HIST 16I – Refugees in the 20th-Century United States

HIST 16I – Refugees in the 20th-Century United States

Semester: Spring
Offered: 2025
Instructor: Yael Sternhell
Meeting Time: M, 9:00 – 11:45am

This course will offer a history of America’s complex relationship with refugees over the course of the 20th century. It will delve into the intricate mix of politics, policies, and ideas at work in determining how the United States has engaged with asylum seekers and how those seeking asylum have shaped, interpreted, and remembered their experiences confronting the United States. We will explore questions of states and statelessness, humanitarianism and coercion, guilt and accountability, wars and postwars. The course will move chronologically and thematically, focusing on particular strands of forced mobility from European Jews fleeing antisemitism to Latin Americans fleeing civil war and use a range of analytical frameworks from global history to critical refugee studies.

For more details please visit the Harvard Course Catalog.