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21    <a href="/" title="" class="logo">Emmet von Stackelberg</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;
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28        <h1 id="courses-at-harvard">Courses at Harvard</h1>
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36<p>I am an Assistant Director of Studies of History &amp; Literature at Harvard, where I’ve taught since 2023. I teach and advise broadly on topics related to the history of the United States after the Civil War, the history of popular media, history of technology, and environmental history. In addition to the courses listed below, I have advised juniors and seniors on a wide range of independent research projects and have led small tutorials of juniors around topics and readings of their cho

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38<h2 id="cultures-of-capitalism-in-the-united-states">Cultures of Capitalism in the United States</h2>
39<p><em>Fall 2026</em> Capitalism is an inheritance of the United States. Its promises—resource abundance, private ownership, economic autonomy—are at the heart of what is now called the American Dream. Celebrants and detractors alike have viewed both capitalism and the <span class="small-caps">US</span> as dynamic, always oriented toward the promise of a better future. But Americans of all sorts have long sought to tame capitalism: to shelter themselves from its risks, to limit the power of its titans, to fight its manifest inequities. This course charts how capitalism came to be integrated into the daily life of almost every American, and how this imbrication was reflected, refracted, and even fought across American culture and thought. Beginning with the panics and corporate consolidations of the 19th century and continuing through the rise of neoliberalism, we’ll trace the spread of wholly new concepts in American life, including personal failure, economic risk, even the idea of<span class="push-double"></span> <span class="pull-double">“</span>the economy” itself. We will
40follow the emergence of two central capitalist dynamics, two ways of seeing the future, seemingly at odds: the speculative urge of fortune-seeking and the calculative drive of risk-avoidance. How did observers of America’s economic fortunes reconcile these two visions of capitalism? We will read a range of thinkers seeking to understand the functions, ethics, and history of capitalism, including Max Weber, Karl Marx, W.E.B. DuBois, Rosa Luxembourg, Thorstein Veblen, Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter, and Milton Friedman. Alongside them, we’ll follow American economic life in poetry, fiction, plays, film, song, and visual art. Authors and artists may include Edith Wharton, Hermann Melville, Simon Pokagon, Walt Whitman, Preston Sturges, Nina Simone, Charlie Chaplin, Paul Robeson, Bertolt Brecht, and Zora Neale Hurston.</p>
41<h2 id="screen-cultures-from-cinema-to-tiktok">Screen Cultures from Cinema to TikTok</h2>
42<p><em>Fall 2023 + Fall 2024.</em> The way we see the world is growing inseparable from the way our screens show that world to us. It would be almost impossible to avoid screens for even one day. This course traces the history of screen cultures in the twentieth century United States from motion pictures, to television, to personal computers, Gameboys, and, of course, smartphones. How have people engaged with screens, and how have these responses changed along with the technology? How did those in power try to use screens or limit them in response to larger political events and concerns? How have <span class="small-caps">US</span> and transnational screen cultures shaped or troubled racial boundaries and gender binaries? What is the relationship between culture, media, and technology? In this course, students will interact with screens in material form and assume the role of viewer for a range of different screen products: films, animation, television shows, video games, websites, and TikTok videos. Additionally, we
43will also read newspaper and magazine accounts, fiction, and screenplays to explore the cultural reception of screens, while engaging with the work of critics and artists including Harun Farocki, Stuart Hall, Marlon Riggs, and Walter Benjamin.</p>
44<h2 id="nature-technology">Nature &amp; Technology</h2>
45<p><em>Spring 2025 + Spring 2026, co-taught with Chloe Hawkey.</em> In our modern world, technology—from cars and airplanes to supercomputers and the internet—seems to be at perpetual odds with the natural world, either unrelated to it or competing with it for loyalty and care. But what if these two features of our lives are not oppositional but in fact tightly intertwined with one another? This seminar traces the history of how nature has made technology and how technology has shaped nature. How have different historical figures—from whalers to plantation owners—understood nature as a resource, and how did they exploit those resources? How did people think about commodities as part of or separate from the natural world, and how did they use technology to mediate between nature and commodity? What fantasies of future utopias inspired workers, theorists, inventors, and engineers? As we strive to answer these questions, we will examine a different technology each week, emphasizing the
46people who created and used them and their connections to the natural world. Our readings will focus primarily on the Atlantic world—Europe, North America, and the Caribbean in particular—a region bound together by environment and history alike.</p>
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