‘Game of Thrones class’ aims to lure students to Harvard

Harvard University has announced a new ‘Game of Thrones class’ that it hopes will attract students to medieval studies and humanities courses in general.

‘The Real Game of Thrones: From Modern Myths to Medieval Models’ will draw parallels between the hugely popular HBO series and Eurasian history from c. 400 to 1500 AD. There will be a particular focus on “archetypal characters [such as] the king, the good wife, the second son, the adventurer, and so on — with distinct analogues in medieval history, literature, religion, and legend.”

The course will be taught by Sean Gilsdorf, a medieval historian and administrative director and lecturer on medieval studies, and his colleague Racha Kirakosian, an assistant professor of German and the study of religion.

Iconic #AzureWindow arch featured in ‘Game of Thrones’ collapses t.co/feFTVjRCVBpic.twitter.com/gOEZUGTNya
— RT (@RT_com) 9 March 2017

“Game of Thrones does dramatize nicely some fundamental things going on in medieval courts. Tensions between a queen and the younger women who marry their sons are some ‘Real Housewives of 10th-century Germany’ kind of stuff, where you see these women going after each other,” Gilsdorf told Time.

The course will focus on mythology from across the world, such as the Irish epic An Táin bó Cúailnge(The Cattle Raid of Cooley), a 10th-century account of the Islamic world by a traveler named Ibn Fadlan, and the medieval German epic Nibelungenlied, among others.

“When I read medieval verse epics with my students, they’d say, ‘Oh, that’s like in Game of Thrones,’” Kirakosian told Time. “No, if anything at all, it’s the other way around. Isn’t it partly our job [as professors] to use that interest and go deeper?” he said.

While the course is obviously aimed at drawing fans of the show, it’s part of a wider trend among third-level institutions in the US that are struggling to attract new enrollments in humanities courses.

The number of bachelor’s degrees earned in the humanities dropped by 8.7 percent between 2012 and 2014, according to a 2016 report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

UC Berkeley already announced that it will be offering a course in the fictional Dothraki language entitled ‘The Linguistics of Game of Thrones and the Art of Language Invention’.

The course was created by David J. Peterson, who earned his Master’s degree in Linguistics at UC San Diego in 2005 and got a job on Game of Thrones in 2009 as a language designer and consultant.

Whether potential Harvard students are willing to fork out up to $40,000 per year for the privilege of taking a Game of Thrones class remains to be seen.

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I fucking KNEW this shitty show was nothing but propaganda.

they've been trying to metropolitanize fantasy for decades now to hide any legitimate roots of white spirituality found within. GRRM's garbage is just a telenovela with difference sets.

Are they going the way of depaul?

The series have nothing with the books since the second season onward.
The books are good.

...

Hah, no.

Only retards go to Harvard anymore, so this make sense. Could you imagine a school of niggers, legacies, and jews? I doubt much learning has been done there in the past 3 decades… or 5…

Gee the fact that it's on American Television wasn't clear its propaganda?

wow. so he literally writes shitty pop fantasy and people laud him as a literary genius.

Harvard keeps going down the tubes

Why the fuck would anyone need that trash to be attracted t that subject? I guess the student body is now so "diverse" and judiazed that no one want to study the achievements of "fucking White males."

This fat, greasy cocksucker (who tries to compare himself to Tolkien, who was a master of Nordic myth and languages and a genuine genius….this is an obese TV writer."

This reminds me of some fucking Starcraft class Berkley had.

What a disgrace. This kind of educational laziness is exactly what happens when you stop taking students of serious academic merit and instead focus on the characteristics they've got no control over (especially race and legacy status). But hey, at least it's diverse now, right???

I visited the Harvard area a few months back and was dismayed at all the screaming homeless blacks and careless students I saw there. They desperately need some genuinely hardworking white kids there, preferably conservatives.

Dragon-kin here. Its not good that humans would try to find out about us through filthy fictional stories like about mother of dragons.
They need to be destroyed.

what they need is kike professors hanging from lamp posts

Is Harvard losing money? Are American colleges about to have a huge market collapse or something? Even Canadian colleges are not this dumb. I know new colleges enrollment is in a record low yet high school graduation is up. nbcnews.com/business/personal-finance/college-enrollment-going-down-will-tuition-fees-follow-f2D11620229

The university here has a "cartoon science" class where you watch episodes of batman and discuss/analyze the physics of what is happening in the show. This is just another scam to get people into debt taking useless courses obviously.

Is mr enter teaching a class?

I'm so fucking tired of all these garbage pop culture references.

Cocksuckers have an endowment of something like $12 billion shekels, maybe more. very much doubt it. It's a dumb article, trashing a school that certainly deserves trashing, but they're picking all the wrong reasons.

My aunt use to scold me by saying I wasted my life for not taking high school seriously because I could've ended up as Harvard materiel…. did I have the last laugh after all? I went to trade school to become a welder and fixing to join the army.

I was talk about American colleges in general. People are not enrolling like they use too.

no mate, when they say "enrollment going down" they mean shitty schools. The admissions rate at the "elite" schools actually keeps going down. My UG went from 31% admissions rate to 14% last year. Meanwhile, year I went to school Harvard's admission was 14%.
What's causing it? Rich chinks from overseas, AA, who plethora of shit. Nut not, schools like Harvard, Yale, Stanford and the elite liberal arts are not having shekels issues. It's the shitty colleges you've never heard of that are getting fucked, and in general they deserve it. A …degree in Womenyz Studies from Hair Pie University is not going to help you get a decent job.

Elite schools. Are you not talking state schools?

Next up is Rick and Morty class.

That sounds believable. Didn't twin peaks get a class?

Reserve half the seats for Holla Forumsacks.

It is the only way

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This, even one seat's fine