Course:

HIST 120  War And Peace

Professor:

Sean McMeekin + Richard Aldous

CRN:

15600

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    3:30 PM – 4:50 PM RKC 103

Distributional Area:

HA Historical Analysis D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 44

Crosslists: Global & International Studies

This global course surveys the history of the international system since the outbreak of war in 1914. We will give particular attention to the three great conflicts of the twentieth century – World War I, World War II, and the Cold War – and the shifting balance of power in Europe and Asia. We will also explore the historiographic controversies that surround these events. Special prominence is given to the policies and strategy of the Great Powers, and the major ideological forces that defined them. In that way, our survey will help you achieve an understanding of the broad sweep of international history, and to be able to differentiate among the forces—including imperialism, fascism, communism, liberal capitalism, science, and globalism—that have disturbed the peace and shaped the world order.  (Global Core Course for History)

 

Course:

HIST 136  Surveying Displacement and Migration in the United States

Professor:

Jeannette Estruth  

CRN:

15601

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    6:40 PM – 8:00 PM Olin 201

Distributional Area:

HA Historical Analysis D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 22

Crosslists: American Studies; Architecture; Environmental & Urban Studies; Human Rights

This class will explore the twentieth-century American experience through the exercise of hands-on historical research methods. We will delve into the following themes in United States history: labor and markets, wealth and inequality, ethnic identity and race, and gender and the environment. Our tools of exploration will include readings, discussions, music, journalism, poetry, scholarly articles, digital content, and films. Upon successfully completing the course, students will be able to employ the methods of historical practice to navigate present-day questions related to political and social issues affecting contemporary society. Together, we will learn how to articulate opinions, grounded in history, about the politics, culture, and economics of the global United States.

 

Course:

HIST 152  Latin America: Independence, Sovereignty, and Revolution

Professor:

Miles Rodriguez  

CRN:

15602

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM – 1:10 PM Olin 201

Distributional Area:

HA Historical Analysis D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 15

Crosslists: American Studies; Global & International Studies; Human Rights; Latin American/Iberian Studies

Latin America is one of the world’s most diverse regions, now with over six hundred million people of African, Asian, European, Indigenous, Middle Eastern, and interracially-mixed descent, in at least twenty different independent nations. The largest Latin American country, Portuguese-speaking Brazil, and the second largest, the world’s most populous Spanish-speaking country, Mexico, as well as countries in the Spanish Caribbean like Cuba, Central America, and in Spanish South America, encompass rich and complex cultures and peoples. This course is an introductory historical survey of Latin America. It focuses on the tremendous, troubled, and often traumatic transformations and transitions that many of its distinct nations and peoples have experienced in struggles for independence, sovereignty, and revolution. The class examines the main historical issues and challenges of Latin America’s post-colonial independent national period, including persistent inequality, regional and national integration and disintegration, and global and international relations, as well as revolution, war, military rule, popular social movements, civil reconciliation, and continual violence. Its goal is to understand the incredibly complex and diverse meanings and histories of Latin America to the present. LAIS Core Course.

 

Course:

HIST 184  Inventing Modernity: Commune, Renaissance, and Reformation in Western Europe, 1291-1806

Professor:

Gregory Moynahan  

CRN:

15603

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    8:30 AM – 9:50 AM Olin 205

Distributional Area:

HA Historical Analysis  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 22

Crosslists: French Studies; German  Studies; Italian Studies

Using as its starting point Jacob Burckhardt’s classic account The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, this course will examine the role of the drastic upheavals of the early modern period in defining the origins of such modern institutions as capitalism, political individuality, religious freedom, democracy, and the modern military. The geographic focus will be the towns, cities, and peasant communes of the Italian and German speaking regions of Europe, particularly the Italian peninsula, Holy Roman Empire, and Switzerland.  Two apparently opposed developments will be at the center of our approach: first, the role of the autonomous peasant commune, particularly in Switzerland, as a model and spur for political forms such as democracy and anarchism; second, the development of modern capitalism and technology as they came to impinge on the traditional feudal and communal orders. The course will also address the historiography and politics surrounding the “invention” of the Renaissance in the late nineteenth century, looking particularly at Burckhardt’s relation with Ranke, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.

 

Course:

HIST 185  The Making of the Modern Middle East

Professor:

Omar Cheta  

CRN:

15604

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     10:10 AM – 11:30 AM Olin 202

Distributional Area:

HA Historical Analysis D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 22

Crosslists: Global & International Studies; Human Rights; Middle Eastern Studies

In this survey course, we will discuss major transformations that the Middle East witnessed from the late 18th century to the present. Topics include reform movements in the Ottoman Empire, European imperialism, nationalist movements (including the Arab-Israeli conflict), political Islam, military intervention, and the Arab Spring (and its aftermath). The course emphasizes the interaction between society, culture, and politics. Therefore, in addressing each of these broad themes, we will pay particular attention to their social and cultural aspects such as gender, labor, popular culture, and forms of protest. In addition to exploring modern Middle Eastern history, students will acquire critical thinking skills through examining primary documents and reflecting on the uses of history in contemporary contexts.

 

Course:

HIST 187  The Indian Ocean World: South Asia from a Transoceanic Perspective

Professor:

Rupali Warke  

CRN:

15971

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     3:30 PM – 4:50 PM Hegeman 201

Distributional Area:

HA Historical Analysis  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 20

Crosslists: Asian Studies; Global & International Studies

Being the ocean with the oldest evidence of transoceanic human activity,  the Indian ocean for centuries has transmitted people across continents, thus serving as an important channel of circulation and exchange. Therefore, the history of the Indian ocean is also the history of the people who traversed it. This class looks at the history of South Asia with a focus on the linkages of South Asia to East Africa, Southeast Asia, and West Asia. Students will explore this peripatetic human history through pathbreaking secondary works and critical primary sources. We will learn how people ‘inhabiting’ the Indian ocean were instrumental in the circulation and exchange of cultural, economic, and socio-political ideas and practices in the Indian Ocean Region. In particular, we focus on the confluence of the African and Asian trends from various eras and their impact on the global Afro-Asian cultures.

 

Course:

HIST 197  India Under Colonial Rule, 1750-1947

Professor:

Rupali Warke  

CRN:

15661

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM – 1:10 PM Hegeman 308

Distributional Area:

HA Historical Analysis  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 20

Crosslists: Asian Studies; Global & International Studies

After the demise of the great Mughal empire of India in the eighteenth century, the British gained power which eventually led to two hundred years of colonial rule ruled over South Asia. This course introduces students to the modern history of South Asia between the years 1750 and 1947. Students will learn how South Asia, a region consisting of several contemporary nation-states, came under colonial rule and how the indigenous communities navigated the colonial experience. Some of the main themes that this course explores are – the political rise of the British East India Company (EIC), the influence of western political thought on Indian society, Gandhi’s ideology of non-violence, socio-political movements against caste inequality, the emergence of extremist ideologies, and modernist women’s movements. Through critical primary and secondary textual as well as audio-visual sources, we will explore questions such as – How could the British rule over a culturally alien people for two hundred years? How did South Asians respond to western modernity? What is the significance of Gandhi in Indian history? What happened to caste during colonialism? What were the causes of political conflict between Hindus and Muslims?

 

Course:

HIST 2060  Swinging London: Britain in the Sixties

Professor:

Richard Aldous  

CRN:

15664

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    5:10 PM – 6:30 PM Reem Kayden Center 102

Distributional Area:

HA Historical Analysis  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 22

“There has been nothing quite like it,” the historian Arthur Marwick wrote of Britain in the 1960s, and “nothing would ever be the same again.” At the center of everything was London, which spread its cultural influence around the world. Carnaby Street and the King’s Road, Mary Quant and the mini skirt, Shirley Bassey, Mods, and Beatlemania, photographer David Bailey and the gangster Kray Twins, Michael Caine as “Alfie,” and the “Profumo Scandal”: they all represented a Swinging London that took Britain to the forefront of international culture, gossip, and fashion. A new openmindedness and progressive sensibility also brought political and social change, not least when Parliament decriminalized abortion and homosexuality, and introduced new race relations laws that made it illegal to discriminate against someone for the color of their skin. “The sixties saw an old world die,” said one Times columnist, “and a new one come to birth.” But there was another sixties too, one that took place away from the glare of fashion photographers and London newspapers. This sixties was one of slow evolution rather than revolution, when rising affluence was accompanied by fears of national decline, and where public tastes were often more conventional and resistant to change than they were “modern’” or anti-establishment. “People rarely remember,” points out historian Dominic Sandbrook, “that the soundtracks of The Sound of Music and South Pacific comfortably outsold any of the Beatles albums of the decade.” By examining the political, cultural and social history of these “two sixties,” this course takes stock of a complicated, often contradictory, even destructive, decade and a national experience where the Pill, “Twiggy,” and Small Faces were more than matched by bingo, bowls, and mowing the lawn. In doing so it asks if John Lennon was right all along when he quipped of the sixties, “Nothing happened except that we all dressed up.”

 

Course:

HIST 2241  Contemporary Russia

Professor:

Sean McMeekin  

CRN:

15606

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    11:50 AM – 1:10 PM Reem Kayden Center 101

Distributional Area:

HA Historical Analysis  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 18

Crosslists: Global & International Studies; Political Studies; Russian Eurasian Studies

This course provides an introduction to contemporary Russia and the CIS.  After examining the dilemmas of reform in the 1980s and the collapse of the Soviet Union, we will trace the different paths of Russia and the other successor states up to the present day.  Key themes include the command economy and efforts to liberalize it; the nature of the Soviet collapse and whether it was “inevitable”; market reforms and “shock therapy”; the hyperinflation of the early 1990s and its consequences; the rise of the mafia; the war(s) in Chechnya; the transition from Yeltsin to Putin, and the current scene.

 

Course:

HIST 2255  Shari’a and the History of Middle Eastern Society

Professor:

Omar Cheta  

CRN:

15607

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM – 1:10 PM Olin 201

Distributional Area:

HA Historical Analysis D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 22

Crosslists: Human Rights; Middle Eastern Studies; Study of Religions

Did shari’a stand out as a pre-modern legal tradition that was practiced in large parts of Asia and Africa? Was it particularly resistant to modern secular influences? Is today’s much debated shari’a the organic law of Middle Eastern society? This course explores how shari’a, commonly translated as “Islamic Law,” has been understood and practiced (or resisted) in the Middle East from the early modern period to the present. The course examines the place of shari’a in the social lives of both the Muslim & non-Muslim communities of the Ottoman Empire (16th-18th centuries). It considers how this particular early modern legacy shaped state and popular attitudes toward legal reform in the modern period (19th-20th centuries). Finally, the course investigates the contemporary politics of law in the contemporary Middle East, with an emphasis on its shari’a-inspired practices. Readings and class discussions will revolve around the intersection of shari’a with various social spheres such as religious conversion, gender, slavery, economy and human rights.

 

Course:

HIST 334  Finnegans Wake: Vico, Joyce, and the New Science

Professor:

Gregory Moynahan  

CRN:

15968

Schedule/Location:

Mon   Thurs    1:30 PM – 2:50 PM Olin 301

Distributional Area:

HA Historical Analysis  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 12

Crosslists: Experimental Humanities; Irish and Celtic Studies

In 1725, Giambattista Vico presented to the world a “New Science” of poetic imagination that was intended as a point-by-point re-contextualization of the already established foundations of the natural sciences of Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon. In 1939, with much of the world enveloped in fascism and on the verge of a new technological war, James Joyce presented an immersive demonstration of Vico’s science in Finnegans Wake. By turns confusing, hilarious, and profound, Joyce’s “vicociclometer” sought to provide a reorientation in myth and history of the relation of ancient and modern life, religion, and politics. In this course, we will use the “exception” provided by both texts to look at the norms of modern intellectual history, using selections in their context to reconsider the background assumptions of modern societies and their political implications. Central issues will include the destruction of oral and traditional cultures (and peoples) by print based-civilizations, the function of science and myth in the organization of modern life (particularly as mediated by law), the definition of individuals and collectives by narrative and institutional form, the relation of written history to power, the function of technological media in politics, and the place of complexity in aesthetics and life. A central theme will be the history of the book as it develops among other media technologies, which we will thematize through the use of Bard’s collection of the facsimiles of Joyce’s voluminous notecards on Finnegans Wake (the so-called “Buffalo Manuscripts”). The only prerequisite for this class is to have read Joyce’s Ulysses, which will be used as a sort of methodological tool-kit and skeleton key for understanding Finnegans Wake.

 

Course:

HIST 2481  Mao's China and Beyond: The History of the People's Republic of China

Professor:

Robert Culp  

CRN:

15608

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    10:10 AM – 11:30 AM Olin 101

Distributional Area:

HA Historical Analysis  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 22

Crosslists: Asian Studies; Global & International Studies

No individual shaped modern China, and arguably any one human society, more than Mao Zedong. This course uses Mao’s life and writings as a framework and material for exploring twentieth-century Chinese history. We will focus first on the course of China’s twentieth-century revolutions, and relate those movements to other social, cultural, and economic trends, including urbanization, industrialization, the urban-rural gap, consumerism, various intellectual and cultural movements, and the expansion of the mass media. For the Maoist period (1949-1978) we will address topics related to youth culture, socialist citizenship, and political violence, using sources like memoirs and party propaganda to explore the dynamics of Chinese state socialism and the Cultural Revolution decade (1966-1976). The final third of the course will focus on contemporary China in light of the history of the period of Reform and Opening (1978-present), since Mao’s death. Fiction, film, television, advertisements, and other mass media will help us understand how contemporary China has developed in reaction to the Maoism of the previous decades. No prior study of China is necessary; first year students are welcome.

 

Course:

HIST 298  Making Silicon Valley Histories

Professor:

Jeannette Estruth  

CRN:

15662

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    5:10 PM – 6:30 PM Olin 201

Distributional Area:

HA Historical Analysis  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 22

Crosslists: American Studies; Architecture; Environmental & Urban Studies; Experimental Humanities; Human Rights

This course is an introduction to the history of Silicon Valley. Moving chronologically between 1945 and the present, we will study the history of this significant region, and stories about the area’s technology industry. With a focus on social justice,  this class will explore race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, health and disability, immigration and labor, and diversity and inequality in technology and the modern United States. In this class, students will experience first-hand the history of the early Silicon Valley through a wealth of primary sources, such as newspaper accounts, oral histories, photographic images, government documents, corporate reports, advertisements and business journalism, and more. We will also engage an exciting and emerging secondary literature.

 

Course:

HIST 387  Reading Gender in Archive: Research Methodology of Gender History

Professor:

Rupali Warke  

CRN:

15609

Schedule/Location:

 Thurs    12:30 PM – 2:50 PM Olin 302

Distributional Area:

HA Historical Analysis  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 15

Crosslists: Asian Studies; Gender and Sexuality Studies

This class is designed for students working on women’s or gender history for their senior projects. The objective is to train students in reading the archive from a gender perspective. It is often said that history is “his-story” because the “building blocks” of history, that is, the archive, are produced by men, and such as is skewed towards the men’s experiences and perspectives. Given this, how do we write a history that includes women’s voices? In this class, students will analyze various primary sources such as letters, memoirs, travelogues, administrative documents, etc., in conjunction with some secondary scholarly works on the research methodology of gender history and audio-visual sources. We will discuss how a gender-sensitive methodology of reading the archive can be employed to ‘recover’ women’s voices. In the process, students will learn how women’s social perceptions, experiences, modes of self-assertion, and challenges shaped gender subjectivities.

 

 

Cross-listed courses:

 

Course:

CLAS 122  The Roman World: An Introduction

Professor:

Lauren Curtis  

CRN:

15515

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     5:10 PM – 6:30 PM Olin 201

Distributional Area:

HA Historical Analysis  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap 22

Crosslists: Historical Studies

 

Course:

HR 269  Slavery, Reconciliation and Repair

Professor:

Kwame Holmes  

CRN:

15667

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     3:30 PM – 4:50 PM Aspinwall 302

Distributional Area:

SA Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 15

Crosslists: Africana Studies; American Studies; Historical Studies

 

Course:

LAIS 204  Latin American and Caribbean Revolutions

Professor:

Miles Rodriguez  

CRN:

15663

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    11:50 AM – 1:10 PM Olin 202

Distributional Area:

HA Historical Analysis D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap 15

Crosslists: American Studies; Global & International Studies; Historical Studies; Human Rights

 

Course:

LIT 2205  Stalin and Power

Professor:

Jonathan Brent  

CRN:

15720

Schedule/Location:

    Fri   3:10 PM – 5:30 PM Olin 201

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap 20

Crosslists: Historical Studies; Russian Eurasian Studies

 

Course:

LIT 241  Sex, Lies and the Renaissance

Professor:

Joseph Luzzi  

CRN:

15713

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     10:10 AM – 11:30 AM Olin 204

Distributional Area:

FL Foreign Languages and Lit  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap 22

Crosslists: Art History; Historical Studies; Italian Studies

 

Course:

PS 393  Race and Gender in US Constitutional Development

Professor:

Simon Gilhooley  

CRN:

15682

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      12:30 PM – 2:50 PM Olin 303

Distributional Area:

SA Social Analysis  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap 15

Crosslists: Africana Studies; American Studies; Gender and Sexuality Studies; Historical Studies; Human Rights

 

Course:

SOC 348  Empires, City-States and Nation-States: An exploration of the social and political dimensions of Rule

Professor:

Karen Barkey 

CRN:

15991

Schedule/Location:

   Tue    3:10 PM – 5:30 PM Olin 304

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis   

Credits: 4

 

Class cap 12

Crosslists: Historical Studies