Spring 2021

Faculty: David Stern Location and Time: TBA The Passover Haggadah is the Jewish book of redemption par excellence. As the script for the seder (the ritual banquet on the first night(s) of Passover), the Haggadah has changed and developed as the Jews have...

Faculty: David Stern Location and Time: TBA The institution of organized prayer—Tefillah be-Tzibbur—is one of the most complex phenomena in Judaism because it has served historically not only as a medium for worshipping God but also for expressing...

Faculty: David Stern Location and Time: TBA Judaism is a famously text-centric religious culture, founded not only on a single book, the Hebrew Bible, but profoundly involved in the study and ritual use of other classic texts like the Babylonian Talmud...

Faculty: David Stern TBA You have spent much of your life since kindergarten (and perhaps earlier) reading books; and you will spend much of your time at Harvard continuing to read them. But do you even know what a “book” is? Is it merely a conveyor, a...

Faculty: Alex Csiszar TBA Does information have a history? The control and manipulation of data has become central to politics, economics, and daily life. But what came before this age of bits and big data? How did we get to this point? This course will...

Faculty: Jeffrey Hamburger Time: Th, 12pm-2:45pm The interaction of authority and authorship in the High Middle Ages, especially in the context of glossed books and commentaries, but also emergent vernacular literatures, with a focus on pictorial...

Faculty: Jeffrey Schnapp Location and Date: TBA An advanced research seminar devoted to Dante's poem on the occasion of 700th anniversary of his death. The course will combine close attention to Dante's text with nuanced attention to strategies of...