Alessandro Giammei greeted me with smiling eyes and a happy “Ciao!” as I settled onto a bright red couch in his office, hugged to my left by a Mona Lisa throw pillow. It’s hard to forget how his warmth and enthusiasm seemed to wash through every corner of the room—the shelves bursting with books stacked upon board games, the walls a mosaic of sticky notes and postcards, the mid-afternoon sunlight slanted but beaming. I felt myself fall relaxed, curious, ready to learn.
As I asked my first question, Giammei leaned forward on his swivel chair. He’s bald and has, in the words of former student Charlie Patton TD ’27, “a very profound goatee.” I asked Giammei how he became involved with the Six Global Perspectives program. He replied, “it’s a dream.”
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Since 2019, the Humanities Department has run the Six Pretty Good program, first taught as the standalone course Six Pretty Good Books, later as a collection of seminars. Its current iteration is the result of years of evolution, nurtured by alliances between Yale College deans, professors, and students across disciplines. And the evolution is still ongoing: this fall, the department rebranded the program as Six Global Perspectives, or 6GPx.
Despite changes in form, the program’s core tenets have remained the same. 6GPx doesn’t have an explicit mission statement, nor does it carry—like the Humanities department’s flagship first-year program Directed Studies—a weighty and storied past. Instead, its spirit tends towards the more playful, inventive, irreverent. While the name change from “Six Pretty Good” to “Six Global Perspectives” heralds a less ironic overtone, the program still focuses on curating surprising selections of materials (Du Fu and Dante Alighieri, Mulan and Ironman) and poking at established disciplinary boundaries (lines between fiction and biography, commonalities between trial accounts and folklore). At the root of it all, the program aims to teach students how the humanities can reshape your thinking about everything around you: to delight in a worldview renewed.
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The history of 6GPx began with a collective impulse. Luke Rambo Bender, who currently co-directs the program with Giammei, said there had been a desire to offer “introductions to the humanities that were more cross-cultural, more global in scope.” Bender’s appointment in 2016 by both East Asian Languages & Literatures and the Humanities program was part of an effort to expand the humanities curriculum in new directions, potentially creating a program that would be complementary to Directed Studies, with a more global focus.
Shawkat Toorawa, Professor of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations and Comparative Literature and current acting chair of the Program in Humanities, was one of the founding faculty members of 6GPx. Upon his arrival at Yale in 2016, he noted an opportunity for more humanities courses targeted at first-years. “Some students were doing Directed Studies,” said Toorawa, “for the other remaining 1000 students, wouldn’t it be good if we had some curated options?”
Recognizing this need was easy; developing a program was harder. After their appointments, Bender and Toorawa worked alongside colleagues in other humanities departments to envision what such a program could look like—what writers to include, what approaches to take. This culminated in a one-day retreat, where faculty members deliberated to no final conclusion. “There were so many different ideas and so many competing ways of doing it that we didn’t go forward with a big project right away,” said Bender.
With no consensus on what direction to take, most faculty involved slowly fell away from the project. But a few remained. Eventually, Bender recalled, “It was Shawkat Toorawa who said: we just need to get a pilot going. How about we do six pretty good books from around the world? And that was the start.”
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Bender, Toorawa, and Tina Lu of East Asian Languages & Literatures collaborated in 2019 to create the first iteration of the Six Pretty Good program: Six Pretty Good Books, a seminar covering six books foundational to six different cultures. Toorawa said they wanted to “explode the idea of a canon, by not appealing to one specific canon.”
The course was an experiment in every aspect, from content to structure: “We told the students from the get go, please understand that you are the guinea pigs.” Toorawa and Lu also asked a then-sophomore, Alex Hu TD ’23, to serve as a rapporteur. Hu would observe what bored students and what excited them, providing that feedback to the professors throughout the term.
By the end of that first term, Toorawa told me that they realized six books without a unifying theme “was not the right way to do it”—there needed to be a common thread. So, when Ayesha Ramachandran and Marta Figlerowicz became co-directors in 2020, they bound the course to a theme: Six Pretty Good Selves. In the years after, the program has grown into a suite of courses on an eclectic collection of topics: Six Pretty Good Journeys, Six Pretty Good Dogs, Six Pretty Good Thought Experiments, and more.
After its first year, the program also became 1.5 credits, fulfilling a writing skills requirement through a lab on Friday afternoons. To facilitate this, the course has a Graduate Teaching Fellows team. Teaching Fellows help out with writing activities, grade student papers, and sit in on seminars. Initially, the lab ran three hours each week, alternating between writing workshops and visits to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Yale Peabody Museum. Many prior students found the three hours too long, and 6GPx remained sensitive to student feedback. “We wanted to retool the lab in a way that would be more helpful and less burdensome,” said Bender, “so that’s why they’re one hour now.”
As 6GPx has cycled through new themes, some professors have continued with the program and others have gone. Bender gave lectures on the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu in 2019’s Six Pretty Good Books; this term, in addition to co-directing the program, he offers a seminar called Six Global Perspectives on Poetry. Toorawa, on the other hand, has decided to step aside. “I felt that if the program was going to work, I needed to walk away,” he said, “It had to work not because of the people involved. It had to work because it worked.” He believes the program—now under Bender and Giammei’s co-direction—is in great hands.
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6GPx’s ultimate aim is to provide students an introduction to the humanities at Yale—but how do you introduce someone to the humanities? What ground do you need to cover? What training do you need to do? 6GPx tackles these questions from two distinct angles: cross-culturalism and accessibility.
By adopting a cross-cultural perspective, courses in 6GPx offer students many possible entry points into the humanities. “We get students who are more or less familiar with every single unit of things that we cover,” Bender explained, “Some students in my class, they know Du Fu, or they’ve read the Analects of Confucius before. Some have read Dante before. Some know something about Hinduism because it’s in their family background. But everyone is also a beginner with something.” Instead of an inequitable environment where some students might come in having years of experience while others come in entirely unfamiliar, in 6GPx all students can draw upon their own diverse areas of knowledge. And all students can encounter something new.
In this way, students also learn to challenge their own perspectives. For Giammei, who’s teaching Six Global Perspectives on Knights and co-directing the program, 6GPx presents “an exciting prospect to dissect your own and others’ cultural mythologies.” Born and raised in Italy, Giammei grew up immersed in his own cultural canon. “The way I was trained in Italy was to take reading Virgil for granted. How can you live without Virgil?” Similarly, he anticipates students growing up with their own assumptions.
“It’s a general experience that we’re often trained in the humanities as if certain things are necessarily the basics,” he told me, “Yet when you step out of your country, of your tradition, of the context in which you grew up, you find out that other people have a completely different mythology about what makes us human.” The point of 6GPx is to push students past their assumptions, to shed—in Giammei’s words—the “delusion of completeness.”
This goal is shared by his colleague, Victoria Almansa-Villatoro. Almansa-Villatoro is an Assistant Professor of Egyptology, and Six Global Perspectives on Evil will be one of her first courses at Yale. “The reason why I’m doing this is because I am interested in how culture influences our own perceptions of things in our world,” she said. Having written her own dissertation on Ancient Egyptian politeness, Almansa-Villatoro is fascinated by how our cultures shape us and how that changes from each era, each civilization.
Originally from a small city in the south of Spain, she has lived in Spain, Italy, and the United States. “I’ve had to learn a new language and get used to different customs two or three times in my life,” Almansa-Villatoro told me, “and one of the most beautiful things of this kind of career is that you really get exposed to so much and it really broadens your perspective. That’s what I hope to be able to transmit with this course.”
Many students, past and present, have felt their perspectives broadened. Patton, Giammei’s former student, said Six Pretty Good Knights—the prior name of 6GPx’s current course on the subject—is his favorite class that he’s taken at Yale. Learning about chivalric archetypes across cultures reshaped and still reshapes how he sees the world around him. “You were constantly thinking about it,” he said, “and the whole impact of the program is that you start to see these archetypes everywhere you look.”
Current students echo that sentiment. Hudson McNeel, JE ’29, is enrolled in Six Global Perspectives on Biography. So far, he’s left each class with a new understanding of how we tell stories about each other. “I’ve been thinking about it during my other classes even, because it’s honestly just so interesting,” he said. As he encounters new forms of biographical storytelling, McNeel finds himself reflecting more on his own day-to-day interactions with others: “It’s all just different backgrounds, different beliefs, different interests. You can break it down a million ways.”
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6GPx also promises to equip students with the tools to take on any future humanities course at Yale—to make the study of humanities accessible to all. Scarlet Perez MC ’27, a past student of Six Pretty Good Knights, said: “What really pushed me to take this specific class was that it’s catered towards a First Year Experience. They really help teach you how to approach writing essays in college.”
Accessibility is a key concern for Bender. “What we wanted to do, following the example of Professors Ramachandran and Figlerowicz, was to create a program that didn’t make any assumptions,” Bender said, “a program that would be useful for the people who are coming in with a lot of preparation, but would also give the students who don’t feel super comfortable with the humanities the same sort of preparation that their peers are coming in with.”
Such a balance isn’t easy to strike. After years of experimentation, 6GPx now approaches writing as a scaffolded process. “There are four steps along the way where we’re gonna check in on the process of writing a paper,” Bender explained, “And at each of those steps, you’re gonna get feedback.” This helps less experienced students along the process, but even for seasoned writers, it has something to offer. Eugenie Kim, MC ’29, hopes to form better writing habits. “I’m hoping to deconstruct my previous writing tendencies, and start building them up again—to gain writing skills that will last me from freshman year to even later,” she said.
6GPx labs also host collections visits. While some students may come into Yale with archival research experience, few will know the ins and outs of Yale’s own collections. For some students, that’s exactly 6GPx’s draw. “We have so much history—not just the idea of these physical artifacts, but the ability to go in person and have this experience of viewing it,” Camila Cervantes-Flores, SY ’29, said, “These courses are so important because they introduce first years like me to this concept that there’s no barrier to entry.”
Giammei hopes that time spent with these concrete pieces of history can challenge the misconception that studying humanities is simply: “you’re in your room, and you read, and then you think.”
“You can do the primary work of research even at the beginning of your career,” Giammei said, “You are looking at so much material at Beinecke that can be accessed – perhaps nobody has ever written about it. And you can be the first.”
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In all its years of experimentation and change, 6GPx has shifted forms in order to remain faithful to its initial spirit: to help students experience how liberating it is to stumble upon new ways of seeing the world.
“Learning is not a chore, right? Learning is a lifelong endeavor that should be exciting,” said Giammei. As we talked in his office, he himself exemplified the excitement that he holds for his work. It reminded me why I’ve chosen to be a humanities major myself. The field is not just about researching one particular subject, but constantly reshaping your reality, remaining humbled by every new world, new perspective, new person that you are fortunate enough to encounter. Without this constant challenge to ourselves—without knowing to look further than the here and now—how can we dare to imagine our future?
Of course, these are big claims. We only need to begin somewhere. “We’re not claiming that at the end of this program you’re going to be fully trained in the humanities,” Giammei said, “What we claim is that you will have a clearer idea of how the humanities can change whatever endeavor that you want to face. The strong conviction behind all this is that there’s not a job, there’s not a life worth living in which you don’t need a humanistic training.”
