Professor: Matthew Liebmann M, W - 12:00pm to 1:15pm
What happened in America before 1492? What were the major turning points in Native American history? Why don't we know more about the ancient history of North America? Anthropology 1080 answers these questions by introducing you to the discipline of North American archaeology. This lecture course will help you to understand how Native American societies developed in the millennia before the European invasion, why American Indian peoples live where they do today, and how their dynamic populations have...
American Indian, First Nations, and other Indigenous communities of the USA and Canada contend with disproportionately high rates of “psychiatric” distress. Many of these communities attribute this distress to their long colonial encounters with European settlers. Concurrently, throughout the 20th century, the disciplines and professions associated with mind, brain, and behavior (e.g., psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis) consolidated their authority and influence within mainstream society. These “psy-ences” promote their professional... Read more about ANTHRO 1900: Counseling as Colonization? Native American Encounters with the Clinical Psy-ences
s prison abolition a serious proposal, an aspirational ideal, a trendy slogan, or a blueprint for social transformation? This interdisciplinary and community-engaged course situates the prison abolition movement in deep historical context and explores its current relation to the politics of criminal justice reform. We will study the movement’s connections to slavery abolitionism, anti-lynching activism, Indigenous struggles for sovereignty, and the Black Power movement. We will examine the emergence of...
Professor: Annette Gordon-Reed T, W - 3:45pm to 5:15pm
This course will trace the development of the American legal and political system from 1776 to 1865. We will discuss the formation of state constitutions and the Federal Constitution, slavery and law, the development of American private law, the "Revolution of 1800" and the "Age of Jefferson", the mechanisms of westward expansion, the "Age of Jackson", and the coming of the Civil War.
This is a "Theories and Methods" course meant to provide groundwork for relational and critical approaches to ethnic studies. It understands race and ethnicity as ongoingly formed in dynamic socio-cultural, economic, and political processes and as inextricable from gender, sexuality, class, and Indigeneity. Sylvia Wynter calls academics "grammarians of the social order” and argues that universities bear particular responsibility for the existence and power of racial concepts. We will analyze how race and... Read more about EMR 133: Power, Knowledge, Identity: Critical Approaches to Race and Ethnicity
Professor: Benjamin Sommers T, TH - 9:45am to 11:15am
This course examines the U.S. health care safety net. We will analyze several key components of the health care system related to the care for low-income populations: Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, community health centers, public hospitals, and state-based programs. We will also explore issues related to the health care of underserved and marginalized populations including Native Americans, immigrants, people experiencing homelessness, individuals with disabilities, and people experiencing incarceration. We will... Read more about HPM 211: The Health Care Safety Net & Marginalized Populations
Professor: Catherine Brekus T, TH - 10:30am to 11:45am
This course is a survey of American Catholic history. We will discuss French and Spanish missions, Catholic immigration to the British colonies, the rise of the “immigrant church” in the nineteenth century, and controversies over slavery, industrial capitalism, “Americanism,” race, feminism, and sexuality. We will also discuss the transformation of the Catholic Church in the wake of Vatican II and contemporary divisions between “liberals” and “conservatives.” Besides discussing Catholic intellectual life, we will also... Read more about HDS 2182/ RELIGION 1462: Catholicism in America
This course is an introductory survey of colonial Latin American history, spanning the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Organized chronologically and thematically, it will examine developments in Spanish and Portuguese America by reading both secondary and primary sources (available in English translation).
Professor: Ahmad Greene-Hayes T - 12:00pm to 2:00pm
Black and indigenous scholars have long argued that archives are often violent and dismembering, especially as the universities which house them preserve the physical and immaterial remnants of slavery and colonialism. Religious studies scholars, especially historians of religion, have attended to this quandary while sifting through archives of slavery, colonialism, conquest, and sexual violence. At Harvard, this conversation has re-emerged in unique ways through Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery:... Read more about RELIGION 1092: Religion, Theory, and the Archive
Ancient Gondwana evolved over forty millennia into several continents including Australia. Since European settlement, the human impact on land, massive species extinction, and climate change, pose threats to the continent's fragile ecology. In this course you will consider Australia's early geological history; Indigenous land use; competing ideas of land use among early settlers; and how various forms of land use shaped, and changed the environment; the ways the environment has shaped humans and Australia’s participation in the global... Read more about HIST 15Q: Australian Environmental History: Gondwanda to Global Warming
The course tracks a contemporary history of visuality ‘by and about Aboriginal people and things’ citing the subtitle of the classic 1993 text by Indigenous Australian anthropologist and cultural activist Marcia Langton (Yiman/Bidjara) as a starting point and key reference. Set within an emergent trajectory of World cinema and First Nations media production, we examine critical moments and transformations in the social, political and historical contexts of four decades of Australian screen-based culture and practice, from remote... Read more about ANTHRO 1643: Making not taking Culture: Australian and First Nations screen culture and activism
This seminar centers citizenship as a deeply contested and dynamic status whose meanings have changed over time. Our study will begin with the historical, philosophical underpinnings of citizenship in the United States but will quickly turn to the ways that marginalized groups have contested the confines of American citizenship. We will ask: How have the rights and obligations of US citizens changed over time? Who has been able to claim citizenship, and who has been barred from it? We will evaluate how race, gender, and immigration... Read more about HIST LIT 90GJ: Contesting Citizenship in the United States
The collections housed at the Peabody Museum of Ethnology and Archaeology, Harvard University, offer a stellar opportunity to investigate Indigenous diplomacy carried on throughout the Great Lakes and Northeast region during the colonial period (1600 – 1900). In this seminar, students will complete readings that address theoretical aspects of museology, such as materiality, orality, literacy, knowledge transfer, meaning-making, collecting, repatriating, and cultural revitalization. Each week readings will be assigned that... Read more about HAA 179G: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Great Lakes & Northeast: Mnemonically Coding Sovereign Relationships
Professor: Daniel Justice M, W - 10:30am to 11:45am
Indigenous literatures are not simply subsets of settler national literatures—they have deep roots in their respective homelands, through which storytellers, scholars, artists, activists, and visionaries have explored and articulated their own imaginative, political, and relational concerns and commitments. From codices and winter counts to wampum belts, totem poles, medical formulae books, songs, treaties, letters, autobiographies, histories, poems, stories, novels, podcasts, comic books, plays, and many other... Read more about ENGLISH 197LS: Introduction to Indigenous Literary Studies: Poetry, Prose, and Politics
Professor: Francesca Benedetto W - 9:00am to 11:45am
The seminar aims to investigate and catalog plants that have a spiritual/emotional value to the public and individuals in the designed landscape. The seminar’s goal is to structure a collection and an archive of plants used during rituals and ceremonies in different cultures and beliefs. Moving from the four sacred medicines for the Native American people (tobacco, sweetgrass, sage, and cedar) to boneset for African-American People or pomegranates and citrons in Jewish traditions to plants that typify the Christian tradition (... Read more about HIS 4487: Plants of Ritual: Creating a Spiritual Connection to the Designed Landscape
Whales, wolves, great apes, big cats, buffalo, bears-- these animals populate human cultural imaginations. From animal advocacy groups to zoos to movies, so-called "charismatic megafauna" and/or “flagship species” dominate a wide swath of debates. By focusing on a selection of animals, this course explores a) how people interpret these animals, and b) how human interactions impact these animals and their natural environments. Organized around different animals and the controversies, questions, and events...
Throughout history, social justice movements and social justice organizations have utilized disciplined inquiry or research to highlight untold stories, illuminate goodness, expose power and colonialism, and offer pathways to more equity and freedom. Yet, we often do not provide educators or doctoral students with research methodology training oriented to these aims. More specifically, we often do not provide educators in the field or doctoral students with research methodology training beyond those...
The purpose of this course is to question prevailing, relatively uniform and quite limiting forms of education in light of approaches that escape or overcome these forms. A mode of education is more than mere content and pedagogy. It refers to ways of knowing, forms of life, conceptions of power, value systems, and structuring goals that ultimately underlie a people’s understanding of what education is and does. Therefore, this course concerns more than a simple familiarity with alternative models of learning—rather,...
This field-based research course focuses on some of the major issues that Native American Indian tribes and nations face as the 21st century begins. It provides in-depth, hands-on exposure to native development issues, including: sovereignty, economic development, constitutional reform, leadership, health and social welfare, land and water rights, culture and language, religious freedom, and education. In particular, the course emphasizes problem definition, client relationships, and designing and completing a research project. The course...
Ju Yon Kim Tuesday and Thursdays, 1:30 PM - 02:45 PM
From depictions of exchanges in the early colonial Americas to efforts to envision alternate and imminent futures, this class will examine representations of interracial encounters in U.S. American culture. We will explore how various texts and performances have conceived, embodied, and reimagined the relationships not only among differently racialized groups, but also between race and nation, individual and community, and art and politics. Topics addressed in this course will include narratives of indigeneity,...
Zachary Nowak Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:00am-10:15am
What’s the problem with wilderness? Or the environmental movement? Or invasive species? This course examines how humans thought about and used the natural world over the centuries—and the consequences of both use of and thoughts about the nature. Students will learn about food, climate change, pollution, conquest and resistance, environmentalism, and energy. This course actively seeks to show the importance of the material world and the contributions of a broad spectrum of historical actors to US...
Water is life, but is it a human right? Water governance is a contentious issue globally because humans rely on water for nearly every productive activity; moreover, it is often scarce and not distributed equally. To better understand the persistence and escalation of struggles over water access around the world, this course uses a multidisciplinary approach that allows students to examine both the social and physical shape of water in a modern and historical context. While all bodies of water deserve mention,...
This hands-on course will introduce key episodes and issues in the history of American astronomy by close looking at rare early scientific instruments and tangible objects in Harvard collections. Starting with the story of Captain John Smith, Pocahontas, and a sundial, the course will move from colonial relations with Native Americans to the controversial placement of observatories on sacred mountaintops today. In between, we will discuss the roles of religion, politics, science, and culture in the...
Initiated by a Muskogee student, this course will be advised by Prof. Ann Braude (Harvard Divinity) and Marcus Briggs-Cloud, HDS 2010. Any student interested in indigenous history and culture of the Southeastern US is welcome. Meeting time to be arranged. Permission of the Instructor required. For further information contact ann_braude@harvard.edu.
Eleanor Craig Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:30am-11:45am
How might critical attention to race and ethnicity as they intersect with gender and sexuality—and also frameworks of indigeneity and class—shape how we study? How do these lenses shift the questions we ask, the information that counts as data, and the genres of work that we recognize as 'academic'?For those newer to studies of race and ethnicity, this course provides intersectional frameworks for recognizing what assumptions undergird academic projects and fields of study. For...
This course explores ways in which human collectives have conceived of other animals, whether in analogical relations for scientific research, exploitative relations for food and labor, affective relations like fear, disgust, love. What are some histories of these unique interdependencies between human animals and nonhuman animals? We will critically explore the relentless and yet slippery divisions between humans and nonhuman animals, seeing them as a falsely singular, conflictual and segregatory divide that has played...
This course introduces the archaeological study of the ancient societies of eastern North America, with a focus on the Ohio River Valley region, the first frontier of the United States. We will explore inter-related aspects of religion, economy, technology, and human biology associated with the span of time ranging from the first arrival of humans to the European invasion of the continent. The emphasis is on key forms and changes in social organization associated with shifts between foraging and farming, the...