, reinforces, or transgresses a norm.
Course Syllabus: Breaking the Norm
Climate Fictions
Eliza Holmes
This class will explore art that attempts to respond to the complexities of global climate change. We are living in a moment where the reality of massive, human-made global climate change has become unavoidable. While fires burn in California and coastlines disappear there have been calls for art that explores and imagines the present and oncoming disaster, with critics such as Amitav Ghosh ask “where is the fiction about climate change?” At the same time, many argue that we already have fiction, art, and poetry about climate change, while others wonder whether art about climate is even important in the face of crisis. Throughout the class we will be asking questions about representation and imagination: How do we describe a climate in flux? The negative effects of climate change are inflicted unevenly. How do people create narratives about environmental loss and the injustice of this loss? Is “Cli-Fi” a genre and if it is what does it look like? What does it mean to imagine the end of humanity or the end of the world, or, as importantly, what does it mean to imagine a future within or after crisis?
In the first unit we will read poetry by Tommy Pico, and a graphic memoir by Kate Beaton, alongside short fiction and critical work by climate scholar Kyle Whyte to ask what it means to observe the climate crisis in the present. In the second section we will investigate different visions of the future alongside selections from Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, in order to ask how speculative fiction can help us to see both the origins, and the future possibilities, of climate change. In the final unit we will ask how artists, communities, and activists are moving between observation and speculation in order to imagine a response to the crisis. Final research papers will examine a representation of, or response to, climate change in film, visual art, or literature.
Course Syllabus: Climate Fictions
Does That Belong in a Museum?
J. Gregory Given
In the 2018 film Black Panther, the dashing villain Killmonger is introduced in the West African Exhibit of the fictional Museum of Great Britain, inquiring politely about a few objects on display. When he turns to an ornate adze, Killmonger’s questioning becomes more aggressive: “How do you think your ancestors got these?” he asks the curator, “You think they paid a fair price? Or did they take it, like they took everything else?” Although framed in the film as justification for the supervillain’s heist, there is intellectual substance to this critique. Where do museum collections come from? Who rightfully owns the objects on display? How should the modern history of these objects affect our interpretation of them, and how should this history be represented in museum settings? Under what circumstances should objects be removed from museums and sent back to their places of origin? Communities around the world claim that museum collections in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere hold stolen relics of their cultural heritage. Defenders of these Western collections argue that their accessibility to scientific research and a global public is worth preserving. In this class, we will interrogate the complex stakes of these debates. In our first unit, you will consider how questions of legal custody intersect with the politics of interpretation through a comparative analysis of prominent cases of contested cultural heritage (including the Benin Bronzes, which inspired the scene in Black Panther). We will then turn our attention closer to home. Informed by class visits to several Harvard museums and libraries, you will develop a research project on an object of your choosing from Harvard’s own collections. You will first write an analytical research paper that draws upon primary and secondary sources, including archival materials associated with your object. Finally, you will translate the fruits of your research into a capstone project, in which you will meet the challenge of communicating specialized knowledge and nuanced arguments to a broader audience. This course will involve an optional excursion to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Course Syllabus: Does That Belong in a Museum?
Everyday Feminisms: Literature, Theory, Pop Culture
AJ Gold
These days, scholar Sarah Banet-Weiser notes in her 2018 study Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny, “it feels as if everywhere you turn there is an expression of feminism – on a T-shirt, in a movie, in the lyrics of a pop song, in an inspirational Instagram post, in an award ceremony” (1). Yet if its ubiquity has grown in the last half decade or so, bolstered by activist movements that have gained traction on and offline, feminism is neither a new phenomenon nor a singular one. Indeed, the idea of feminism continues to evolve as activists, academics, and regular women alike contemplate and debate what it means, what it does, and where it meets its limits. In this course, you’ll study a small but illustrative range of responses to these lines of inquiry, encountering modes of feminist expression that extend across various genres and considering how they might relate to your everyday lives. In doing so, you’ll probe ideas and ask questions about intersectionality, objectification, embodiment, and power that have long been central to, and often contested within, feminist thinking. We’ll start the course with literature, and you’ll analyze feminist short stories by contemporary authors Roxane Gay, Carmen Maria Machado, and Jenny Zhang. Next, you’ll engage critical feminist theory, focusing particularly on Laura Mulvey’s articulation of the “male gaze” and bell hooks’ response to it. Finally, you’ll pursue independently designed research essays and related group capstone projects that return to Banet-Weiser’s discussion of “popular feminism” (and its detractors) to interrogate how pop culture – including film, television, music, and even social media – markets and communicates feminism to a public audience.
Course Syllabus: Everyday Feminisms: Literature, Theory, Pop Culture
Fashion Icons: Power and Style (new course for Spring 2024)
Vivien Chung
Fashion icons are individuals who have a significant influence and possess distinctive styles. This course aims to explore the relationship between the two: Does style become powerful once a person becomes influential, or does style play a role in the person gaining significance in their field? We'll also consider the types of power that style carries and how it's exercised. In the first unit, we will study fashion icons from the fashion industry, such as Coco Chanel, André Leon Talley, Kate Moss, Gigi Hadid, and Kendall Jenner. By examining biographies, editorials, and columns about these individuals, we will delve into questions such as: What defines style? Is it just about clothing? How does someone become a fashion icon? In the second unit, our focus will shift to figures outside of the fashion industry, such as Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Michelle Obama. We will explore the role style has played in their careers and its part in authority-building and social positioning. We'll also examine how attire is linked to character and job performance, including leadership and entrepreneurship. This will lead to a discussion on the influence of class, race, and gender in forming these connections, and whether style is deceptive or substantial in its power. Throughout the course, students will delve into studies on style conducted by anthropologists, sociologists, and business scholars. Using these insights, we will explore how fashion icons are made. For the final unit, students will select a fashion icon and write a research paper analyzing their rise to stylistic prominence. By the end of the semester, students will have cultivated their unique perspective on style, shaped by their own research and analysis.
Course Syllabus: Fashion Icons: Power and Style
This course will consider the complex questions that emerge where gender and mental health meet. We will take an interdisciplinary approach to tackling these questions, drawing on work in clinical psychology, social theory, feminist and historical analyses of clinical science, and primary source historical documents. After developing a foundational understanding of the constructs of gender and mental health, we will consider their intersection, asking how gender leads to illness. We will read and evaluate competing theories about the relative import of biological sex differences; gender norms and socialization; gender-based inequities, stressors, and trauma; and over-pathologizing women and gender-expansive individuals. In the second unit, we will investigate clinicians’ past and current methods of assessing patient distress and impairment and explaining how that distress or impairment developed and what maintains it. To inform our investigation, we will pair historical records of female patients who reported abuse, focusing on Freud’s case studies of hysteria, with more current theoretical frameworks for understanding similar symptoms and experiences. Throughout this unit, we will think about how our ideas about assessment, patient credibility, clinician expertise, and case conceptualization have endured or evolved since the establishment of the field of psychology. We will end by asking what history can teach us about conducting clinical science in a patriarchal but post-binary world. We will consider, for example, how historical treatment of women’s trauma informs the #MeToo movement and how clinical science and practice might adjust to better study and serve gender-expansive individuals.
Course Syllabus: Gender & Mental Health
Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?
Isabel Lane
“Is it o.k. to be a luddite?” This is the question that writer Thomas Pynchon asks us in a 1984 essay of the same name. “And come to think of it, what is a Luddite, anyway?”
The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the word has at least two meanings:
1. A member of an organized band of English mechanics and their friends, who set themselves to destroy manufacturing machinery in the midlands and north of England.
2. One who opposes the introduction of new technology, esp. into a place of work.
As the second definition suggests but doesn’t outright say, “luddite” is typically an uncomplimentary term for someone who is suspicious of technology and, by extension, of progress. This course will ask us to really consider the question Pynchon poses: is it okay to resist (or outright reject) technology? And what would it mean for us to do so? We will approach these questions (and many more) from the perspective of cultural analysis, looking at how literature, film, and visual media reflect humanity’s ongoing relationship with—and struggles against—technology. We will read and write about world-altering tools and inventions that are difficult to ignore, but we will also explore the quotidian, the utopian, the obsolete, and the downright absurd, all the while looking for ways to understand technology through the stories we tell about it. Within the course, we will explore these topics and questions through short writing assignments, field trips and hands-on activities, analytical papers, and a capstone podcast.
Course Syllabus: Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?
Laughing Matters
Elliott Turley
Humor is serious business. Laugh if you will, but comedy is hard work—and the right sense of humor is often the key to career success, surviving adversity, or even finding love. We will laugh in Laughing Matters, but our primary goal will be to examine how comedy works and what it does. Our discussions will span literary, sociological, psychological, and philosophical treatments of comedy as we unpack jokes and their social contexts, exploring both what makes an audience laugh and why humor matters. First, we will consider comedy from a philosophical and psychological perspective, testing theories of comedy against actual examples of humor to see what those theories can (or can’t) teach us about how comedy works. Then, for our research paper, we’ll turn to the big social and ethical questions around comedy to assess what humor does. How can it create bonds, perform cruelty, provoke thought, or teach lessons? Students will select one of these big questions or a question of their own and dive into a comic performance, genre, or history of their choice to answer it. Finally, in a capstone project, students will use their newly gained academic knowledge of comedy to craft a public-facing review of a comedic act of their choice, orienting their insights toward a broader audience.
Course Syllabus: Laughing Matters
Mindfulness From Aristotle to Lebron James
Sheza Atiq
Resources espousing “mindfulness” as a lifestyle, practice, or means of self-growth have exploded in the last few decades. Celebrities and scientists alike have taken to academic platforms and social media to champion the significance of a present state of mind. But what, if anything, do figures such as Lebron James and some of the earliest practitioners of contemplative practices like Aristotle have in common? This course will study mindfulness in its historical and contemporary contexts, examining the long and ancient history of looking inward and examining the self. We will consider the emergence of “mindfulness” as a term and practice in the last century, while also considering the ways in which it is connected to–and distinct from–past traditions. In Unit 1, we shall study some of the earliest discussions on reflective and meditative practices, beginning with the ancient Greeks, moving on to Sufi and dervish literature and ending with a study of a modern Buddhist work by popular Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk, Thích Nhất Hạnh. We shall consider how the notion of contemplation and mindfulness is presented and negotiated in the writings of each of these authors, and whether there are parallels to be found across histories and cultures. For Unit 2, we will switch gears and adopt a more contemporary lens, studying mindfulness from the perspective of modern science. Several recent studies in psychology and medicine have attempted to place mindfulness and meditation in conversation with cognition and neuroscience. Our task will be to better understand how mindfulness is measured, defined, and studied in these relatively new fields. Finally, in Unit 3 we will study the role of body and movement in contemplative practice. We will ask why the body is so critical in ancient yogic wisdom on the mind and what modern notions of a “flow state” mean, and consider why athletes such as Bruce Lee and Lebron James understand their physical craft as intimately connected to a mindful mental state. As we study mindfulness beyond the mind, we will supplement our studies of texts with analysis of non-literary and contemporary resources such as the modern podcast, art, and architecture through visits to the Harvard Art Museum and contemplative spaces on Harvard’s campus. Such studies will carry over to our capstone project where students will have the opportunity to explore narrative and writing through the audio-visual medium. Throughout the course we shall consider how our history and our present merge in the study of mindfulness, and what it can disclose of our understanding of human experience.
Course Syllabus: Mindfulness From Aristotle to Lebron James
More Than a Game
Keating McKeon
“Shut up and dribble,” snarled a broadcaster when basketball star LeBron James voiced concerns about the competence of then-President Trump in 2018. The message was clear: sports and politics don’t mix. In fact, as we will find across various media this semester, few things in the past century have been as closely intertwined. At the same time, the relationship often appears lopsided. Politicians show little hesitation to wade into issues pertaining to athletics, but athletes—like LeBron James himself—are discouraged from anything resembling an opinion on matters with a wider societal bearing. Through units navigating the NFL’s suppression of concussion science, the complex relationship of race to American sports culture, and the political dynamics of consequential events within the sporting world, we will consider the following questions: what makes the world of sports such a significant setting for political activism? What authority lies in the manipulation of athletic culture by politicians? In what ways do athletes become avatars of their cultural moment, and can they ever really exist “above the fray”?
Coure Syllabus: More Than A Game
Our Quest for Immortality
Emilie Raymer
In the oft-cited ancient Mesopotamian poem The Epic of Gilgamesh, the eponymous protagonist searches for, finds, but ultimately loses an aquatic plant that was rumored to grant him immortal life.1 Different cultures have developed different stories—and cautionary tales—about efforts to significantly expand or transcend our lifespans. These narratives have been chronicled for thousands of years, but the questions that they raise arguably have become even more pertinent in recent years in light of promising new biomedical advancements. In this class, we will read the work of geneticists, surgeons, and biologists alongside the writings of philosophers and novelists, including Friedrich Nietzsche and Leo Tolstoy, to wrestle with how to use new innovations ethically and to examine age-old dilemmas about what constitutes a good life and a good death. In the first unit, we will assess how different authors have examined the problems of “natural life cycles” and “biological limitations.” This will help provide us with a framework and language for our next unit, the focal point of which will be Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End by Harvard Medical School professor Atul Gawande. Among the questions that his work raises are: how do we combine our justified faith in “modern scientific capability” with the realities of aging, disease, and death? In other words, should longevity always be the goal of medicine? And is there perhaps a better way of designing medical education, care, and policies? We will read excerpts from Gawande’s book in conversation with the arguments of other scientists, physicians, and scholars. For the third and final unit, students will devise a research project. To help broaden our understanding of the many dimensions of this topic, students also will deliver a short presentation of their findings to the class. Possible research subjects could include explorations of scientific and medical issues like precision medicine and biogerontology or more socially oriented issues such as how aging and the elderly are treated in different cultures.
Course Syllabus: Our Quest for Immortality
According to philosopher Thomas Hobbes, the world—including human life—is selfish, violent, and without justice. Against this imagined state of nature, societies form to establish laws, thereby preserving property, enforcing agreements, serving the general welfare, and securing peace for mutual prosperity. However, a problem arises for Hobbes: if societies thrive upon such governance, it is only insofar as beneficiaries are able and willing to abide by the law. But given that humans are naturally uncooperative in the Hobbesian worldview, societies must invent something that recognizes and is in turn recognized by the law: a “person.” As a result, humans, non-human entities, and corporations can be personated. Jurisprudence consequently grapples with criteria whereby persons are defined. While Hobbes is not the architect of the U.S. Constitution, his influence on the issue of personhood is most apparent when we ask, “who are the ‘we’ in ‘we the people?’” What counts as a person? No question is more urgent in the course of events than when personhood is employed by the Supreme Court. From Dred Scott v. Sandford to Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, from Buck v. Bell to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, this course explores numerous landmark decisions that have made and unmade people.
We begin in the first unit by investigating how personhood figures into the history of slavery and segregation. After finding how that legacy is tied to citizenship, our ongoing conversation on due process, equal protection, and ordered liberty expands in the second unit to include discussions about ethnocentrism and affirmative action. Finally, in the third unit, we examine reproductive rights through highlighting a range of controversial subjects from sterilization to abortion. While we will collectively read philosophical, scientific, and sociological articles in addition to judicial decisions, students are invited to pursue related topics and various interdisciplinary approaches in preparation for their independent research essays.
Course Syllabus: Personhood in U.S. Constitutional Law
Privacy and Surveillance
Gillian Sinnott
Most of us are vaguely aware that our online activities are extensively monitored by corporations in search of profits and that the government may be watching or listening to our communications in the name of national security. It is easy to decry this state of affairs as Orwellian or, on the other hand, to reassure ourselves that surveillance only harms those with something to hide. In this course we will seek to move beyond these simplistic responses by considering the rights underlying privacy claims and by closely examining how surveillance operates in practice. We will begin by exploring the powerful, but surprisingly elusive, concept of privacy. Are we concerned only about the possibility that information gathered about us will be abused? Or is there something more fundamentally troubling in the government reading people's emails, or in corporations having records of our internet browsing histories? We will then consider government surveillance, specifically the National Security Agency’s power to monitor the content of calls and emails originating from non-American citizens who are outside the United States. Finally, we will examine what privacy rights we have with respect to private entities such as corporations, universities and charities.
Course Syllabus: Privacy and Surveillance
In the mid-1960s, the great jazz singer Nina Simone had a conflict with her husband and manager, Andrew Stroud. She wanted to use her music to address the Black struggle for civil rights, but Stroud disdained these activities, arguing that they would limit Simone’s commercial appeal. Their daughter Lisa described the difference like this: “My father had a strategic plan in terms of how mom’s career was going to go. He wanted her to be able to win all the awards and to become the huge star that he knew she could be…But she wanted something more. There was something missing in her—some meaning.”
What was Nina Simone missing? We speak as if all sorts of things can have meanings: words, sentences, novels, experiences, dark clouds, even lives. But how can an arbitrary inscription, like “moon,” somehow connect us to a celestial body nearly 240,000 miles away? How can a novel have a meaning larger or deeper than the meanings of the sentences that compose it—or even, arguably, a meaning other than what its author intended? Are we right to hold someone accountable for the hurtful effects of her words, even if the speaker didn’t “mean them that way”? And what does the kind of meaning a word conveys have to do with the kind of meaning a dark cloud conveys—and what does either have to do with the kind of meaning a life can have?
We’ll think through these questions in three units: the first on meaning in language; the second on meaning in literature; and the last on meaning in life. Along the way we’ll draw on foundational texts in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and literary theory, keeping the company of some of the great figures in these fields, including Susan Wolf, Viktor Frankl, Liz Camp, Noam Chomsky, and David Foster Wallace.
Course Syllabus forthcoming: Problems of Meaning in Language, Literature, and Life
Queer Coming of Age Stories
Brian Pietras
Coming of age stories—tales in which a young protagonist stumbles along the messy, confusing, exciting path toward adulthood—are central to our culture. The Catcher in the Rye, Great Expectations, Little Women: all are coming of age stories. But what happens to this centuries-old genre when it encounters people it has traditionally excluded? What do coming of age stories that feature LGBTQ+ youth look like? And, when queer youth are centered in stories about growing up, does that change the ways such stories are told?
In this course, we’ll analyze queer coming of age stories in literature, film, and popular culture. We will begin with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson’s classic 1985 novel about a girl whose lesbianism puts her at odds with her fervently Pentecostal community. Next, we’ll use scholarly theories about coming out stories and heteronormativity to examine three films: Pariah (about a teenager claiming her identity as a Black butch lesbian), The Miseducation of Cameron Post (about a high schooler sent to a conversion “therapy” camp) and Dating Amber (about two closeted queer teenagers who pretend to date one another). For their final paper, students will make a researched argument about a queer coming of age story of their own choosing. Possibilities include films (Moonlight, Call Me By Your Name, Bottoms, But I’m a Cheerleader), television series (Heartstopper, Pose, Sex Education), novels (Giovanni’s Room, A Boy’s Own Story, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, Freshwater), and graphic novels (Fun Home).
Rationality and the Supernatural
Doug Bafford
Is it irrational to believe in malevolent spirits? Why are certain rituals invoking supernatural forces deemed more prestigious than others? Despite their prevalence across the globe, including in high-tech, industrialized countries, belief systems centered around unconventional cosmologies—such as witchcraft, magic, and specters—are often marginalized and suppressed as backward, unmodern, or even dangerous. What drives people to believe in such notions that can seem, from a scientific or “rational” perspective, to be illogical? This course will guide us through systems of thought and practice at the margins of mainstream Euro-American cosmological and religious models. We will explore how cultural anxieties over witches, demons, aliens, and other unseen (yet sometimes nonetheless palpable) forces operate according to their own internal logic yet simultaneously reflect historical and societal dynamics that tell us about more than the practitioners themselves.
The first unit begins with reading classic works on African beliefs and rituals that Europeans labeled as witchcraft or magic, where our analytic emphasis is focused on uncovering the hidden assumptions guiding writing about culturally unfamiliar phenomena, especially the power (and potential distortion) of taken-for-granted worldviews. The second unit continues to explore magical thinking, albeit with the assistance of contemporary theoretical toolkits, including that of anthropologist Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, to explain the social effects and meanings of ritual. Finally, our scope expands in the final unit to develop skills in humanistic and social scientific research into the dynamics of alternative belief systems, from UFOs to flat-earthers. While seemingly exemplars of the irrational, these case studies taken together reveal conflicts over social authority, subjective experience, and our deepest values. We will examine multidisciplinary conventions, including those in anthropology, history, and scientific fields, with an aim to write in critical and nuanced ways about religious and cultural systems deeply unfamiliar to most people living in industrialized contexts dominated by mainline Abrahamic faiths.
Romantic Comedy
Ryan Napier
In this course, we’ll consider those questions—and deepen your abilities as a thinker and writer—through some close encounters with literature, film, and criticism. In the first unit, we’ll read and analyze Shakespeare’s finest romantic comedy, Twelfth Night, a crossdressing farce that playfully investigates the nature of identity and desire. Next, we’ll turn to literary critic Northrop Frye’s influential theory of comedy and put it in conversation with three rom-coms from Hollywood’s Golden Age: Howard Hawks’s breakneck screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby; Preston Sturges’s witty and provocative The Lady Eve; and George Cukor’s battle-of-the-sexes comedy Adam’s Rib. Finally, in our last unit, you’ll have a chance to choose your own topic related to romantic comedy—such as a work of literature or a film—and make an argument about it in a research essay.
Course Syllabus: Romantic Comedy
The Ruling Class
James Herron
The United States certainly has an upper class, but does it have a ruling class? And if the U.S. does have a ruling class, how does is rule in a country that is ostensibly a democracy? In this course we will examine the identity, politics, and social role of the American upper class. We’ll begin by considering how scholars have variously conceptualized the upper class: is the upper class defined by money, power, prestige, pedigree or something else? In unit 1, we’ll consider the character of the ruling class in contemporary American society with a particular focus on the role of elite education in shaping the cultural outlook of the upper class. In unit 2 we’ll turn our attention to Wall Street, which many scholars have argued is a key venue for both the socialization of the ruling class and for its exercise of power. Finally, in unit 3 we’ll research how elites understand their privileged positions in a society that (at least officially) celebrates ideals of democracy and equality. The course readings are largely drawn from the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, and history. Some of our main texts are Shamus Khan’s Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School, Karen Ho’s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, and Rachel Sherman’s Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence.
Course Syllabus: The Ruling Class
Sci-Fi Others
Stephen Spencer
From their distant planets and galaxies to their exotic aliens and robots, works of science fiction are filled with other-than human entities. Through these entities, the genre encourages its earthbound audiences to reconceptualize the limits of what is possible. Despite this emphasis on the far away and fantastical, science fiction also hits closer to home, using other-than human entities to contemplate the “othering” of human beings on Earth. Indeed, sci-fi creators often utilize aliens, robots, and the like to reflect on humanity’s unsavory inclination towards creating insider and outsider groups via intersecting hierarchies of gender, race, and sexual orientation, among others. In this course, we will look at a sampling of sci-fi stories and films, asking how and why these works engage with the concept of “the Other,” broadly construed.
In our first unit, you will closely analyze a short story from Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles (1950), which imagines humanity colonizing Mars and its indigenous population as Earth becomes increasingly inhospitable. We will spotlight stories where missionaries and capitalists encounter the Martian Others. In our second unit, you will test an influential theory of science fiction: Darko Suvin’s “novum,” which posits that works in the genre balance otherness with reason, logic, and plausibility. To test this theory, we will consider two mid-20th century stories, depicting astronauts as a fetishized subculture (Samuel Delany) and human clones as a laboring class (Ursula Le Guin). In our third and final unit, you will choose either Her (2013) or Ex Machina (2014), films which depict female-gendered A.I. as a kind of Other, and you will write an essay about this film that contributes to a scholarly conversation. We will look at secondary sources together in class, and you will also develop your own set of sources to help you analyze your chosen film. Throughout the course, we will consider a number of broader questions: How might older works of science fiction speak to contemporary concerns? What distinguishes science fiction from similar genres (fantasy, horror, etc.)? How might research in the social and life sciences speak to works of sci-fi (and vice versa)?
Course Syllabus: Sci-fi Others
Matthew Cole
This turbulent chapter in Harvard’s history was just one flashpoint in the broader student movement of the 1960s, when young people across the nation were radicalized by the Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam War movements and when American universities became epicenters for activism. It’s also just one chapter in the story of student activism at Harvard. Since the 1960s, Harvard students have campaigned on issues ranging from apartheid in South Africa to living wages for university staff. In recent years, a visitor to the Yard might have encountered demonstrations reflecting national movements like Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo, as well as local campaigns like Fossil Fuel Divest and Justice for Faisal.
In this course, we’ll work to uncover the story of student activism at Harvard and beyond. Together, we’ll connect the dots between the 1960s and today, and explore the role of student activists in local, national, and global campaigns for social change. In the first unit, we’ll examine the ideas and actions of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the most influential student activist organization of the 1960s, and investigate the broader milieu of student activism they contributed to both nationally and at Harvard. In the second unit, we’ll develop skills for qualitative research that will help us connect past and present as we seek out historical documents in Harvard’s archives, conduct interviews with student activists, and observe ongoing campaigns and demonstrations. That work will prepare us for our third unit, where we’ll conduct original research comparing historical and contemporary instances of student activism. We’ll also collaborate on a public-facing project to share our findings with the campus community.
*Note: This is an Engaged Scholarship Expository Writing Course, and some assignments will require participation outside of normal class hours.
“QAnon.” “Rigged elections.” “Anti-Vaxxers.” These days, conspiracy theories seem to lurk around every corner. But what do the conspiracy theories of today have in common with those of the past? In this course, we examine the history and inner-logic of conspiracy theories. Why are they believed in the first place? How do they spread? And why do certain conspiracy theories persist? In unit one, we begin with a seemingly remote example: a group of Jews falsely accused of the murder of a child in 1475. As we shall see, however, this accusation—an example of what is known as the “blood libel”—has unsettling connections to the present. Next, we move to a modern-day conspiracy theory promoted in the 2022 Netflix series, Ancient Apocalypse, in which the villains are, improbably, professional archeologists (whom the show’s host disparagingly refers to as “Big Archeology”). Finally, students will research a conspiracy theory of their own choosing and make an argument about why it is (or was) so alluring to a particular audience. Readings will include works of history, journalism, and social psychology.
Course Syllabus: Thinking with Conspiracies
According to the founder of analytical psychology Carl Jung, a persona is “a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual.” In this course, we'll consider the creation and consequences (intended and unintended) of persona. When might we embody a persona academically, professionally, or personally, and what are the benefits, downsides, or other effects on our lives and relationships with others? In Unit 1, we’ll explore the idea of persona through a close examination of Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 horror/psychological drama film Persona, a work heavily informed by Jung’s theory of persona. We’ll consider the intersection of one’s persona and one’s underlying identity, how one’s voice may embody a persona or reveal true nature, and how visual language communicates point of view and perspective in the construct of persona. In Unit 2, we’ll apply theories of socialization to the idea of persona in real life scenarios by looking at a sampling of nonfiction works, including Don’t Look Back, pioneer filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker’s “direct cinema”-style documentary of singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. We’ll read short memoir pieces written by a diverse set of well-known literary voices, such as American poet and social activist Langston Hughes’s “Salvation,” Chinese-American novelist and memoirist Amy Tan’s “Two Kinds,” and “The Jacket,” by Gary Soto, a writer known for his honest portrayal of marginalized communities. Within these personal stories of truth, we’ll look at the influence that socialization has on the generation of persona. This unit will ask us to weigh in on what happens when people pretend to be someone they’re not in order to be loved, to belong, or even to avoid persecution. We’ll consider the choices individuals have made to either create or deconstruct their persona, as well as the complexities, contradictions, conflicts, and paradoxes of identity in relationship to the formation and use of persona as a type of social performance. Finally, in Unit 3, we’ll explore the destruction of persona as portrayed in a selection of films, possibly including Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, and one of Orson Welles’s most famous films, Citizen Kane. In this endeavor, we’ll enter into a scholarly conversation about persona, debating whether living and building relationships via persona leads to the ultimate gain or loss of the self. Is the false construct of persona completely deceitful or could there be elements of authenticity and/or integrity that can forge personal growth and true connections with others? Might artificial constructs serve the individual, and, by extension, our greater community in constructive ways?
Course Syllabus: To Thine Own Self Be True?
To What Problem is ChatGPT the Solution?
Jane Rosenzweig
What does it mean for a college education if ChatGPT can pass exams and write essays? What jobs will disappear as generative AI becomes more sophisticated, and what jobs will emerge? Do you want to watch a movie featuring AI-generated versions of your favorite stars, speaking lines generated by ChatGPT? Should tech companies be able to use your written work to train their AI tools? What role should the government play, if any, in regulating generative AI tools? Since ChatGPT was released in November 2022, experts and pundits have raised these questions and many others, predicting that generative AI will lead to everything from the extinction of the human race to unprecedented prosperity to a society mired in disinformation, bias, and inequality. In this course, we’ll consider a wide range of arguments by AI ethicists, scholars, writers, and practitioners as we try to make sense of what problems generative AI tools can solve–and what problems these tools may create. In our first unit, we’ll investigate how large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT work and consider current debates about the potential risks of generative AI. For our second unit, students will research their own questions about what generative AI means for education, creativity, democracy, inequality, or work. As a capstone project, students will adapt their research essays into op-eds with the goal of publishing them and joining the broader, ongoing conversation about AI.
Course Syllabus: To What Problem is ChatGPT the Solution?
Toys' Stories: A History of Play
Katie Baca
For $120 every three months, new parents can enjoy “stage-based play essentials for [their] child’s developing brain” from the popular children’s brand Lovevery. These toys claim to provide one-year-olds with “an early introduction to physics.” For an extra $40, parents can take a supplemental course led by a “child development expert” to help “make tummy time easy and fun.” Lovevery’s “learning toys” have big backers: in 2021 the company scored $100M in funding from backers including the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and GV (formerly Google Ventures).
When did toys and playtime become things that we need to teach? And what are toys teaching children? This course examines the history of child’s play, exploring the ways that social, scientific, and political conditions impact our approaches to playtime. Unit 1 builds the skills of primary source analysis through exploration of interesting moments in the early history of playtime in America. We begin with the pious children’s primers of the colonial era (“C: Christ crucify’d | For sinners dy’d”). We continue into the Victorian era, when childhood was first recognized as a distinct phase of one’s life and children’s toys gained popularity. Students conclude the unit by completing a close reading of an excerpt on playtime from psychologist John Watson’s 1928 Psychological Care of Infant and Child. Unit 2 offers a case study of the relationship between playtime and its larger sociocultural context. It explores the relationship between children’s playthings in the mid-twentieth century and the Civil Rights Movement. We will study psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s 1947 “doll studies” and their impact on Brown v. Board of Education (1954), President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 declaration of a “war on poverty,” the Coleman Report’s (1966) findings of educational inequities, and the resulting creation of Sesame Street (1969) as a means of narrowing the achievement gap. Students will complete this unit by putting a vintage episode of Sesame Street into conversation with an excerpt from pediatrician Benjamin Spock’s bestselling guide to childcare: The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (first published in 1946). In our final unit, students will research a modern instrument of play (for example, a toy, game, craft, or activity) and make an argument about the ways in which it reflects and/or responds to contemporary social, political, or scientific events. Students will use this essay to enter scholarly conversations surrounding toys, including the gendering of toys, toys and violence, playtime as learning, screentime and cognitive development, imaginative vs. structured play, and the environmental impact of toys.
Course Syllabus: Toys' Stories: A History of Play
The Underworld
Adam Scheffler
Hell is popular. In fact, it’s been doing much better than heaven. It’s practically a literary consensus that Dante’s best book is his Inferno not Purgatorio or Paradiso, and that Milton, a Christian believer, got so carried away in describing Satan and hell that he ended up being “of the Devil’s party without knowing it” (Blake). And the world today may be more secular than in past generations, but hell is doing just fine. Harvard presents its own interesting case: Currier House’s annual “Heaven and Hell” party has situated “Hell” in a room that can hold about 500 people whereas “Heaven” can fit only about 50. (In recent years heaven has been eliminated entirely.) But what are the components of hell – what archetypes or depictions of hell and the underworld helped to cement their importance in culture? And why is hell so alive in secular culture? Why do those people who don’t believe that hell is real want to keep imagining it again and again (in Lucifer, in Good Omens, in The Good Place, etc.)? In our first unit, we will examine famous underworld themes and archetypes as we look at short excerpts from Gilgamesh, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Jonathan Edwards, the story of Persephone, and the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. In our second unit, we’ll consider how these themes and archetypes are taken up by recent secular texts such as a Stephen King short story, the film Pan’s Labyrinth, and a New Yorker article by Harvard Professor Danielle Allen about her cousin’s experience in the American prison system. Finally, in our third unit, students will select and research a contemporary depiction of hell, and make an argument about how that hell works as a metaphor for a real-world issue or fear (such as the sleaziness of Hollywood, or bickering families, or mental illness, or the vastness of outer space). Throughout, we will try to better understand the curious attraction of hell, and why its 4,000-year-old story shows no sign of ending.
Course Syllabus: The Underworld
The Uses of Horror
Mande Zecca
In a conversation with Stephen Colbert, comedian and filmmaker Jordan Peele referred to his 2017 horror film, Get Out, as a “historical biopic.” His claim that “the movie is truth” invites us to reflect on the relationship between horror and history – between fictional and filmic fantasies that terrify us and our own lived realities. In this course, we’ll think about what makes horror cohere as a genre, how its aesthetic qualities operate on the mind of the observer or reader, and what kinds of social and cultural commentary might we discover in a genre that’s often been dismissed as frivolous. The readings for this course – and our responses to them – will help us think through some key questions: How do we explain our cultural preoccupation with the macabre? How might our engagement with terrifying works of the imagination help us think in new ways about the world in which we live? While these questions are relevant to (and potentially answered within) a range of disciplines – from sociology to psychology to neuroscience, and beyond – our primary sources in this course will be works of fiction and film.
In our first unit, we’ll read a range of short stories (by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Joyce Carol Oates, Carmen Maria Machado, Mariana Enriquez, and others), paying particular attention to how they express anxieties about the unknown and the irrational and how they serve as allegories for psychic and social realities. We’ll also think about how the 20th- and 21st-century authors riff on and subvert the conventions of their 19th-century predecessors. In the second unit, we’ll turn to two recent horror films: Get Out and The Babadook. We’ll read several critical and theoretical sources that will help you think (and write) about how these films operate as allegories. For the third unit, you’ll have the opportunity to write a research paper about a primary source (or sources) of your choice: horror film, Gothic novel, short story, etc. Our shared sources for the unit will provide a broader sense of the genre and some of its key questions and concerns. These sources will serve as springboards for your independent research.
Wastelands
Collier Brown
What do you think of when you think of wastelands? The Sahara Desert? Chernobyl? Abandoned factory districts in Michigan? Mars? By definition, wastelands are supposed to be desolate places. But is that always true? Large-eared fennec foxes thrive in the Saharan dunes. Two hundred bird species have found in Chernobyl a veritable wildlife refuge. Reclamation projects, like the NYC High Line, turn defunct transit corridors into urban playgrounds. And in the pursuit of a multiplanetary future, the space industry makes “reuse” its new mantra.
Are wastelands the places we should avoid? Or are they the places we can no longer afford to ignore? This class assumes the latter. And with that assumption in mind, we’ll be reading in the first unit short stories that complicate our preconceived ideas about wastelands. In the second unit, we’ll look at real-world wastelands, like the landfills near Rio de Janeiro and the deforested plains of Kenya. And in the third unit, students will choose their own wasteland research topics. In this class, we’ll search for possibility where none presumably exists.
Work: Culture, Power, and Control
Rachel Meyer
This course explores the experience of work in the contemporary political economy with an eye toward both its liberating and oppressive potential. We will take up enduring sociological questions with respect to power, control, autonomy, surveillance and self-determination on the job. How do different forms of work affect our life circumstances, personalities, and connections to each other? In the first unit we will examine young college educated workers’ adherence to “passion” as a guiding principle when making career decisions. Does passion bolster or undermine fulfillment on the job? Can it be used as a form of control—and, if so, how and in what contexts? In unit two we explore the crucial issue of workers’ control over their own labor and the concept of alienation. We examine accounts of deskilling, the separation of mental and manual labor, and the consequences of these processes for workers’ experience on the job. To what extent does alienation occur in factories versus in offices and in service work? For the final unit we will critically engage in a debate about the development of “flexible” labor and the ways in which workers’ connections to employers, occupations, and locations have become more fluid and transitory. We will explore what flexibility means in a variety of contexts and ask: does flexibility lead to liberation or loss of identity? Does it bring self-fulfillment or insecurity? What does flexibility mean for tech workers in Silicon Valley, bankers on Wall Street, and gig workers? Our texts consist of sociological studies and ethnographic accounts representing a variety of workplaces along with readings from prominent social theorists who in different ways seek to elucidate the conditions of work under modern capitalism.
Learn more about Work: Culture, Power, and Control
Course Syllabus: Work: Culture, Power, and Control