Taught collaboratively by professors in Economics and Literary Studies, this course takes a long historical view, from two different disciplinary perspectives, of labor markets and how poverty is defined, from the early years of English capitalism up to the present global economy. Students will learn how economists think about wage labor and poverty, as well as learning some of the cultural history of labor and its evil twin, poverty. They will learn how to analyze and interpret complex literary texts, how to analyze and compare different economic theories of labor and poverty, and how to understand both literature and theory in their historical and cultural contexts.