Teaching

Gili is the best instructor I have ever had. She cared so obviously and deeply for the material, the course, and her students, and this care was infectious. Even as a person who never intended to enjoy Social Studies 10, Gili’s enthusiasm and empathy changed the way I saw the course and theory in general. She gave such effective lectures, broke down concepts incredibly well, and was always there to answer questions. I am eternally grateful to have been taught by Gili, and anyone who gets her as their tutorial leader is incredibly lucky.

Gili is literally the best. I could not sing her praises more. She facilitates amazing discussions by starting section with a list of questions that give our discussions structure and purpose. It never feels aimless or random. She also provides handouts with definitions and key points from the texts that are very helpful. I come away from EVERY section with a better understanding of what we read. She is willing to challenge our analysis of the text, while still making me feel comfortable and welcome in class. She returns assignments so quickly it’s honestly astounding. She holds a conference with each person to discuss their essay and gives such specific, helpful feedback (even at the sentence or word level). As a person, she is so kind and I feel like she genuinely cares about me. She has helped me grow so much as a writer, and grow in my confidence in myself.

Gili is INCREDIBLE. Hands down has made my experience in social studies a 10000/10. I feel so lucky to have her as a section leader. She always gives timely feedback on essays + meets with us individually + goes into great detail with her notes. She is always willing to meet multiple times in office hours. She does a great job breaking down every single text into several main points to take away.

Gili has, singlehandedly, changed my trajectory at Harvard. I genuinely do not think I would be continuing in social studies if I was not in her section. Coming into class, I was pretty skeptical of how much I would enjoy the class and readings; it all felt like a bit of a chore. Over the course of the semester, however, she really helped me (and everyone else!) find what was fun and compelling about intellectual history. She did a great job pushing us forward without being pretentious at all; it was great to know that we weren’t judged on our opinion of the authors, or that we wouldn’t be put down for asking questions. She also did a great job creating an enjoyable section environment, both in terms of the respect she gave us as students, and in terms of the community she helped foster.

Gili Kliger is the absolute BEST section leader you can get. Gili combines three things perfectly: a deep understanding of the text with a particular critical eye towards each thinkers biases and problematic elements, a light–hearted welcoming nature that makes each individual comfortable with each other and happy to be in section, and a grounded understanding of us as undergrads who might not enter academic (which leads to practical considerations and pragmatic discussions about what the theory we read means for us as people over us as ‘scholars’). I would not be in Social Studies if not for Gili. I wouldn’t understand most thinkers, nor be able to deal with their problematic or difficult ideas.

I am so grateful to have been assigned to Gili’s section. She makes a point to center the discussion around the original texts that we study, but regularly checks for understanding. She makes the content significantly more digestible, organizing class time in such a way that important themes and ideas are made concrete. Her feedback on assignments is both thorough and prompt, and she meets with each student to talk through her comments after each essay. She has always been easy to contact and responsive to requests for extensions, additional meetings, and other forms of support. I truly believe that Gili prioritizes student understanding and growth. Thank you, Gili!

Gili is one of the best instructors I’ve had at Harvard, she is enthusiastic and engaging and really gives us the space to feel comfortable in the tutorials. The discussions are always very productive and interesting, mainly because she comes prepared with specific questions to try to answer together and book exerts to read. Her feedback on the essays is always a few days after submitting it (which is super rare at Harvard, instructors take a long time to return essays) and has been very helpful and very accurate and its clear that she takes time to read it in depth and discuss it with each student. She is very fair with her decisions on deadlines extensions etc and I think she deserves the respect and admiration she gets from the classmates.

Gili is an incredible tutorial leader!!! I am extremely grateful to have learned from and with her. She gives extremely extensive feedback so we always know where we went wrong. She guides our discussions perfectly during tutorial, and I love that she provides us with overarching questions for each reading. She is always available to us and provides so much support for our essays. She also makes the readings so much easier to understand, but she does so by prompting us to think rather than just explaining things outright. I am eternally grateful to have had Gili, and I am excited that she will be my concentration adviser for the next few years.

Words cannot describe how grateful I am for Gili. I was very intimidated to take this course and was very prepared to drop it before the course even started. However, through the individual meetings I was able to have with Gili to clarify readings and truly understand them, through all the preparation she put into the mini–presentations she gave before tutorial to kick–off our discussion, through all the times she was able to help us gather our thoughts in tutorial when we went on tangents, through all the extra–material she prepared for us to better understand the text, and through all the genuine feedback she gave on the essays, Gili made Social Studies 10 the most enjoyable and eye–opening courses I have taken at Harvard. Gili is such a phenomenal instructor and anyone who is able to take a class with her should consider themselves extremely lucky to have an instructor that cares as much about the course material and about her students as Gili does.

Gili is a phenomenal teacher. I was nervous at first to enter social studies, but having Gili as my tutorial leader has completely shaped my experience into a positive one. Gili inspires students to perform at their highest level because she knows you can. She constantly challenged me to dig deeper into the material, while also providing me support along the way. Her feedback has definitively shaped me into a better writer and reader. Her essay feedback is timely, constructive, and immensely helpful in improving my work. She facilitates fascinating discussions while also encouraging conversations to flow naturally. Social studies is a difficult course, and each week brought new challenges with the material. Yet, Gili’s determination to help us understand the material was clear in her teaching style and tutorial structures. Although I have suggestions for social studies improvement of course material, Gili is the one aspect of the course that continued to remind me of its importance and value as she would ground us in why these conversations and authors were important to read even if we disagreed with them. Overall, Gili is a phenomenal instructor and I feel lucky to have her as my academic advisor moving forward.

As in the previous semester, Gili continued to a phenomenal tutorial leader. To be frank, some of the lectures this semester were not the most helpful to my learning style but the way that Gili broke down the readings in tutorial and helped lead/direct discussion was so helpful in understanding the readings. Also, Gili like always continued to be very generous with her time outside the class when it came to clarifying the readings, brainstorming for papers, or even just getting general career/academic/life advice. I am very grateful for Gili and will continue to proudly say she is a huge reason why I ended up declaring my concentration in social studies and why now I know social studies is where I meant to be.

Gili is the best teacher I’ve ever had. She single handedly turned me into a Social Studies concentrator from a STEM concentrator. She was so helpful in understanding course content and readings. Her papers were reasonable and her feedback was great. She really cares about her students.

I feel so lucky to have had Gili as my tutorial leader! She is very passionate and engaged in the subject matter and works to helps students feel the same way. She was very organized – with handouts prepared to make the course content more understandable and a list of quotes/ sections of the readings she wanted us to go over and discuss at each section. The feedback she gave was also amazing, not only highlighting areas we could improve – but helping us come up with ways in which to do so. She is also readily available for office hours appointments and very easy to keep in contact with!

Gili Kliger was the best teacher I had this semester. It is so clear how much she cares about the content and about her students. Gili makes a consistent effort to ask about our lives outside of class, and, most importantly, remembers all the details. I have struggled to find a teacher at Harvard that makes me feel seen, and it has been so refreshing to have Gili as a teacher. All of our section loves her, and we are so grateful for all of her knowledge. Even when I don’t make it to lecture that week (or didn’t have time to completely understand the book/thinker), I leave tutorial every week with a significantly deeper understanding of everything we read. And her enthusiasm for the course content is infectious––it makes us love it too. She is the reason I am taking 10b next semester.

Gili is the absolute best!! In each tutorial, she presents key questions that we are going to answer by the end of class. We go through the text together to understand what is being said and discuss how it is applicable to the historical context and society today. Gili often provides other suggestions of materials we could read if we were interested in a specific topic. She provides supplementary material in class and also does different activities to make it more interactive. In some classes, she gave a mini– lecture to help us better understand the history behind the text and what the theorist was saying. You can really tell how much effort she puts into teaching the class and how knowledgable she is about all the material. Gili is also so accessible outside of class. She is incredibly helpful when brainstorming a thesis for essays or trying to understand the material. Gili takes a true interest in her students and tries to get to know them. She helped me pick out some of my courses for next semester and suggested other books I could read or opportunities I could take. She also fosters a great class culture. For one of our reflection papers, we had to do a group paper rewriting the master–slave dialectic and it was a great bonding activity. Gili also makes her self available after class for a bit to just talk about life and catch up. All of her feedback on papers comes back pretty quickly after and her comments are always super insightful and helpful. She explains each comment to make sure we understand what’s going on. I feel so lucky that I got Gili as a tutorial leader!

TAKE THIS CLASS!!!!!! Gili is one of the best instructors I have had in my life. She cares so much about this subject and the contributions of every student. She listens and appreciates everything each student says, and she is more than willing to meet with you about any question or concern. Many professors say this, but with Gili, you feel encouraged to meet not out of obligation but because you know it will benefit you. The structure of each class is really helpful because she outlines where you will go and what information you should take away from each part of the lesson. The readings are also super interesting, and lots of the history you discuss seems like stuff you should have been taught about in previous courses but never got the chance to learn. The assignments of this course are SUPER helpful when drafting your final paper. I love that we learned about historiographies and primary source analyses and could just use the assignments we had already written as sections of our final paper. This was also really helpful because we had already gotten feedback on parts of our final paper when we started drafting it. The type of people that this course attracts is also great, and I loved the energy of everyone I took it with. This was probably one of my favorite classes I have taken at Harvard, and I can’t recommend it enough. Social Studies is a better place because Gili is in it, and this course is part of the reason why!

I could not recommend this class more. This class will absolutely change your perspective on reparations, reciprocity on a global and individual level, and possibilities for future justice. The texts are SO interesting – I would end up talking about our texts from class in many of my other classes. I love how we studied a fascinating and global set of different case studies on reparations. Gili is also the BEST instructor you could ask for. She is so supportive while also giving you incredibly detailed and helpful feedback. I come away from this course as a much better writer and researcher because of her. She also makes sure that every single discussion is valuable and instructive. I love how she structures our discussions around several central questions and also synthesizes key takeaways for us to remember. She ensures that you will come away from this course with valuable knowledge and you will enjoy every class. TAKE THIS CLASS!!!!!!!! YOU WILL HAVE THE BEST TIME!!!!!

This is an incredible course! If you’re interested in history and/or the relationship between the government and the governed, definitely take it. There is a lot of reading but each week is so interesting and it’s so cool to see the common threads between each of the reparations cases.

I would definitely recommend taking this course. Every facet of this class is set up to help you success, and Gili is truly the most engaged and supportive tutorial leader you could ask for. She has such a depth of expertise in this field. In addition to this, her style of teaching is so centered on the student experience. Even though this was a difficult course, I have rarely felt like I had so much space to just genuinely learn rather than perform in an academic space. It was amazing to not only learn from the course material week–to–week but from my peers, as well, as we each explored our own topics for our final research paper throughout the semester. I am so grateful to have taken this course, and I feel so much more confident as a student and researcher after this class. So much of that is thanks to Gili! Cannot recommend enough.

This is a great course. Dr. Kliger is wonderful, and the way you think about justice will be completely molded by these cases and the discussions. This course handles heavy subjects, so work to build a community within your classmates and Dr. Kliger. Set aside enough time to do the readings because they are so worthwhile. Do not procrastinate your research paper. Plan ahead!

Gili is the best and this was one of the most interesting classes I have taken at Harvard! It is difficult and there is a ton of reading (200+ pages each week) but the conversations are very interesting and you will learn a ton. The papers are well spread out and prepare you for the final project (20–25 page essay). Definitely go to office hours which are very easy to schedule and you will be ok! Such an interesting course.

This was a great junior tutorial. Everything in the class felt new and was intellectually stimulating. The topic is super relevant for so many issues and I learned so much history I previously hadn’t known. Gili is amazing: knowledgeable, effectively facilitates discussion, super helpful and supportive with our individual research projects, and also just very friendly, approachable, and calm. She made the course feel very organized and everything felt in control — even with our 25 page paper. Because of the diversity of cases that we examined, there will definitely be a week that each person finds super interesting.

I have learned so much about what reparations truly mean in this course. This tutorial really did everything it could to set us up for success, with guiding assignments, consistent feedback, and open opportunities to speak with Gili about our research process. Gili found a perfect balance between giving us the structure we needed to consistently work on our assignments and apply feedback while also giving us space to navigate our learning opportunities. Each element, even if not especially our research diary entries, were created with our experience and learning in mind, and it was felt as a student. This course has been among the most important I have taken in my time here.

I came away from this class with several key takeaways – reparations absolutely are possible and have occurred numerous times throughout history. However, our existing legal frameworks do not accommodate well for them. Reparations also reflect the existing power disparities. I come away from this course with a transformed belief in the importance of reciprocity on a global and individual scale. I absolutely LOVE how our final class ended with key takeaways from the course and even a key takeaway for our personal lives – studying reparations asks us to reconsider how our inherited sense of entitlements informs our relations in the world. A lot of classes on historical injustice can be depressing, but this one genuinely gave me hope that reparations are attainable and that fully acknowledging our complicated pasts is a worthwhile project. Thank you so much, Gili!!!!!

I took away a deep understanding of reparations in law and history, a variety of examples of successful and unsuccessful reparations cases, and applications to contemporary society for building a case for reparations. This course made me strongly believe in reparations as a reparative and necessary form of justice

This class was fantastic! Gili is so passionate about the material and made a huge effort to help us understand the topic and feel comfortable participating in class. I learned about reparations from all angles: historical, legal, social, economic. I also feel as though I grew a ton as a writer in this class.

This was probably one of my favorite classes I have taken at Harvard. I learned so much about successful/unsuccessful cases of reparations and gained a broader understanding of what reparations can mean and what it means to owe and be owed. I also learned how to think about harm and redress in more expansive ways, and I think I will take that with me in many of the courses I take in the future. Not only will the information I learned in this course enhance my academic experience, but I believe it will improve the way I interact with my peers and my future career as well. This course will definitely enhance my thesis work, especially because I was walked through the steps of crafting a historiography and primary source analyses. Basically, everything I learned in this course changed me, and I am so grateful for it.

Gili is amazing and the syllabus and readings created such a comprehensive picture of the history of reparations! The class was a very comfortable place to talk and participation from everyone was welcomed and encouraged. The assignments were well spread out. Gili was very accessible outside of class and eager to help us learn.

This course went above and beyond the syllabus. Great survey of themes, examples, and wonderful discussion community fostered by Dr. Kliger. This course provided support in building toward a large research project and was a fantastic junior tutorial since it taught methods, examples, and time–management along with the course materials.

This course was amazing! The syllabus was very thoughtfully designed – a perfect mix of primary and secondary sources and a diverse and fascinating range of case studies. I appreciated how we began the semester with a theoretical basis for understanding reparations as a subject and then dove into a series of cases that were chronologically organized. Gili always made sure that our in–class discussions were structured and engaging, and I came away from every class with a thorough understanding of the key points.