Contact Michele
Mail Code CSI
Michele Hardesty
Franklin Patterson Hall G4
413.559.5490
Michele Hardesty
Dean of Humanities and Arts and Associate Professor of U.S. Literatures and Cultural Studies
Michele Hardesty received her M.A. and Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from Columbia University, and her B.A in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Professor Hardesty’s courses explore the multiple literary cultures of the United States, in national and transnational frameworks. She teaches that any reckoning with the literary history of the United States must include not only the canonized genres of novel, short story, and poetry, but also oral forms such as storytelling and slam poetry, and “popular” forms such as science fiction and comics. Studying these different forms requires students to pay attention to their distinct contexts of emergence, modes of circulation, and measures of value. Understanding context also means understanding power, and Hardesty’s courses explore how texts and canons have both shaped and contested dominant formations of power along the lines of nation, gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality.
Hardesty’s research focuses on the crosscurrents of social movements and literary cultures during the Cold War era, with a focus on the cultural politics of international solidarity. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Writers Take Sides: Internationalism and U.S. Literatures, 1959-86. Her essay “Looking for the Good Fight: William T. Vollmann Comes of Age in Afghanistan” was published in the journal boundary 2 in 2009, and her essay “If All the Writers of the World Get Together: Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and a Writers’ International in Sandinista Nicaragua” appears in the edited volume Transnational Beat Generation (Palgrave, 2012), edited by Nancy Grace and Jenny Skerl. In addition, Hardesty’s work has appeared in Critical Quarterly and The Monthly Review, and in the historical comics encyclopedia Comics Through Time: A History of Icons, Idols, and Ideas, edited by M. Keith Booker.
Hardesty is also working with Hampshire digital pedagogy librarian Alana Kumbier and Mount Holyoke archivist Leslie Fields on a project called “Zine Scenes,” supported by a Mellon-funded Five Colleges Digital Humanities project development grant. The goal of this project is to create an ongoing archival research initiative in which students, faculty, and library staff will examine queer and feminist zines from the 1990s within the countercultural contexts in which they were produced and circulated. This initiative will develop digital tools (games, mapping, timelines) to publish research findings on a dedicated website hosted by Five Colleges, Inc. A major part of this project is a Five College archival research seminar called “Beyond the Riot: Feminist and Queer Zine Histories,” hosted by Hampshire College.
Professor Hardesty has been a member of the Hampshire in Havana program since 2012, and was Faculty-in-Residence in Havana for the spring 2015 semester. Find more information on the program.
Recent and Upcoming Courses
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How have newspapers, magazines, newsletters, pamphlets, zines, and even comic books defied racism and fascism, spoken back to settler colonialism, represented marginalized communities, and created cultures of liberation? What does it mean to talk about culture (radical culture, cultures of resistance, or even cultural revolution) in relation to print? What is the relationship between print and the changing technologies that have created it, from the printing press to the photocopier? From our vantage point in a largely digital culture, what does print culture mean today? This seminar will ask these questions as we learn how radical political organizations, social movements, and countercultures seized the modes of (re)production in the Americas from the 19th to 21st centuries. By the end of this seminar, you should be able to analyze serial publications in terms of their (re)production technologies, circulation networks, (un)conventional formats, as well as how they have been preserved and archived; recognize how the study of periodicals and print culture, as well as the production of print periodicals themselves, has been affected and/or informed by race and power; gain critical, ethical, and self-aware methods for researching (with) periodicals individually and collaboratively; navigate Hampshire College's in-person and online academic resources; and understand the College's academic program.
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How have broadsides, newspapers, magazines, newsletters, pamphlets, zines, and even comic books helped build political organizations, social movements, and countercultures? What does it mean to talk about culture (radical culture, cultures of resistance, or even cultural revolution) in relation to print? To talk about culture and imagination in relation to politics? What is the relationship between print media and the changing technologies that have created it, from the printing press to the photocopier? From our vantage point in a largely digital culture (which, nevertheless, has not left print behind), what does print culture mean today? And, as a Division I seminar in the Media and Technology Learning Collaborative, we will also ask our LC's question ("How do we decide what constitutes truth in a "post-truth" era?") and find out how it applies to earlier eras of media culture. This seminar will ask these questions as we investigate print periodicals-as media and as social objects-in political, social, and cultural movements. Students will develop critical and historical understanding of international print cultures and movements from the 16th to the 21st century, with a focus on print cultures of 20th century liberation and justice movements in the Americas. With guided, hands-on research of print periodicals in local and online collections, students will directly access rich cultural worlds and social/political networks that cannot be accessed via books and anthologies. They will learn methods for researching (with) periodicals, and the class will work together to complete in a collaborative project. Additionally, this seminar will serve to introduce students to academic life at Hampshire and support them in their first semester. This course will address issues of race and power.
