Professor: Chris Pexa
M, W - 1:30pm to 2:45pm

“Indians are an invention,” declares an unnamed hunter in Gerald Vizenor’s (White Earth Ojibwe) 1978 novel, Bearheart. The hunter’s point, as Vizenor has explained in interviews and elsewhere, is not that Indigenous peoples don’t exist, but that the term “Indian” is a colonial fiction or shorthand that captures, essentializes, and thus erases a vast diversity of Indigenous lives and peoples. This course begins from the contention that other categories, and maybe most consequentially that of “nature,” have not only...

Professors: Matt Liebmann & Dan Smail
T, TH - 12:00pm to 1:15pm 

When does history begin? To judge by the typical history textbook, the answer is straightforward: six thousand years ago. So what about the tens of thousands of years of human existence described by archaeology and related disciplines? Is that history too? This introduction to human history offers a framework for joining the entirety of the human past, from the long ago to the present day, in a single narrative that stretches across many disciplines. We will explore a series of interrelated themes...

Professor: Ann Braude
TH - 12:00pm to 2:00pm

Approaching 20th-century abstract art through the lens of religious studies, this course explores alternatives to twentieth-century narratives of modern art centered on the existential crisis of a heroic-- usually male, Caucasian and secular—individual.  In contrast, we will center paths to abstraction in which a departure from or repurposing of the figure emanates from spiritual sources not usually associated with modernity.  Locating the artists’ work within their biographies and their communities, the course focuses...

Professors: Tiya Miles & Walter Johnson
Th - 12:45pm to 2:45pm

This seminar will convene scholars, public-facing intellectuals, writers, and practitioners whose work falls under the broad umbrella of ecological study and care rooted in Black, and/or Indigenous, and/or feminist, and/or community-minded thought, culture, and history. This flexible thematic has been chosen to inspire new questions, highlight key issues, structure constructive dialogue, spark fresh ideas, and support works in progress in the academic arenas loosely deemed “black ecologies” and “...

Professor: Sky Hopinka
W - 12:45pm to 2:45pm

This seminar looks at contemporary and historical documentary, narrative, and experimental films made by Indigenous filmmakers and artists. The focus is primarily on North America, but includes works from around the world. 

NOTE: To take this limited-enrollment seminar course, please consult the Canvas course site for information about the enrollment process and procedures. 

Professor: Mandy Izadi
W - 3:00pm to 5:45pm

The first Americans met Europeans on their shores over five hundred years ago. They made the continent theirs millennia prior. And yet, Indigenous Americans are often missing, or misrepresented—in traditional, even contemporary portraits of North America. An introduction to the study of Native North America—and Native American and Indigenous Studies—this course provides a sweeping portrait of the histories and legacies of settler colonialism, war, dispossession, and slavery in the continent; it also reckons with contemporary...

Professor: Mandy Izadi
M - 12:45pm to 3:00pm 

The study of North America, at its root, is the study of Native America and African America. Typically, scholarship on the first Americans—and Africans and their descendants—are studied in isolation. Dominant trends in scholarship, journals, academic disciplines, and university departments tend to reinforce these boundaries. And yet, from the dawn of European colonization to the present day, the worlds of Black and Indigenous peoples have collided in ways that have shaped not only the history of each group, but also,...

Professor: Adriana Zenteno Hopp
T - 3:00pm to 5:45pm

How might Montezuma, the Aztec ruler, or Atahuallpa, the Inca emperor, have told the story of their respective encounters with Europeans? Too often, indigenous voices are not centered when we tell the history of colonial Latin America. This seminar aims to address this issue by exploring how native people living under colonialism understood the pre-Hispanic and early colonial past. Together, we will examine the many ways native people told stories about what had transpired, including the use of oral history, unique...

Professor: Morgan Ridgway
M - 3:00pm to 5:00pm

How do gender and sexuality shape Indigenous life? What does it mean for the body to be a site for both colonial violence and imaginative futures? How have constructions, ideas, and aesthetics of gender and sexuality morphed across time and to what consequences for Native people? This course grapples with these questions through an examination of literature and cultural production by Indigenous peoples in North America. Students will be introduced to some of the foundations of settler colonialism, what it is and how it...

Professor: Alan Niles
T - 9:45am to 11:45am

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 Harvard’s long history of...

Professor: TBA
T, TH - 10:30am to 11:45am

This course offers an introduction to the complex relationship between Christianity and Indigenous spiritualities in the Pacific, including Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia. Texts in the course will focus on the significance of relationality through the connection between Moana (ocean), Fanua (land), Tagata (people), and Atua (God), and how colonisation has impacted understandings of these key aspects of life. Students will be invited to consider what decolonisation looks like in their own contexts.

Professor: Hannah Waits
Th - 3:00pm to 5:00pm 

This course explores the culture and politics of imperialism in the Americas from the early 19th century to the present, with particular attention to race and ethnicity. We will ask how formal and informal imperial relationships developed by looking at French, British, and especially United States imperialism across the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. Focusing on topics like revolution, migration, military occupation, tourism, climate change, and humanitarianism, we will examine how empire functioned on the...