Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, alphabetically the last Harvard concentration, comes at the end of a guide through Houghton that hopes to have shown that the library’s reputation for being a place where diversity is the exception to the rule is unfounded. From African and African American Studies to…
Visual and Environmental Studies encompasses a wide variety of artistic fields, from studio art to photography and film. Houghton’s versatile collection caters to all of these areas; the library owns many artists’ books and multifarious photography collections, as well as films. Beginning with more traditional endeavors, Houghton’s large…
Harvard’s newest concentration, Theater, Dance, and Media is a multidisciplinary field that involves the arts and many of the humanities at Harvard. Most importantly, however, it is one of the only concentrations in the 49 Book to have a special, dedicated Houghton collection. The Book, in fact, mentions the…
Though Statistics is described as a “young discipline” by the 49 Book, data collection and analysis are as old as human civilization itself. Livy, in Book I of his Ab urbe condita (which Houghton owns in multiple copies, including a 1470 incunabulum [Inc 3345, 005274015]), describes how king Servius Tullius…
South Asian Studies covers India, Pakistan, Tibet, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. A humanities concentration focused on an area of the world, it is multifarious in its approach to the region: students can focus on South Asia’s history, literatures, languages, religions, and philosophies, as well as any other desired…
Described by the 49 Book as “the meeting place of the social sciences,” Sociology, as the study of human society, is interdisciplinary by definition. It is also not restricted to academic theory and large-scale studies; to quote Harvard’s concentration guide again, Sociology is the “study of social life at…
Social Studies is the interdisciplinary concentration par excellence. Devised around a focus field rather than a concrete set of courses and requirements, it allows students to pursue any interest from a social scientific perspective. Houghton’s archive can most certainly cater to that, but, because of the concentration’s highly…
Concentrators in the field of Slavic Languages and Literatures are in luck: Houghton Library has the largest Slavic collection in the world, amassing many rare items that were destroyed through countless intellectual purges in Eastern Europe across the centuries. HOLLIS accounts for almost 140 Russian manuscripts and twenty manuscripts described…
French and Francophone Studies The library owns more than 700 French manuscripts from the medieval to the modern periods, besides countless French books and letters on the most varied topics. Notable items include contemporary newspaper articles about the Dreyfus Affair (MS Am 2638 [49], 011724159), a fifteenth-century manuscript copy of…
Religion is well-represented in Houghton’s catalogue. Religious institutions have been patrons of the arts and the letters throughout human history, and the library reflects that through its immense collection of books and manuscripts connected, in one way or another, to human spirituality. Houghton’s archives demonstrate the tangible effect…