The Supernatural in the Modern World

What do our ghost stories say about us, what do our beasts betray about us? Which witches bewitch us, which rumors consume us, and what sense can be made of what haunts us? Restless spirits, alien invaders, wicked witches, bloodthirsty vampires, legendary cryptids, murderous ogres, illuminati satanists, deep-state conspirators, memetic online menaces: our contemporary bestiary is overflowing with meaningful monsters. Our spine-tingling intellectual task in this course is to analyze the roles that these malevolent entities and the supernatural narratives we tell about them play in our everyday lives, collective psyches, communities, and politics, and in the crises we confront as individuals and groups. Are our occult stories allegories of our modern discontents or simply holdovers from our childhood nightmares? Are they symptoms of specific societal crises or representations of timeless pan-human fears? How has the witch hunt, the rumor panic, the standardized nightmare of the group transformed in this meme-ified age of online participatory culture, global interconnection, ecological catastrophe, and fake-news-driven conspiracy thinking? What can we learn about ourselves, our pasts, and our futures by thinking deeply about what scares us the most? And how frightened should we be of what we might find if we dig too deeply into that question? We analyze the supernatural in relationship historical memories, cultural anxieties, folk traditions, spiritual beliefs, physiological sensations, political conflicts, environmental disasters, and existential imperatives. Because nowhere is safe from the things that go bump in the night, our interdisciplinary journey takes us across time and space into the bellies of various beasts, from the gates of Harvard Yard, to the hills of Rwanda, the message boards of 4chan, the proms of rural Pennsylvania, the ships of the Middle Passage, the villages of medieval Europe, the halls of the White House, your creepy neighbor's basement, and the deep dark woods. Our abominable assignments include creative reading responses, the documentation and analysis of frightful folklore, a fearsome final project, and a co-created haunted Harvard virtual tour. Course activities may include local excursions, storytelling sessions, and paranormal experimentation.