Seminar To Push Bodily Inquiry

Where is the threshold of embarrassment about smells, sexuality, and defecation?

This fall, history professor Walter L. Johnson will seek to answer this question in his new course, “Bodily Functions: The History of Bare Life and Biopower.”

Johnson said that those who enroll in his seminar will work through various approaches, including Marxism, cultural anthropology, post-modernism, and feminism to study different topics on the history of the body,

“The idea is to think in a suggestive rather than exhaustive manner about the way that historians and social theorists have thought about the history of the body,” Johnson said.

History department chair James T. Kloppenberg said in an e-mail that Johnson will be breaking boundaries and asking new questions in this class.

“Walter is a very talented and imaginative historian,” Kloppenberg said. “His new course reflects the expanding interests of historians into fields that earlier generations tended not to study.”

The class will fulfill the history concentration’s reading seminar requirement, according to Caron P. Yee, the undergraduate coordinator for the Department of History.

Johnson said that readings will be culled from history books covering the 17th to the 21st centuries, with a focus on the United States and African-Americans—his areas of research.

The idea for the class came from Johnson’s research, which centers on questions about the history of slavery, particularly the history of violence and the sensory experience of slavery.

“Out of that set of questions at the heart of my work I started to work out to other sets of questions from other things that I’ve been interested in,” Johnson said.

These questions included where humans see the boundary of their bodies and what they see as disgusting.

The class will also address questions about the economy and governance, as well as different kinds of embodied experiences like torture.

“I think there’s probably three or four different axes of inquiry—not all of which are always running in the same direction at the same time—but for me they intersect in different, illuminating ways,” Johnson said.

Instead of a final research paper, the class will culminate with a historiographical essay in which students will “figure out a body of scholarship that they want to map out and analyze,” Johnson said.

Johnson came to Harvard in the fall of 2006 from New York University, where his colleague and friend Harvey Molotch, a professor of sociology, teaches a class with a similarly provocative title: “The Human Toilet.”

—Staff writer Alissa M. D’Gama can be reached at adgama@fas.harvard.edu.