For information on registration, preregistration, and days and times, please refer to the Registrar's Schedule of Courses.
History 508P-00P: Revolutionary France, 1750-1815
Miller; MAX:12
Paper-writing section taken after History 508 – Written permission of instructor required.
History 535P-00P: U.S. Foreign Relations
Harbutt; MAX:12
Paper-writing section taken after History 535P - Written permission of instructor required.
History 560P-00P: Topics in Colonial Latin American History
Socolow; MAX:12
Paper-writing section taken after History 560 – Written permission of instructor required.
History 562R: Themes/Approaches Latin American History: New Paradigms, Old Trends (Same as ANT 585/ILA 790)
Lesser; MAX:8; Tu 1:00-4:00
Content: This course is designed to provide participants with methodological and topical approaches to Latin American history via a series of thematic themes spanning the region’s colonial and modern periods. The themes capture both traditional and new approaches to the region’s rich past. Analytical concerns revolve around the relationship between methodology and empirical conclusions and how scholars’ shifting intellectual and political agendas have led them to integrate different disciplinary approaches into the study of history.
Texts: We will read a combination of “canonical” and newer works in the field, generally at the rate of two monographs per week.
History 583: Introduction to Advanced Historical Study
Adamson/Ravina; MAX:12; Th 1:00-4:00
Content: The goals of this course are (1) to introduce students to the influential paradigms that, though often tracing back to earlier scholarship, continue to animate and shape historical research and writing today; (2) to make students more aware of assumptions and preconceptions that precede hours in the archives and at the writing table; and (3) to introduce some conceptual milestones in history and cognate disciplines and understand how their practitioners have wrestled with questions of research, analysis, interpretation and presentation.
History 585-001: Special Topics in History: Histories of Medicine & Disease in the West (Same as ILA 790)
Kushner; MAX:12; Tu 1:00-4:00
Content: This seminar examines the competing claims about the purposes, meanings and uses of “history” for the understanding of medicine and disease in the West since the 19th century. While medical education has emphasized biographies of “great” physicians and stories of professional scientific progress to provide a means of professional identity, academic historians have been critical of this approach. In contrast academic historians have emphasized the need to place medical claims in wider social, cultural, and ideological contexts. As a result physicians and academics often employ “history” for incommensurate purposes. Recently, a third approach has emerged, drawing on the technical knowledge of medical practitioners and researchers along with the critical analyses of academic historians in order to use the histories of medicine as a tool for medical problem solving. This seminar will examine these approaches, and others, in order to gain a fuller appreciation of the extent to which assumptions about what constitutes historical inquiry frames both the possibilities and limitations of cross disciplinary interdisciplinary collaborations.
History 585-002: Special Topics in History: Plato (Same as PHIL 510)
Patterson/Patterson; MAX:3; W 6:00-9:00
Content: Plato subjected all aspects of traditional Greek culture in general, and Athenian society in particular, to philosophical criticism. But he also tried to devise religious practices and institutions, and new myths that would genuinely serve the naturally good ends of individuals and their communities. The course will focus especially on Plato’s treatment of Greek religion and myth (with some of their inevitable connections to politics, tragedy, et al.) and his attempts to forge a new, moral, vision of the cosmos, human society and the human soul.
Texts: Plato, Complete Dialogues
Particulars: Participation in discussion, presentation to seminar, term paper.
History 585-003: Special Topics in History: Violence: A History
Crais; MAX:12; W 4:00-7:00
This is an interdisciplinary seminar on violence and the human condition. We will explore definitions of violence, the ways different interpretive practices and communities have understood violence, and issues such as violence and memory. Readings will range across time and space, and will engage with disciplines such as anthropology, history, literary theory, and psychoanalysis. We will also engage with classic historical problems such as the relationship between violence and the state, violence and empire, as well as contemporary issues such as insurrections and terrorism. The seminar will be of interest to students in History, Anthropology, Literary Criticism, and allied disciplines.
Particulars: Students will be required to produce short weekly responses, in addition to a substantial research project.
History 585-004: Special Topics in History: Early Modern European & the Atlantic World
Melton; MAX:12; W 4:00-7:00
Content: This seminar focuses on aspects of European transatlantic migration and settlement from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. It attempts to integrate narratives of origin and settlement by exploring, on the one hand, the various motives that led Europeans to leave their native lands and forge new lives in an alien environment, and on the other, how their social, cultural, and political experiences in the “Old World” shaped their encounter with the “New.” Without neglecting broader structural themes, such as the expansion of mercantile capitalism or the rise of transatlantic empires, the course also explores microhistorical perspectives that illuminate issues of migration, settlement, and cultural encounter at the level of everyday experience.
Texts: J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492; Marianne S. Wokeck, Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America; James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670-1730; Jon Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World; Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic; David Cressy, Coming Over; Richard White, The Middle Gound: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815; Aaron Fogleman, Jesus is Female: Moravians and Radical Religion in Early America
History 585-005: Special Topics in History: Subaltern Citizens and their Histories: Investigations from South and North (Same as ANT 585)
Pandey/Knauft; MAX:4; Tu 1:00-4:00
Content: The aim of this seminar is to open up fresh avenues of inquiry into questions of subalternity and marginalization, and the political conflicts that flow from these. We will focus on the question of power relations, the production and reproduction of subalternity, and the struggles surrounding this. Central to the exercise is a close attention to history. We shall examine the importance of inherited cultures, discourses and practices, as well as changing resources and contexts, in the making of - and resistance to - particular relations of dominance and subordination.
The seminar seeks to re-frame the discussion on these themes by recasting the subaltern – classically seen in the figure of the Third World peasant – as subaltern-citizen. The positing of ‘citizenship’, statutory or anticipated, restores to the subaltern the position of being a two part subject-object, and recognizes the layered and intricate character of the political structures, institutions and opportunities within which subalternity has been located, reinforced and re-inscribed at different times and in different places. We will take our examples from countries of both the South and the North – South Asia, North and South America, Africa and other areas being studied by participants in the seminar. The histories we wish to engage are the histories of the disfranchised in the broadest sense of that term – in the past and the present: gays, lesbians and transsexuals; dispossessed indigenous communities; New York taxi drivers; Rajasthani laborers in Delhi; African-American and Dalit women; African-Americans, Dalits and women, to take a few examples from India and the USA alone. In one frame, these are histories of the homeless, the uninsured and the marginalized (and these are always relative terms, as we know very well); in another, of materially more comfortable citizens who are even so not allowed to be part of the polis or city, that is to say, citizens in the classic sense.
The point of the seminar is not to cover the entire spectrum of subaltern conditions and histories in different parts of the world, but rather to recognize the variation and sophistication of inherited histories and cultures; religious, political and economic rituals; states and state policies; and to underline the highly differentiated character of subaltern groups and their politics, without losing sight of the undoubted facts of immiserization, oppression and marginalization.
History 585-006: Special Topics in History: Fin-de-Siecle Europe
Vick; MAX:12; Tu 4:00-7:00
Content: This discussion-driven seminar will explore recent trends in the study of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, with a focus upon the crisis-ridden transition to mass politics, mass culture, and urban modernity. The course will touch on both high and popular culture, the development of urban modernity and modernism, the rise of radical nationalist and antisemitic politics, the relationship between colonialism and the metropole, changing conceptions and experiences of gender, the invention of tradition, and the spread of urban currents into rural areas. You may also find yourselves becoming strangely familiar with the world cities of Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, our prime examples. The range of important and innovative approaches covered should make this course of use to students researching or preparing exams in other fields as well.
Texts: Readings may include: Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture; Stephen Beller, ed., Rethinking Vienna 1900; Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris; Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900; H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany; Edward Berenson, The Trial of Madame Caillaux; Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town; Pieter M. Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria; and various articles available electronically.
Particulars: Active participation in class discussion; a short analytical review; presentations; a longer historiographic review essay.
History 585-007: Special Topics in History: Telling Muslim Lives (Same as MESAS 570R/RLAR 738/CPLT 752)
Newby; MAX:4; W 1:00-4:00
Content: One of the earliest, most prominent and durative genres of historical writing among Muslims has been the genre of biography. Through primary sources in translation and secondary scholarship, this seminar will examine the ways in which Muslims have told about the lives of Muslims, including themselves, from the time of the beginnings of Islam to the present. It will start with the Sacred Biographies of Muhammad, look at the encyclopedic biographies of the generations immediately after Muhammad, the lives of saints, lawyers, poets and politicians, and end with the modern versions of those biographies and autobiographies and the influences on their formation.
History 585-008: Special Topics in History: Nineteenth-Century U.S.
Roark/Prude; MAX:12; W 1:00-4:00
Content: This course explores developments, institutions, and events that shaped American society in the nineteenth-century. In specific, though intensive readings and discussions, we’ll explore a variety of topics, including slavery and free labor; race and race relations; the spread of the market and commercial relations; plantation agriculture; industrialization, immigration, and urbanization; abolition and pro-slavery ideologies and movements; class relations; gender; family; and culture. More generally, we’ll examine the meaning of the Mason-Dixon line in American history.
History 585: Special Topics in History: The Problem of Life and the Philosophy of Life (Same as ILA 790/CPLT 751)
Goodstein; MAX: ; Th 9:30-12:30
Content: As the de Anima attests, philosophical attempts to grasp the meaning of life are coeval with the western philosophical tradition itself. In modernity, however, the category of life became a problem in entirely new ways. Contemporary concerns about life center less on its definition, interpretation, and proper conduct than on its malleability, manipulability, reproducibility, and indeed technological producibility. This course will attempt a genealogy of what is quite literally a transformation in the meaning of life in modernity in an effort to understand not just the philosophical but also the historical and cultural significance of that transformation. After briefly considering predecessors from Aristotle to Emerson, we will focus on the “philosophy of life” that emerged in the late nineteenth century in response, on one hand, to Kant’s radical rethinking of philosophy itself and, on the other, to developments in the natural sciences. Readings will include work by James, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Simmel, Bergson, and Freud. Time permitting, we will consider how Lebensphilosophie is criticized and extended in Husserl and Heidegger and explore later thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Maturana, and Agamben who take up the problem of life in new ways.
History 585P-00P: Seminar Papers
Faculty
Paper-writing section taken after History 585 – Written permission of instructor required.
History 596R-00P: Special Studies
Faculty
Written Permission of Instructor Required
Content: Attendance in an undergraduate course with satisfactory completion of those course requirements as well as additional graduate-level assignments as required by instructor.
History 597R-00P: Directed Reading
Faculty
Written Permission of Instructor Required
History 599R-00P: Research
Faculty
MUST BE TAKEN S/U
Content: Variable credit. For M.A.-level students.
History 786A: Introduction to College Teaching
Prude; Th 4:00=7:00
MUST BE TAKEN S/U
Content: This course is a practical introduction to college teaching, following up on the summer TATTO course. We will orient the course toward various tasks and problems normally encountered in teaching for the first time at the university level. Assignments include developing a syllabus and essay exams, giving practice talks, and so forth. We’ll work in various combinations such as pairs and small groups to maximize feedback and give additional hands-on experience.
History 786B: Introduction to College Teaching
Faculty
Written permission of instructor required; MUST BE TAKEN S/U
Content: The student works with a member of the department in conducting a course, including giving an occasional lecture or leading a discussion group. This course must be taken S/U.
History 799R: Advanced Research
Faculty
MUST BE TAKEN S/U
Content: Variable credit (1 to 12 hours). Designed to give doctoral students opportunity for individual research on their dissertation subjects. Credit for this course will normally be given only after completion of 32 hours of work in 500-level courses in the doctoral program.