History and Literature

About

History and Literature’s innovative and rigorous approach to interdisciplinary scholarship allows students the flexibility to design an individualized course of study. With their tutors, students explore cutting-edge research in the humanities, while learning how to shape research projects of their own. Each year the concentration sends graduates to careers in media, law, business, banking, consulting, medicine, government, public policy, the arts, and academia. History and Literature teaches skills invaluable to any profession: the craft of writing and the art of close and critical reading.

WORKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

History and Literature’s tutorials provide the opportunity to learn about and apply interdisciplinary tools of analysis to a rich variety of topics. They also allow students to integrate their courses in literature, history, and related fields.

• Sophomore tutorial is a group enterprise, a small seminar led by two tutors.
• Junior tutorial allows students to collaborate on a syllabus with their tutor, meeting weekly with the tutors and one to two other students.
• Senior tutorial focuses on developing, researching, and writing a senior thesis.

Both junior and senior tutorials offer students an uncommon degree of control over the individual direction of their study.
There is no single way to describe how these two disciplines fit together, and how they resist being fit together. Discovering and explicating that relationship is the touchstone of the student’s experience in History and Literature.

ASKING INTERDISCIPLINARY QUESTIONS

When faced with a document of any kind, a History and Literature student asks both historical and literary questions. He or she might inquire into the author's background and position, as well as the social and political conditions under which the text was produced.

• Who was the audience?
• How was the text produced and circulated?
• What values and ideas are assumed or omitted?
• What historical circumstances or other works influenced it?

Looking at the piece of writing more closely, a History and Literature student might ask:

• What rhetorical devices does the text employ?
• To what genre ("tragedy," "romance," "history," "detective fiction") might contemporaries have assigned this text–and how does the history of that genre affect our reading of the work?
• Does the work defy any established conventions of the genre?
• Did the author conceive of the work within the context of a literary movement ("romanticism," "naturalism," or "surrealism," for example)?

A History and Literature student might then use the particular text to ask more far-reaching questions.

• If, for example, the work addressed a certain class of people (the "middle class," say) then how, in the period in question, did people define that class?
• If the work claimed to treat "public" matters, then how did contemporaries define the "public"?
• Was the public sphere defined as "masculine" and the private as "feminine"?
• What were the forums for political exchange and for political power?
• How many people were reading, and what sorts of books were popular?

To answer these and other questions, students work in their tutorials and other courses to gain a substantial knowledge of historical events and developments, and literary forms and movements. They learn the research and writing skills necessary to produce interdisciplinary scholarship of their own.

CHOOSING A FIELD

Each concentrator in History and Literature must choose a special field. These fields are defined either by country, region, and/or period. These include:

• America (1607 to the present)
• Latin America (1492 to the present)
• Postcolonial Studies
• Medieval Europe (400–1500)
• Early Modern Europe (1300–1750), and
• Modern Europe (1750 to the present).

READING IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE

We do not expect students entering non-Anglophone fields to be fluent readers of the required language(s). However, when students join the concentration we expect them to start working on becoming proficient enough to take literature courses in the language(s) by the end of their junior year.
All students, including those in Anglophone fields, are expected to take a course in the literature of a foreign language by the end of the junior year.
Many students elect to complete language citations to meet History and Literature’s foreign literature requirement.

CHOOSING COURSES

Students choose concentration courses in the History department and the relevant literature departments for their field (English, Romance Languages, German, or Slavic, as well as Literature and Comparative Literature). We strongly encourage students to explore other course offerings as well. For example,

• A student in the Medieval Europe field might take a Religion course on the medieval Christian church, or a History of Art and Architecture course on medieval maps.
• A student in the Early Modern Europe field could study all the permutations of the Enlightenment–the "Rights of Man," and those of women, too–while also taking a Government course on Hobbes, or a History of Art and Architecture course on Michelangelo, or a History of Science course on Copernicus and Kepler.
• A student in the America field with an interest in Hemispheric relations might take a course in Romance Languages on Latino literatures.

Courses offered by many other programs–including Women's and Gender Studies, Afro-American Studies, Anthropology, and Sociology–count for credit in a number of fields.

CHOOSING TOPICS OF STUDY

Our concentration is truly interdisciplinary in that our students do not need to confine their interests to written texts. A text need not be composed of words; it might be a cultural production of another sort:

• a cartoon
• a painting
• a poster
• an advertisement
• a symphony
• a song
• a film
• a building