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
According to census data, nearly seven out of every ten Indigenous people live in or near cities. Despite this number, a prevailing narrative locates the Indigenous person some place far away from urban life. While the reservation and rural areas are critically important in Indigenous histories, presents, and futures, cities provide another lens through which to understand Indigenous life in the United States. Given the sheer numbers of Indigenous people in cities, why is the prevailing narrative one of rurality? How does urbanity... Read more about HIST LIT 90FL: Indigenous in the City
Professor: Americo Mendoza-Mori M, W - 3:00pm to 4:15pm
Are Indigenous languages and cultures a thing of the past? Although Indigenous peoples make up less than 6% of the global population, they speak more than 4,000 of the world’s approximately 6,700 languages. At the same time, the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues indicates that two Indigenous languages die every two months. Indigenous Language reclamation is crucial to the identity and resistance efforts of many communities: additionally, this process contributes to the preservation of Indigenous...
Harvard’s beginnings included a promise to educate both “English and Indian youth.” From its inception, however, Harvard’s endowment included Native lands expropriated through war, theft, and coercion. Drawing inspiration from Harvard’s own Legacy of Slavery initiative and the Land-Grab Universities website, this class will conduct original research on these histories. We will work... Read more about ENGLISH 90LN/ HIST LIT 93 AD