HIST-H 580 - The Teaching of College History
Tu 4:55 PM - 6:55 PM, BH203 with Leah Shopkow
As you transition from graduate school to the classroom, you will encounter a challenging world: students change generationally; you will be required to demonstrate what your students are learning, and you will almost certainly be required to teach remotely at least some of the time. H580 will introduce you to some of the literature available to help you understand students; to think deeply about nature of historical thinking, so you can design your courses to teach it; to adapt to whatever circumstances require at your institution; and to these concepts to your students, your colleagues, and your administration.
HIST-H 602 - The Historical Profession
W 3:15 PM - 5:15 PM, Online with Jonathan Schlesinger
HIST-H 605/705 - Colloquium in Ancient History: Plagues, Eruptions, Famines, and Other Catastrophes in the Roman World
Th 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM, Online with Colin Elliott
Plagues, eruptions, earthquakes and famines routinely struck the Roman world, capturing the attention of contemporary authors and leaving behind non-literacy evidence. This course examines these catastrophes, whether major or minor, global or local, in order to better understand not only the duration and scope of these calamities, as well as responses to the suffering, devastation and death they inflicted.
HIST-H 650 - Colloquium in United States History: Native American History
Tu 6:45 PM - 8:45 PM, Online with Liza Black
You will encounter key readings in the history of Native America. Our themes include: early American history, removal and dispossession, borderlands history, history of Indigenous women, Indigenous history of the Midwest, Pacific waters and Indigenous people, intersections of African American and Native histories, genocide, history of the Indigenous family in reeducation camps and forced sterilization, violence in border towns, and cultural studies in Indigenous history. Our authors include: Christine DeLucia, Jean O’Brien, Brian De Lay, Susan Sleeper-Smith, George Ironstrack, Claudio Saunt, Josh Reid, Brianna Theobald, Tiya Miles, Jeff Ostler, Brenda Child, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Phil Deloria, and Adria Amada. Several authors are confirmed to be joining us live during class! In order of appearance these include: Christine DeLucia, Claudio Saunt, George Ironstrack, Brianna Theobald, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, and Phil Deloria. Your personal responsibility in this class will include reading a book a week, short weekly papers, and in-class weekly discussion. You will create a final project of some kind, with options including a long essay, a research paper, course syllabus, grant proposal, podcast, blog, exhibition, or perhaps a webpage.
HIST-H 665 - Colloquium in Latin American History: Caribbean History
M 3:15 PM - 5:15 PM, Online with Arlene Diaz
The Caribbean is perhaps one of the most culturally and ethnically diverse regions for its size in the world. While language and the historical experience of colonization by different metropolitan states divides this region, the Caribbean is historically united by its common historical experience of population substitution, African slavery, plantation agriculture, economic dependency, imperialist domination and migration. This colloquium in Caribbean History will focus precisely on the issue of Caribbean regional identity and historical unity. This line of inquiry will be examined using pertinent works in specific areas of study such as slavery, emancipation, agrarian capitalism, gender and race relations, U.S. presence, environmental disasters, and Caribbean communities in the United States. At the same time, this course seeks to familiarize students with the literature, leading and recent approaches to Caribbean History.
HIST-H 680 - Colloquium in Cultural History: Postcolonial Theory
W 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM, Online with Michael Dodson
This class will serve as an introduction to the diverse body of critical thought that has developed in the last several decades surrounding issues of power, culture, discourse, and identity in the colonial/postcolonial world. As such, it should be of interest to those graduate students in History, English, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, and related disciplines, who are studying any variety of colonial or imperial relationships, non-Western contexts, as well as those interested in furthering their knowledge of critical historical methodologies.
HIST-H 695 - Colloquium in African History: African & Humanitarianism: Intentions & Interventions
Th 6:45 PM - 8:45 PM, Online with Michelle Moyd
The perception that Africa is a continent perpetually in need of outside help dominates media coverage and popular discourse in the Global North. This course situates Africa's experiences of humanitarian intervention within histories of slavery and abolition, colonialism, development, and the rise of human rights discourses that are fraught with contradictions that often spring from racist, paternalist assumptions about Africa and Africans. At the same time, the course asks how Africans have defined "humanitarianism" on their own terms, how they have engaged (or not) with humanitarian interventions, and what criticisms they have leveled against what Alex de Waal calls "the humanitarian international."
HIST-H 699 - Colloquium in Comparative History: Decolonizing Academia
F 1:10 PM - 3:10 PM, Online with Arlene Diaz
The events of the year 2020 exposed with renewed intensity how White European/Western standards and ideologies have “colonized” institutions, not only in society at large but also in the microcosm of academia. Paradoxically, the isolated lifestyle imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic increased our exposure to facts that some of us may previously have overlooked: access to health care that is so inequitable that Black people, Latinxs, and Native Americans bear the brunt of the pandemic death rates, brutality committed by police against Black people with impunity, forceful repression of peaceful BLM protests, and instances of White nationalist groups carrying weapons in public without repercussions from the authorities, to name but a few. The overwhelming and undeniable intensity of these issues catalyzed our universities to take a more visible stand against systemic racism. Yet the embedded social injustices described above require deeper inquiries and solutions. How are us in academia going to not only talk the talk but also walk the walk especially when academia long been established as an institution premised on a racialized hierarchy in which Eurocentric White ideological forms function as the standard in the way we learn, in the way we assess, in the way we teach? In this course, we will read theoretical works on decoloniality as well as learn how other historically white social and academic spaces have questioned Eurocentric ways of thinking. We will also discuss academic works on decolonizing knowledge as well as on concrete actions to decolonize research, curriculum, teaching and learning, museums, archives, and public spaces.
Graduate students enrolled in this class will write brief weekly responses to readings, lead a weekly discussion, write two short papers, and submit a final project that can take the form of a long essay, course syllabus, grant proposal, podcast, webpage, or exhibition.
HIST-H 699 - Colloquium in Comparative History: Oral History
M 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM, Online with Daniel James
This course has two basic aims. The first is to introduce the student to the basic historiographical and theoretical issues that underlie the practice of oral history -- or more broadly the use of oral sources in historical and social science research. This involves engaging with themes such as memory -- both collective and individual, the different approaches to the use of oral sources, issues of objectivity and subjectivity, issues of ethics, the nature of the interview dynamic. The second is to focus on a number of case studies, wherein we can see how different scholars have addressed these issues in their own research and writing. The case studies vary widely in both region and historical context: from coal miners in Kentucky to meatpackers in Argentina, from elderly Jews in Los Angeles to a Guatemalan indigenous woman's autobiographical testimony.
HIST-H 699 - Colloquium in Comparative History: The Global Turn
W 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM, Online with Pedro Machado
The past two decades have witnessed growing interest in a developing new field of historical research and teaching: global history. Spurred in part by the political reorientations, geographical and spatial re-imaginings following the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the urgent realities of an emergent ‘hyper’ globalizing world, as well as by the transnational turn to anti- and postcolonial scholarship, global history scholarship has opened possibilities for scholars to reframe spatial, temporal and discursive constructs in a changing intellectual landscape. Echoing broader arguments against universalism and Eurocentrism – but employing frameworks that set them apart from world historians’ preoccupations with comparative history – global historians seek to uncover the multipolar and pluralistic connections that have brought different parts of the world into relation with one another over the span of centuries. The ‘entanglements’ of the past, whether they are conceptualized in material, cultural, political, social or economic terms, have thus become of central concern to the global history project. This course will explore the theoretical underpinnings and methodological approaches of global history as a way of understanding the conceptual and intellectual possibilities of, and challenges for, this rapidly expanding field. It will address specific problems such as how to rethink area divisions rooted in the Cold War and colonial eras, and how to think about periodization on a global scale that is attentive nonetheless to local and regional scales. The goals are to encourage students to consider research that can illuminate large-scale historical processes, engage in global and ‘transnational’ histories, or explore geographically dispersed phenomena such as mobility, commodity flows and the history of aquatic regions. As will be clear by semester’s end, some of the most exciting, suggestive and stimulating work in the historical profession is being conducted in the field of global history.
HIST-H 699 - Colloquium in Comparative History: Histories of Gender
Th 7:15 PM - 9:15 PM, Online with Sarah Knott
Taking its lead in particular from Black feminist thinking, this course has three main aims: to explore new recuperative feminist historiography, including emergent streams from economic history and intellectual history to trans history and digital history; to identify a feminist canon stretching from Hortense Spillers, Joan Scott and Eve Sedgwick to Imani Perry, that is of use to historians; and to bring forward the remarkable range of methodologies, techniques and forms of interpretation required to give a history to gender, from counting differently to presencing to critical fabulation. All these aims turn on the problem of archival silence and the potential for redress. Students will encounter an array of concepts of gender as well as a working terminology for contemporary feminist research, including revivified ideas of intersectionality, patriarchy and social reproduction. Bringing together scholarship about a range of times and places, our overarching concern is to develop a set of feminist reading and writing practices to approach the archives of the past from our present day.
HIST-H 750 - U.S. History Seminar
Th 4:55 PM - 6:55 PM, Online with Cara Caddoo
This course is open to graduate students working in the fields of United States (and colonial American) history, broadly conceived. Each student will select his/her/their own research topics, which they will develop in consultation with their instructor and advisor(s). By the end of this class, students will complete a research proposal, conduct archival research, and write an original 20-30 page research paper based on primary sources and engaged with the historiography of their chosen topic. Peer review and revision are essential aspects of this course. Students are expected to read their classmates' work, and offer consistent, engaged, and constructive oral and written feedback during the course of the semester. Our course readings include peer-reviewed journals, monographs, and public-facing publications. These readings are not intended to impart substantive historical knowledge of particular historical topics, rather they will serve to help us think about our own writing practices. We will also consider texts that deal explicitly with the craft of writing. Students are expected to read all assigned materials, participate in every class discussion, and submit assignments in a timely manner.
HIST-H 799 - Modern History Seminar
Tu 6:45 PM - 8:45 PM, Online with Carl Ipsen
Seminar in Modern World History
The goal of this seminar is for participants to write an article-length piece on a modern historical topic based on primary-source research. As a Europeanist, I take modern history to refer to the period after the so-called Middle Ages (and so continuing to the present day) and involve work in a modern language. Given this broad scope, participants are expected to consult also with other history colleagues whose expertise may better correspond with their own. For the first segment of the semester we will read a series of articles from history journals - some chosen by me, some by you - and discuss not just the arguments contained but also what probably went into the writing of them. Might they or might they not serve as models for your writing? There will also be a schedule for submitting topics, bibliographies and progress reports. In an ideal case, participants will produce a publishable article or a first dissertation chapter.