H580: The Teaching of College History (Shopkow)
When you have emerged from graduate school, many of you will find that you are emerging into a rather different academic world than the one you have experienced both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student. The student population changes very rapidly. You may end up at a liberal arts college more selective than IU or at a community college that is open admission. Furthermore, tertiary education is under extraordinary pressure to demonstrate that it actually has some value and teachers as a whole are under pressure to demonstrate that they know how to teach. This course is intended to introduce you to only a small slice of the truly vast literature that is available to help you understand your students (whatever their backgrounds and preparation), to highlight for you the nature of historical thinking and learning so as to be better prepared to foster it in your own classrooms, and to provide you with research tools to determine how well your students have mastered it.
There are three major topics we will consider this semester, each of which will terminate in a project or product.
- Pedagogy Literature. We will read some of the more important writing about history teaching and students will write an essay.
- Course design. Students will read about backward design and will design a course in a topic of their choice backward.
- Educational research. Lee Shulman has referred to student minds as the "black box." We know what we put before them and we know what comes out, but we are grossly ignorant of what goes on in there, because students do not normally tell us. We learn about some of the techniques of doing educational research and you will participate in a real research project, with all that entails. You will collectively design a research project, walk it through the IRB, and carry it out.
H605/705: Economy and Society in the Roman World (Elliott)
Was Roman society static, underdeveloped and primitive or should Roman social and economic achievements be seen as crucial precursors on the path to modernity? We examine themes including poverty, markets, social relations, family, slavery, money and technology among others in order to understand the 'material base' of Roman society as opposed to a more traditional history of 'great men', war and elite political culture. Students will learn how social and economic historians approach and evaluate Roman economy and society, including their varied methodologies and ideologies. Assignments include weekly readings of roughly 100 pages, discussion leading, a book review, a conference-style presentation and a final research paper of between 3,000 and 4,000 words.
H615 (CMLT C525/REN R501): Intellectual Cultures of Early Modern Europe (Schneider)
The early modern period in European history begins in the late Middle Ages and arrives at the threshold of the Enlightenment, encompassing the birth of humanism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the European wars of religion, and the scientific revolution. This team-taught course will chart both historical continuity and cultural change to ask how this rich, paradoxical, and often contradictory age remains profoundly distant from our own yet laid the foundations of the modern world. The course will be organized as a series of interlocking investigations into the forces that shaped the early modern world: courts and court culture, book and print culture, networks of knowledge, humanism, neostoicism. It will explore the impact of those forces across national and disciplinary boundaries, drawing on both primary texts and secondary readings. Blending cultural history and literary criticism, this course will introduce students to a wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches to studying the distant past.
H620 The Holocaust: History, Literature & Popular Culture (M. Zadoff)
Holocaust remembrance has become a central part of post-war politics and culture in many countries. Recently, with populism on the rise and survivors becoming few, this culture is being endangered. In this course we'll try to assess, in what ways the holocaust is being remembered in Europe the US and Israel – in public commemorations, historical scholarship and in popular culture. We'll read, watch and discuss recent scholarship, documentaries, feature films, novels, poetry, art and music. How did this culture of remembrance change over the past decades, and what are the implications for the future?
H645/H745 East European Historiography
The course serves as a survey of 15 important themes in East European historiography, with emphasis on some new exciting work published in the last decade on themes pertaining to the 19th and 20th century. We will look at nationalism, urbanization, the Cold War, anti-Semitism, gender roles, consumerism, and the European Union, among other topics of historical research. Assignments will include a historiographic survey of a theme, bibliographical searches, in-class presentations, and book reviews. H745: For those taking the course as a research seminar, their writing assignment will be producing a research paper based on the use of primary sources in addition to relevant secondary sources.
H650 Recent Works in African American History, Colloquium: US History (Williams)
New perspectives on various subjects emphasize and analyze local experiences, icons and their relationship to historical memory and popular perception, and critical issues of African Americans today. The required books for the course are all recent works and all have been recognized by the academy as foundational works for those studying various aspects of African American history. A particular emphasis will investigate themes of resistance/liberation struggles and the Prison Industrial Complex/mass incarceration. What does the notion of liberation or freedom mean to different generations of activists and communities in African American urban/rural life? How has heightened awareness of intra-racial differences--class, gender, sexuality and regional habitat--affected group consensus and debate on a range of issues pertinent to the Black experience? Students engage these questions and others through an extensive encounter and dialog with scholarship on various sub fields in African American history.
H699: Nations and Nationalism (Guardino)
The development of national states and national identities was one of the most prominent features of the modern age. Not surprisingly, it has drawn the attention of legions of historians, from the nineteenth century to the present day. This course will not try to cover such a vast historiographic terrain, but will instead consider relatively recent (post 1990) works in which historians try to understand how and why nations came to be the primary focus of so many people's loyalties and how national states came to be the most important form of political organization. We will not focus on any single world area: we will use readings on different parts of Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the United States. Although we will certainly sample some theoretical approaches to nationalism in the first week or two, the focus here will be on how working historians have approached the problems of studying nations. Students will complete several short assignments, including book reviews, presentations, a syllabus, and a mock grant proposal.
H750: Seminar in U.S. History (Irvin)
This course is open to all graduate students researching in the fields of colonial American and/or U.S. history. This is a practical class intended to assist you in the development of a dissertation topic and/or the writing of conference papers, journal articles, and/or dissertation chapters. Each student will propose, research, write, and revise an original essay grounded in primary sources and engaged with the historiography of his or her chosen topic. Course readings will consist of exemplary papers, articles, and chapters, the purpose of which is not to impart the substantive history with which they are concerned, but rather to model for you the best, and worst, practices of their respective genres. Written assignments will include peer critiques of classmates' writings. Course work may also include oral presentations, depending on enrollments. In-class and/or out-of-class activities may also include instructional exercises intended to familiarize you with IU Libraries and other local and/or online archives. Students will be expected to read every assignment, to attend every class, to participate in a vigorous but at all times collegial manner, and to complete their written work by the end of the semester.