Seminars
A core activity of the Center since its inception, the seminar program extends across disciplines, methodologies, and time periods, and serves a broad constituency of faculty and graduate students at Harvard and beyond.
Find a Seminar
American Literature and Culture
Chairs: Sari Edelstein, Joseph Rezek
Showcases new work by scholars engaging with well-established and emergent methodologies in the history of American culture, politics, and aesthetics....
Art, Political Culture, and Civic Life
Chairs: Kiku Adatto, Michael Sandel
Explores the interplay of the arts, political culture, and civic life. Our goal is to provide a vibrant, international forum for the exchange of ideas and ongoing projects....
Buddhist Studies Forum
Chairs: Janet Gyatso, James Robson
Provides an opportunity for faculty, students, and participants to discuss approaches to Buddhist Studies that are as diverse as philology, philosophy, intellectual history, anthropology, art history, literary studies...
Celestial Spheres
Chair: Jennifer Roberts
A forum for research that engages with the physics, aesthetics, poetics, and/or politics of outer space....
Celtic Literature and Culture
Chairs: Joseph F. Nagy, Paul Russell, Natasha Sumner
Topics include aspects of Celtic literatures and cultures from ancient to modern times, with an emphasis on new approaches to these topics....
China Humanities
Chairs: Thomas Kelly, James Robson, Xiaofei Tian
A forum for exploring the whole span of Chinese experience before the modern era....
Civilizations of Ancient Greece and Rome
Chairs: Irene Peirano Garrison, Naomi Weiss
Through consideration of topics reflecting the entire range of Classical studies, the seminar examines Greek and Roman literature, philology, history, religion, archaeology, and philosophy...
Classical Traditions and Receptions
Chairs: Emily Greenwood, John Hamilton, Adrian Staehli, Richard F. Thomas
Investigates the reception, elaboration, and revaluation of ancient and classical traditions from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to modernity and postmodernity....
Critical Health Humanities
Chairs: Sari Altschuler, Amy Boesky, David Jones
Provides a space for vibrant interdisciplinary conversation about health-related topics from a humanities perspective....
Dialectical Thinking in the Humanities
Chairs: Jess Keiser, Robert Lehman, Samantha Matherne
Every academic year, the Dialectical Thinking in the Humanities seminar hosts a weekly reading group on a work relevant to our theme....
Eighteenth-Century Studies
Chairs: Nicole Aljoe, Susan Lanser, Jennifer Reed
A forum for new research and perspectives on the many cultures of the "long" eighteenth century (1660-1820)....
France and the World
Chairs: Hannah Frydman, Usha Reena Rungoo
The sense of a globe that is interconnected within and beyond the nation has a long history in literature and culture....
German Studies: New Perspectives
Chairs: Peter Burgard, John Hamilton
Through a comparative study of German conceptions of the Kulturwissenschaften and American versions of “German studies,” the seminar aims to initiate a new phase in the debate on the function and scope of...
History of the Book
Chairs: Ann Blair, Alex Csiszar, Stephanie Frampton, Hannah Marcus
Considers the production, circulation, and reception of texts....
Jewish Cultures and Societies
Chair: David Stern
Highlights diverse approaches to the study of Jewish cultures and societies throughout the entire span of Jewish history, bringing together for discussion scholars and scholarship from a wide variety of disciplines and across...
Ludics
Chairs: Vassiliki Rapti, Eric Gordon
The Ludics Seminar is animated by the concept of play as humanistic inquiry and beyond. It constitutes an open forum where scholars and practitioners from a variety of humanistic and scientific disciplines, ranging from...
Medieval Studies
Chairs: Sean Gilsdorf, Alexander Riehle
A forum for the presentation and discussion of scholarly work in Medieval Studies, emphasizing comparative and interdisciplinary approaches....
Modern Greek Studies
Chair: Panagiotis Roilos
Performs transhistorical and cross-disciplinary explorations of aspects of Greek literature, societies, politics, and culture from the twelfth century to postmodernity....
Musics Abroad
Chairs: Charrise Barron, Alejandro L. Madrid
"Musics Abroad" will take a global and comparative approach to music and mobility in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with particular attention to music and musicians within new diaspora...
Native Cultures of the Americas
Chair: Philip Deloria
A forum for the interdisciplinary study of the indigenous peoples and cultures of the Americas....
New Directions in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
On Hiatus AY25-26
Chair: Jocelyn Viterna
A forum for discussing new interdisciplinary scholarship in the field of women, gender, and sexuality studies....
