Meredith (“Mimi”) Garcia had the unique challenge of teaching “Apocalyptic Lit” amidst the COVID-19 hybrid year. Still, the central questions of the course remained, “Will the apocalypse bring total annihilation, transcendence, bloodthirsty zombies, or all of the above? Will it bring people together or tear them apart?” As a medium, fiction allows for distance from both the material and reality, enough to critically engage with the text. Despite the fantastical, sci-fi qualities to apocalyptic literature, Mimi stresses that each text, from The Walking Dead to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, speak to questions of human nature and of hope.
Mimi’s new course offering, “Globalization, Literature, & Film”, investigates how globalization and media have come to shape each other and our everyday lives. The course utilizes films like Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) and Walter Salles’ Motorcycle Diaries (2004) to discuss how politics, history, and cross-cultural encounters come to manifest in film. Mimi notes that the entire film industry and how we have come to watch film also plays a role in how we analyze and reflect on the relationship between literature and media—to be both critical of the past and the present.
THE POPULIST PERSUASION
Michael Kazin ESB ’66 THE POPULIST PERSUASION Cornell University Press, November 2017 In The Populist Persuasion, the distinguished historian Michael Kazin guides readers through the expressions of conflict between powerful elites and "the people" that have run...
BURNT SUGAR
AVNI DOSHI ’01 BURNT SUGAR Hamish Hamilton, July 2020 Originally published in India under the title Girl in White Cotton, Avni Doshi’s debut novel, Burnt Sugar, has been short-listed for the Booker Prize, the leading literary award in the English-speaking world. It...
A BULLDOG’S GUIDE TO IDEOLOGY
Doesn’t it seem like we can’t talk about anything these days without it getting political? Everything is so fraught. You’re either on our side or their side. You’re either liberal or you’re conservative. Democrat or Republican. Black lives or Blue lives. These...
HOW CAN SCHOOLS CULTIVATE CARING AND A COMMITMENT TO JUSTICE IN CHILDREN?
DR. RICHARD WEISSBOURD, FACULTY DIRECTOR & SENIOR LECTURER Richard Weissbourd is a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he co-directs the Human Development and Psychology Program, and the Kennedy School of Government. His work focuses...
Exploring Rhythm and Melody in Early Childhood
In this age of Zoom, it is perhaps the greatest sadness for music teachers to not be able to hear their classes sing as a group. Technical sound lags and a platform geared towards projecting one voice at a time combine to make sing-alongs frustrating and...
The Rights of Spring in Preschool-3
In Preschool-3, one part of our distance learning program has been the fun-and-learn sharing of the marvels of faunal and floral transformations that unfold in forests and woodlands in spring. We began with a look at trees and how they burst from bare twigs and...
That’s “ARRAY”zing!
Through the distance learning process, the first graders have been working diligently in their math groups. Their creativity truly sparked during our multiplication unit of study. The first graders are familiar with the idea of grouping items to make them easier to...
StringJam Virtual Concert
Virtual Field Trip to Neon Art Studio
