When doing research, some Harvard professors slip on white cotton gloves to protect 16-century manuscripts, or conduct controlled interviews in sterilized laboratories.

Others watch "The Simpsons."

Classes on Michael Jackson or the poodle skirt are relatively rare in Harvard's hallowed halls, but a handful of faculty members focus their energies on MTV instead of Machiavelli, and analyze Coca-Cola advertisements rather than Cezanne.

And their numbers are growing. Today, nearly every department in the humanities and the social sciences offers courses in contemporary popular culture.

Their ranks include linguist Bert R. Vaux, who sometimes illustrates his lectures with examples culled from the previous night's sitcoms, John R. Stilgoe, Orchard professor of the history of landscape development, who gives an entire lecture on Coca-Cola advertisements, and History and Literature instructor Stuart M. Semmel, whose class includes British pop music from the decades after World War II.

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A few decades ago, however, an academic analysis of artifacts of popular culture would have been practically unheard-of.

Lynne B. Layton, assistant clinical professor of psychology, remembers writing a paper on folk singer Joni Mitchell for a graduate class on Marxist aesthetics in 1974.

"I think my professor thought I was a lunatic," she says. "He was in his 40s, and probably didn't even know who Joni Mitchell was."

But, Layton says, she remembers feeling that Mitchell spoke more directly to her life than the other high cultural works they were studying.

Still, practitioners say resistance to the field of popular culture has not disappeared.

"I don't think that the academy yet fully welcomes it on a par with other disciplines," Layton says.

Layton recalls an article about Madonna she wrote a few years ago for the Boston Globe. The article attracted attention from other media, and in the aftermath, Layton was interviewed for several talk shows.

"The way [the media] framed the whole story was, `Can you believe they are teaching Madonna at Harvard?'" she says. "There was some real condescension about it."

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