History

The purpose of this course is to introduce you to the ancient histories of the region in western Asia that is today called the Middle East. There we find the earliest cultures in world history documented with an abundance of sources, including numerous written texts, which allows us to study the first attestations of many elements of life we take for granted, such as writing, cities, laws, empires, and much more. The course aims to provide you with a knowledge of the most important empirical data about these histories and to confront you the impact some of the developments made on human life as well as the difficulties we confront trying to study them.

This course will explore the struggle to control the continent of North America from an Indigenous perspective. After a century of European colonization Native peoples east of the Mississippi River Valley formed a political confederation aimed at preserving Native sovereignty. This Native confederacy emerged as a dominant force during the Seven Years War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812. At times Native political interests aligned with the French and British Empires, but remained in opposition to the expansion of Anglo-American colonial settlements into Indian country. This course is designed to engage literature and epistemology surrounding these New World conflicts as a means of the colonial and post-colonial past in North America.  We will explore the emergence of intersecting indigenous and European national identities tied to the social construction of space and race. In this course I will ask you to re-think American history by situating North America as a Native space, a place that was occupied and controlled by indigenous peoples.  You will be asked to imagine a North America that was indigenous and adaptive, and not necessarily destined to be absorbed by European settler colonies.  Accordingly, this course we will explore the intersections of European colonial settlement and Euro-American national expansion, alongside of the emergence of indigenous social formations that dominated the western interior until the middle of the 19th century.  This course is intended to be a broad history of Indigenous North America during a tumultuous period, but close attention will be given to use and analysis of primary source evidence.  Similarly, we will explore the necessity of using multiple genres of textual evidence – archival documents, oral history, material artifacts, etc., -- when studying indigenous history.

Survey of African history from the 18th century to the contemporary period. We will explore six major themes in African History: Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World, Colonialism in Africa, the 1940s, Nationalism and Independence Movements, Post-Colonialism in Africa, and Issues in the Making of Contemporary Africa.

Today’s Christianities have evolved through a series of radical departures from the life and teachings of a person remembered as Jesus Christ but perhaps first known as Yeshua. Our course grounds what can be known about this “historical Jesus” in the contexts of Roman, Greek, and Jewish antiquity, then progresses through developments of Christian and para-Christian communities to key engagements of Christianity and the world today. The focus is on landmark readings that illuminate moments of change, situating those readings in proper historical contexts, and linking them into the wider narratives the human story. Students will interrogate readings to understand what Christianity was to their authors and first audiences,  supported by lectures that outline key historical contexts and significant scholarly debates, a series of exams that guide students to articulate stories of change, and a complementary thread of assignments that focus on pilgrimage to reflect on how Christianity has historically been a religion inflected by both time and place.

This lecture course investigates nation-building as a process of decolonization of Europe’s land empires (Ottoman, German, Russian, and Habsburg) from 18th century to present. It was a turbulent historical process: decolonization of European East’s ‘small peoples’ paved the way to anti-imperial and anti-colonial movements outside Europe only to be crushed, in the mid-twentieth-century, by imperial politics of Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Union. We will study different ways in which culture – local languages, vernacular heritage, religion, and material culture – became politically weaponized to achieve goals of national self-determination and social revolution. Throughout the 19th and 20th century nation-building in the European East produced particular forms of non-Western modernity that found expression in built environments, visual arts, letters, music, public activism, and domestic sphere. We will study how resistance and enforced accommodation to Empire turned into spaces of cultural production, mass movements, economic upheaval, state-building, and last but not least, physical violence. Finally, we will investigate how ordinary Eastern Europeans experienced and gave meaning to the processes of nation-building. The course is intended for students interested in cultural, intellectual, social and gender history, histories of nationalism and communism, as well as local and transnational histories of Eastern European ‘peoples’ (Jewish, Muslim, Christian Slavic; German, Russian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Southern Slavic/Yugo-Slav, Greek, and Roma).

This course examines the history of gender and sexuality in Europe, from the Renaissance to the present day. We will take a thematic approach, tracing the shifting operations, definitions, and understandings of both gender and sexuality within European culture and society. Topics include: Renaissance visual culture, the witchcraft trials, Enlightenment philosophy, European imperialism and colonialism, revolutions (both political and sexual), moral reform campaigns, the birth of sexology, queer and trans histories, sex work, and the politics of control. Central to this course is an examination of the ways gender and sexuality function at the intersections of class, race, nation, ethnicity, and religion, and how these intersections speak to dynamics of social, cultural, and political power. In our work throughout the semester, we will draw from a range of sources, including film, painting, photography, literature, and music. We will regularly engage with primary sources, which will allow students to learn the skills and techniques necessary for the work of historians. Throughout the course, students will examine how historians write, interpret, and construct histories of gender and sexuality, and question what place these histories have in our contemporary world.

An introductory survey of the history of Russia, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union over the last two centuries. Russia’s role on the European continent, intellectual movements, unfree labor and emancipation, economic growth and social change, and finally the great revolutions of 1905 and 1917 define the “long nineteenth century.” The second half of the course turns to the tumultuous twentieth century: cultural experiments of the 1920s, Stalinism, World War II, and the new society of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years. Finally, a look at very recent history since the East European revolutions of 1989-91. This is primarily a course on the domestic history of Russia and the USSR, but with some attention to foreign policy and Russia’s role in the world.

Environmental history seeks to expand the customary framework of historical inquiry, challenging students to construct narratives of the past that incorporate not only human beings but also the natural world with which human life is intimately intertwined. As a result, environmental history places at center stage a wide range of previously overlooked historical actors such as plants, animals, and diseases. Moreover, by locating nature within human history, environmental history encourages its practitioners to rethink some of the fundamental categories through which our understanding of the natural world is expressed: wilderness and civilization, wild and tame, natural and artificial. For those interested in the study of ethnicity, environmental history casts into particularly sharp relief the ways in which the natural world can serve both to undermine and to reinforce the divisions within human societies. Although all human beings share profound biological similarities, they have nonetheless enjoyed unequal access to natural resources and to healthy environments—differences that have all-too-frequently been justified by depicting such conditions as “natural.”

What was Fascism? What kind of appeal did authoritarianism and dictatorship have in interwar Europe? How did the Fascist “New Order” challenge liberal democracies and why did it fail in World War II? What was the common denominator of Fascist movements across Europe, and in particular in Mussolini’s Italy, Salazar’s Portugal, Franco’s Spain, culminating in Nazi Germany?

This class examines the history of Fascism as an ideology, constellation of political movements, and authoritarian regimes that aimed at controlling the modernization of European societies in the interwar period. Thus, the course focuses in particular on the relationship between politics, science and society to investigate how Fascism envisioned the modernity of new technologies, new social norms, and new political norms. The class will also explore Fascism’s imperialist goals, such as the calls for national renewal, the engineering of a new race, and the creation of a new world order.

The objectives of this course are: to gain familiarity with the major themes of New York History since 1898, to learn to think historically, and to learn to think and write critically about arguments that underlie historical interpretation. We will also examine and analyze the systems and structures--of race and class--that have shaped life in New York, while seeking to understand how social groups have pursued change inside and outside of such structures

A survey of the history of the American South from the colonial era to the present day, with two purposes: first, to afford students an understanding of the special historical characteristics of the South and of southerners; and second, to explore what the experience of the South may teach about America as a nation.

This course will survey a century of Mexican history that oscillated between an authoritarian regime (Porfirio Díaz’s presidency, 1876-1911), a massive revolutionary upheaval (1911-1920), the construction of a single-party, corporatist regime that became a model of stability and economic success (that of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional), and a complex transition to democracy (culminated in the July 2000 presidential elections but, one might argue, still ongoing).

Politics will be defined in broad terms. Lectures and readings will consider social and cultural processes from diverse perspectives. Topics will include: migration and population growth; economic expansion and stagnation; urban history, crime and punishment; gender, women and families; elite and popular culture; labor, agrarian reform; the left, electoral and armed insurgency; relations with the United States and other countries of Latin America. Local and regional perspectives will be offered as an alternative against prevailing state-centered, national narratives. Combining thematic and chronological lectures and discussion of primary sources, the course will examine the most exciting recent literature on Mexican society, culture, and politics.

Discussion of primary sources will be an important component of this course. Classes will combine lecture and discussion of historical contents with discussion of primary documents. These documents will include texts (political manifestos, essays, letters, testimonies, legislation, literature) as well as movies, music and visual records (mostly photography and painting). Discussions sections will also use those documents to expand on topics presented in the lectures and the required readings.

This is the discussion section for HIST BC2699: Latin American Civilization II. 

This is the discussion section for HIST BC2699: Latin American Civilization II. 

This is the discussion section for HIST BC2699: Latin American Civilization II. 

This is the discussion section for HIST BC2699: Latin American Civilization II. 

This course is an introduction to the medieval Middle East, starting from the Abbasid caliphate at its peak and ending with the establishment of the Timurid empire.  It explores political, social, and intellectual trends that configured the region’s later history, emphasizing both its complexity and interconnectedness. The course will feature not only on the Middle East and North Africa, but also other regions such as North India and Andalusia, considering the role of the Islamicate world in global history. Special attention will be given to political formations, intellectual and social diversity, and Islam as a cultural system. Students will be introduced to a large number of primary sources from different regions, languages, and religious communities, including objects, art, and music. Students will learn to analyze these materials and understand how history is written and made. This course does not presume any foreknowledge of the topic.

This lecture course explores the Indian Ocean worlds of the nineteenth century and twentieth century by tracing networks of trade, labor, capital, pilgrimage and science. It offers an overview of how these networks were forged and who formed them, mapping their ebbs and flows across Mauritius, Madagascar, Kenya, Zanzibar, Oman, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, Fiji, Indonesia, and Australia. It begins with a brief overview of the premodern Indian Ocean and the seaborne empires of sixteenth centuries and the first encounters with Portuguese, Dutch, French and British colonization and then looks at a range of different topics from the spice trade and caravan routes in the age of sail to the abolition of slavery and establishment of indenture as steamships began to take over oceanic journeys. We look at the travels of botanical specimens scrounged from tropical forests in the nineteenth century to the surveying of the ocean floor in the twentieth. At the end of the lectures, which will also feature active learning components using primary sources, we will learn how to reframe regional histories through the lens of oceanic mobilities.

This course examines the landscapes of urban public health from the medieval era to the 19th century using spatial analysis. It has two objectives. Thematically, it introduces students to the concept and study of “urban healthscapes” in Europe and the Americas before the age of modern bacteriology. Weekly lectures advance through a sequence of four related themes: (1) medieval and early modern communal, infrastructural, and regulatory spatial practices of public health; (2) urban mortality regimes, epidemics, and societal responses; (3) the relationships between urban form, spatial governance, planning, and public health; and (4) problems of environmental justice, including unequal exposure to health risks and access to health amenities. Methodologically, the course approaches these topics via the lens of historical Geographic Information Systems. In weekly labs, students acquire technical skills of GIS mapping. They learn how to work with spatial data, create GIS maps, conduct spatial analysis, and develop spatial historical arguments and narratives. Labs integrate recently released public hGIS datasets on a variety of cities—such as medieval Bologna and 19th-century New York—directly relevant to the themes covered in lectures. For course assignments, students use these datasets to conduct spatial analyses of urban healthscapes. The course is open to all undergraduates. Previous GIS knowledge is not needed.

The course investigates the relation between politics and technology in the Unites States during the twentieth century. Following the telegraph, radio, the mainframe computer, the internet, and online platforms, the course asks how have Americans conceptualized the relation between technological developments and democratic ideals starting in the late nineteenth century? Are new technologies forms of control or of liberation? Do they enhance or curtail free speech? Has the public sphere been strengthened or weakened by new communication technologies? What has been the rule of government regulation in the adoption of these technologies? Students will be introduced to basic ideas and methodologies in the history of technology, while focusing on the relation between politics of technology. 

This course surveys some of the major historiographical debates surrounding the Second World War. It aims to provide student with an international perspective of the conflict that challenges conventional understandings of the war. In particular, we will examine the ideological, imperial, and strategic dimensions of the war in a global context. Students will also design, research, and write a substantial essay of 15-18 pages in length that makes use of both primary and secondary sources.

This course introduces students to researching and writing African colonial history with a specific focus on Uganda. Students will be guided through the missionary sources available at Columbia and we will discuss how African voices can and cannot be found in these archives. At the end of the semester students will have produced an original primary source paper on Ugandan history.

This course samples works by women writers from the Middle Ages, interrogating questions of authorship and gender to situate these works in broader social histories. Selections center on western archives, where women’s voices have been extensively curated, but students will also survey non-western texts. This course is built around in-class discussion and the collaborative exploration of texts, complemented by a series of short papers in which students explore recurring themes. A visit to special collections and supplemental materials will also allow students to explore how premodern women projected their voices and views through manuscripts and visual culture. Students will select an additional text to explore individually for the final project, writing a short research paper and presenting a summary of their findings.

Literary and visual texts sometimes express the essence of historical experience more powerfully than “factual” narratives or historical debates. This class will focus on four such texts – three novels and one film – which take empire as their central theme. They are taken from different empires, different chronological periods, and different (but sometimes interrelated) phases of imperial conquest, development, and decline. Our task will essentially be a close reading of the texts, and the reconstruction of their historical and geographical context. The empires in question for this semester are the British, Ottoman, Russian, and French.

The development of the modern culture of consumption, with particular attention to the formation of the woman consumer. Topics include commerce and the urban landscape, changing attitudes toward shopping and spending, feminine fashion and conspicuous consumption, and the birth of advertising. Examination of novels, fashion magazines, and advertising images.

Prerequisites: Open to Barnard College History Senior Majors. Individual guided research and writing in history and the presentation of results in seminar and in the form of the senior essay. See Requirements for the Major for details.

Prerequisites: Open to Barnard College History Senior Majors. Individual guided research and writing in history and the presentation of results in seminar and in the form of the senior essay. See Requirements for the Major for details.

Prerequisites: Open to Barnard College History Senior Majors. Individual guided research and writing in history and the presentation of results in seminar and in the form of the senior essay. See Requirements for the Major for details.

Prerequisites: Open to Barnard College History Senior Majors. Individual guided research and writing in history and the presentation of results in seminar and in the form of the senior essay. See Requirements for the Major for details.

This class is not a “pre-history” of the modern metropolis, but rather a stand-alone story of Gotham’s growth from a tiny Dutch trading post in the midst of hundreds of Native villages into a key port of the first British Empire. We will close at the dramatic moment when the colonial society at the tip of Manhattan was torn apart and partially destroyed in the inter-imperial civil war we know as the American Revolution.

Even when its skyline was made of wooden masts and steeples, New York City was a diverse and dangerous place. Major topics will include frontier wars, slave conspiracies, religious revivals, and conflicts between the legitimate and contraband economies. All along, we will try to balance local and global perspectives, and blend social, cultural, political, and economic analyses. The course will also consider this colonial town’s place in American national memory, and critically approaching the many self-congratulatory and silly stories people like to believe about this long-lost island town.

The central texts in this course are a combination of secondary sources and primary texts. Our weekly meetings will mostly focus on the assigned reading, with each student submitting six (6) short reading responses on Courseworks before 9 am on the day of class. Students will also develop an original fifteen-to-twenty-page research paper on a colonial New York topic of their own choosing, and will be strongly encouraged to use archival resources held at Columbia or one of the city’s other major archives (NYPL, N-YHS, NMAI, Schomburg Center, Municipal Archives).

Caribbean literature offers complicated and vivid portrayals of the Caribbean’s past, and grapples with difficult histories lived by its people that compromised colonial archives can only partially capture. Literary works far exceed the limited narratives of Caribbean history by imagining entire worlds that official documents could never contain, rich selves, cultures and communities built by many generations of Caribbean people. This course is aimed at bringing forth a broader understanding of Caribbean history by examining a body of creative works by feminist and womanist writers that continuously remain attuned to the complexities of the past, which are either underrepresented or absent in the record. Chosen literary texts will also be paired with historical works that will illuminate and contextualize the multiple themes with which these Caribbean authors frequently engage, including slavery, and colonialism, racism and colorism, migration and immigration, gender and sexuality, poverty and globalization. From these pairings, students will explore both the divergences and alignments in how writers and historians approach the work of retelling the past, and will acquire reading and writing skills that will foster thoughtful critical analysis of the ever-changing contours of the Caribbean’s history.

This course explores the intersectional histories of food, race, and migration in the U.S., with most of its focus on the period 1900 to the present. From food that migrated with colonists and enslaved laborers, to food created within ethnic communities trying to establish comfort and presence in the nation, to haute and fusion cuisines that cross racial, classed, and geographic borders—the things we see on our plates are the product of a myriad of movements of people, commodities, and ideas. How have factors such as race/ethnicity, migration, class, and gender impacted the foods available to us to eat, buy, and share? How have different waves of immigrants to North America shaped the nation’s culinary landscape, and conversely, how has the national culture shaped the diets of newcomers? How does food function to unite and separate people? How have food politics and activism developed over time in the U.S.? This class will explore all of these questions, and more.

The end of a century and the beginning of a new one can be a moment of self-consciousness, when people pause in their usual activities to reflect on the direction of their civilization and to wonder what the future might hold. Usually, the 1917 Revolution dominates our consciousness of the first decades of the 20th century in Russia. This course offers a chance to take an in-depth look at a different aspect of Russian life: the turbulent world of ideas and culture, in many ways shared with other European capitals, that we have come to know as the Silver Age. One of the great novels of the age, Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1913), will be our window into the artistic currents, philosophical discussions, apocalyptic moods and revolutionary stirrings of turn-of-the-century Russia. Since the creators of the Silver Age thought of themselves as drawing on the whole of Russian and world culture for inspiration, I also hope that our focus on these 30 years will propel us both backwards and forwards in time so we can discuss broad themes of Russian history and culture.

This course endeavors to understand the development of the peculiar and historically conflictual relationship that exists between France, the nation-states that are its former African colonies, and other contemporary African states. It covers the period from the 19th century colonial expansion through the current ‘memory wars’ in French politics and debates over migration and colonial history in Africa. Historical episodes include French participation in and eventual withdrawal from the Atlantic Slave Trade, emancipation in the French possessions, colonial conquest, African participation in the world wars, the wars of decolonization, and French-African relations in the contexts of immigration and the construction of the European Union. Readings will be drawn extensively from primary accounts by African and French intellectuals, dissidents, and colonial administrators. However, the course offers neither a collective biography of the compelling intellectuals who have emerged from this relationship nor a survey of French-African literary or cultural production nor a course in international relations. Indeed, the course avoids the common emphasis in francophone studies on literary production and the experiences of elites and the common focus of international relations on states and bureaucrats. The focus throughout the course is on the historical development of fields of political possibility and the emphasis is on sub-Saharan Africa. Group(s): B, C Field(s): AFR, MEU

This seminar explores the making and unmaking of citizenship, adopting regional and global histories from South Asia. Beginning with a brief overview of early twentieth century debates over imperial citizenship involving the Britain, its colonies, and North America and the making of a global color line in the years leading up to the formal end of empires, we look at how important political events (the 1947 Partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, the 1971 War of independence for Bangladesh among others) were important inflection points in the rethinking of the relationship between national identity, belonging and formal-legal citizenship and its impact on people’s understanding of citizenship. Our discussions of citizenship after empire will include readings on citizenship debates involving the former Portuguese and French possessions in India in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as a discussion of the broader debates over citizenship and belonging involving the South Asian diaspora in Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. We will also look at how debates over indigeneity and authenticity mark citizenship debates in Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka as well as parts of Southeast Asia, and how this shapes global citizenship and refugee regimes. Returning to India, we consider how unmaking citizenship affects both people who stay behind and engage with state structures as well as those who are on the move, pursuing education or employment opportunities beyond it, shaped by uneven access to rights and shaping their social and political identities.

Comparative, cross-cultural examination of social organization and historical construction of human reproduction, with emphasis on 20th century. Topics include role of states and local and transnational "stratification" of reproduction by race, class, and citizenship; eugenics; population politics; birth control; kinship as social and biological relationship; maternity; paternity; new reproductive technologies.

This seminar is devoted to examining the work of writers who address the nature and course of history in their imaginative and non-fiction work. This semester we will be exploring the work of Robert Musil, in particular his great unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities, with its imaginative account of Vienna in the lead up to World War I and an exploration into the fundamental historical dynamics of Western modernity.

This course introduces you to the rich history of international political economy in the nineteenth century, a period often described as the ‘first age of globalization’. You will gain a foundational grounding in classic theories of free trade, protectionism, and autarchy, from well-known thinkers like Adam Smith and Friedrich List. You will also, however, have a change to engage with a range of heterodox and critical voices in Marxist and anti-colonial economics, and explore some of the real-world, on-the-ground situations where economic theories were inspired, implemented and contested.

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Through assigned readings and a 3500-4000 word paper, students will gain familiarity with a range of historical moments in the history of public health in the 20th-century United States. Themes will include ethnic and racial formations, technological development, biopolitics and biopower, medicalization, geography, political economy, and biological citizenship, among others.. Topics to be examined will include, but will not be limited to, women’s health organization and care; HIV/AIDS politics, policy, and community response; reproductive justice; “benign neglect”; urban renewal and gentrification; social movements, and environmental justice.  Previous coursework in relevant fields required (U.S. history or health history, certain area studies, Public Health/Sociomedical Sciences, medical humanities, etc.).

GUIDELINES & REQUIREMENTS

There are no official prerequisites. However, this is an upper-level course, and students should have some academic or professional background in health studies (especially public health), African-American/ethnic studies (history or social science), or some other work related to the course material.

ADMISSION

Admission to this course is by application only, Students from all schools, including Teachers College, are welcome to apply. Students may not enroll in this course on a pass/fail basis or as an auditor without instructor permission.

Through a series of thematically-arranged secondary and primary source readings and research writing assignments, students in this seminar course will explore the public health, medical, political, and social histories of HIV and AIDS in Black American communities. The course’s chronological focus begins roughly two decades before the first recognition of the syndrome to the first decade of the twenty-first century. Thematically, the course will address several issues, including syndemic theory; stigma, homophobia and political marginalization; late capitalism and public health; the health effects of segregation; and mass incarceration. Please note that admission to this course is by application

Please note that students enrolling in this course must do so for a grade, and not on a pass/fail or audit basis.

This course will explore the background and examine some of the manifestations of the first Jewish cultural explosion after 70 CE. Among the topics discussed: the Late Roman state and the Jews, the rise of the synagogue, the redaction of the Palestinian Talmud and midrashim, the piyyut and the Hekhalot.

How to write the city? What is an archive for writing the city? What liminal and marginal perspectives are available for thinking about writing the city? What is the place of the city in the global south in our historical imagination? Our attempt in this seminar is to look at the global south city from the historical and analytical perspectives of those dispossessed and marginal. Instead of ‘grand’ summations about “the Islamic City” or “Global City,” we will work meticulously to observe annotations on power that constructs cities, archives and their afterlives. The emphasis is on the city in South Asia as a particular referent though we will learn to see Cairo, New York, and Istanbul.

“American Radicalism in the Archives” is a research seminar examining the multiple ways that radicals and their social movements have left traces in the historical record. Straddling the disciplines of social movement history, public humanities, and critical information studies, the seminar will use the archival collections at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library to trace the history of social movements and to consider the intersections of radical theory and practice with the creation and preservation of archives.

In the first semester a series of workshops will introduce the field of international history and various research skills and methods such as conceptualization of research projects and use of oral sources. The fall sessions will also show the digital resources available at Columbia and how students can deploy them in their individual projects. In the second semester students will apply the skills acquired in the fall as they develop their proposal for the Masters thesis, which is to be completed next year at the LSE. The proposal identifies a significant historical question, the relevant primary and secondary sources, an appropriate methodology, what preliminary research has been done and what remains to be done. Students will present their work-in-progress.

This course gives students the opportunity to design their own curriculum: To attend lectures, conferences and workshops on historical topics related to their individual interests throughout Columbia University. Students may attend events of their choice, and are especially encouraged to attend those sponsored by the History Department. The Center for International History and the Heyman Center for the Humanities have impressive calendars of events and often feature historians. The goal of this mini-course is to encourage students to take advantage of the many intellectual opportunities throughout the University, to gain exposure to a variety of approaches to history, and at the same time assist them in focusing on a particular area for their thesis topic.

HIST 6999 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History seminar provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 3000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6999 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History seminar provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 3000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6999 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History seminar provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 3000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6999 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History seminar provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 3000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6999 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History seminar provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 3000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6999 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History seminar provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 3000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6999 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History seminar provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 3000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6999 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History seminar provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 3000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6999 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History seminar provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 3000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

This colloquium aims to introduce graduate students to the diverse literature on religion and capitalism, with an emphasis on early modern Europe. Readings range from classical sociological literature and major historical monographs to more recent work in heterodox economics. Our discussions will address a number of persistent questions in the field, both methodological and empirical: (1) How have historians, sociologists, and philosophers characterized the relationship between God and Mammon, between religious and economic life? (2) What is the nature of this relationship (unidirectional causality, mutual constitution, supersession, etc.)? (3) How have explanatory possibilities been brought to bear in scholarship on different periods, and for different traditions (Christianity and Judaism, Catholicism and Protestantism, Jansenism and devout humanism, Calvinism and Anglicanism)? (4) How should one approach religious institutions in light of the massive wealth at their disposal? (5) To what extent have theological categories and economic axioms informed each other over time, and under what political and cultural conditions?

This course is designed to offer a general introduction to early American history from the colonial era to the early national era in North America. The goal of the course is to introduce students to the early American field broadly defined. Through weekly discussions of selected monographs and essays we will explore the key themes of early American history, examine methodological innovations and changes, and explore shifting historiographic trends in this broadly defined chronological field.  Accordingly, we will approach our study by examining a few important historical constructs – the representation of the western hemisphere as a New World; the fact that European colonists, their African slaves, and the imperial governments that ruled North America’s settler colonies were part of a larger Atlantic World --connecting people and political regimes in Europe, Africa and the America. And finally, we will wrestle with the fact that as late as the end of the eighteenth century the majority of the North American was controlled by autonomous indigenous peoples making colonial history a story of encounter between an emergent indigenous New World and the peoples and institutions of Europe Empire.

Does the long history of South Asia reflect only a teleologic march towards the partition of the subcontinent in 1947? What modes and practices, histories and concepts, which emerged in, say, the second millennium alone allow us a glimpse past the divisions, ruptures and conflicts which pre-dominate contemporary political and historical understanding? This graduate seminar takes the longue durée approach to the study of “Partition” by examining illustrated and illuminated epics and histories from the 14th century to the 19th century. This visual and textual production is put in conversation with modern contemporary artists who interrogated, imagined and wrestled with the Partition. Illustrated texts include: the Awadhi Chandayan (14th c.), Pancatantra via Anvar-i Suhayli (15th c.), and Mahabharata via Razmnama (16th c.). Artists include: Zarina Hashmi (1937-2020), Lala Rukh (1948–2017), Shahzia Sikander (b. 1969) and Varunika Saraf (b. 1981). The class will use collections housed at the MET and will also meet at the MET or IFA.

This course investigates in-depth the significance of resistance among African-descended communities in the Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone and Lusophone Atlantic Worlds from approximately 1700-2000. We will examine the genesis, forms, and limits of resistance within the context of key historical transformations such as slavery and abolition, labor and migration, and transatlantic political organizing. The class will explore the racial epistemologies, racialized labor regimes, and gendered discourses that sparked a continuum of cultural and political opposition to oppression among Black Atlantic communities. The course will also reflect on how resistance plays a central role in the formation of individual and collective identities among black historical actors.Resistance will be explored as a critical category of historical analysis, and a central factor in the making of the “Black Atlantic.”

In recent years, opposition to “gender ideology” has become a rallying cry for the Right.  Politicians throughout the world have invoked the dangers of “gender” to restrict access to abortion, revoke LGBTQ rights, police education, and defend national sovereignty.  And yet at the same time, the term “gender” has become standard in everyday speech—a box to check on a passport application or on a form at the doctor’s office.  When did the word “gender” become a political controversy?  When did the idea of a “gender ideology” first emerge?  The goal of this seminar is to explore different scholarly and political articulations of gender in order to understand why this concept appears so threatening today.  We will read some of the “classic” accounts of gender (Lévi-Strauss, Rubin, Wittig, Butler, Foucault, Scott…) before turning to recent critical works across various disciplines (history, anthropology, literature, political theory, history of science, and psychoanalysis).  Preference will be given to graduate students but advanced undergraduates working on these questions can also apply.  

It is a common-place that the twentieth century ended with the establishment of capitalism and democracy as the “one best way”. In triumphalist accounts of the end of the Cold War the two are commonly presented as sharing a natural affinity. As never before the democratic formula was recommended for truly global application. To suggest the possibility of a contradiction between capitalism and democracy has come to seem like a gesture of outrageous conservative cynicism, or leftist subversion. And yet the convergence of capitalism and democracy is both recent and anything other than self-evident. It has been placed in question once again since 2008 in the epic crisis of Atlantic financial capitalism. This course examines the historical tensions between these two terms in the Atlantic world across the long 20th century from the 1890s to the present day.