This course, designed for newcomers to American history, tells three interconnected stories. The first is about the European colonization of North America between the 1500s and the 1750s. The second is about the wars for empire and independence that reshaped the North American continent between 1754 and 1815. The third story is about the creation of the United States and its destruction and remaking during the US Civil War. At the end of the class, you will be able to tell these stories and talk about why they matter. Along the way, you will meet all kinds of people from North America's past: enslaved voyagers, visionary women, costumed parade-goers, and land-hungry presidents. You will get a sense of how they made early America such a wild and unusual place, and at the same time, how they shaped the United States that we live in today.
Required zero-point/ungraded discussion section for “Introduction to American History to 1865” lecture (HIST 1501)
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.
This course is designed to introduce students to the study of premodern history, with a substantive focus on the variety of cultures flourishing across the globe 1000 years ago. Methodologically, the course will emphasize the variety of primary sources historians use to reconstruct those cultures, the various approaches taken by the discipline of history (and neighboring disciplines) in analyzing those sources, and the particular challenges and pleasures of studying a generally “source poor” period. The course queries the concepts of “global history” and “world history” as applied to the “middle millennium” (corresponding to Europe’s “medieval history”), by exploring approaches that privilege connection, comparison, combination, correlation, or coverage.
Required zero-credit/ungraded discussion for The Year 1000: A World History lecture (HIST UN1942). Discussion section day & times to be determined.
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.”
Adopting a long-term perspective that centers on the dynamic interplay of economy, space, and political power, this course investigates how Ukraine's geography – its richness in natural resources and trade routes; its centrality as a crossroads between sea, settlement, and steppe, and between rival religious, imperial, and national projects; its vastness, which fostered divergent developmental trajectories and deep regional diversity; and its openness, which offered few natural barriers to contact and conquest – have shaped the country’s history from antiquity to the present.
This course covers all aspects of British history – political, imperial, economic, social and cultural – during the century of Britain’s greatest global power. Particular attention will be paid to the emergence of liberalism as a political and economic system and as a means of governing personal and social life. Students will read materials from the time, as well as scholarly articles, and will learn to work with some of the rich primary materials available on this period.
This lecture course comparatively and transnationally investigates the twentieth-century communism as a modern civilization with global outreach. It looks at the world spread of communism as an ideology, everyday experience, and form of statehood in the Soviet Union, Europe, Asia (Mao’s China), and post-colonial Africa. With the exception of North America and Australia, communist regimes were established on all continents of the world. The course will study this historical process from the October Revolution (1917) to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986), which marked the demise of communist state. The stress is not just on state-building processes or Cold War politics, but primarily on social, gender, cultural and economic policies that shaped lived experiences of communism. We will closely investigate what was particular about communism as civilization: sexuality, materiality, faith, selfhood, cultural identity, collective, or class and property politics. We will explore the ways in which “ordinary people” experienced communism through violence (anti-imperial and anti-fascist warfare; forced industrialization) and as subjects of social policies (gender equality, family programs, employment, urban planning). By close investigation of visual, material and political representations of life under communism, the course demonstrates the variety of human experience outside the “West” and capitalist modernity in an era of anti-imperial politics, Cold War, and decolonization, as well as current environmental crisis.
DISCUSSION SECTION for HIST UN 2336 Everyday Communism
This course examines the political culture of eighteenth-century France, from the final decades of the Bourbon monarchy to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. Among our primary aims will be to explore the origins of the Terror and its relationship to the Revolution as a whole. Other topics we will address include the erosion of the kings authority in the years leading up to 1789, the fall of the Bastille, the Constitutions of 1791 and 1793, civil war in the Vendee, the militarization of the Revolution, the dechristianization movement, attempts to establish a new Revolutionary calendar and civil religion, and the sweeping plans for moral regeneration led by Robespierre and his colleagues in 1793-1794.
MANDATORY Discussion Section for HIST UN 2398 The Politics of Terror: The French Revolution. Students must also be registered for HIST 2398.
It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of the American Civil War as an event in the making of the modern United States and, indeed, of the western world. Indeed the American Civil War and Reconstruction introduced a whole series of dilemmas that are still with us. What is the legacy of slavery in U.S. history and contemporary life? What is the proper balance of power between the states and the central government? Who is entitled to citizenship in the United States? What do freedom and equality mean in concrete terms?
This course surveys the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction in all of its aspects. It focuses on the causes of the war in the divergent development of northern and southern states; the prosecution of the war and all that it involved, including the process of slave emancipation; and the contentious process of reconstructing the re-united states in the aftermath of Union victory. The course includes the military history of the conflict, but ranges far beyond it to take the measure of the social and political changes the war unleashed. It focuses on the Confederacy as well as the Union, on women as well as men, and on enslaved black people as well as free white people. It takes the measure of large scale historical change while trying to grasp the experience of those human beings who lived through it.
This course offers a survey of the political history of contemporary Africa, from independence to the present day, with a focus on the states and societies south of the Sahara. We will use the tools of historians to study African political life: who held political power; how they wielded it and to what ends; and what kinds of opposition they faced. An important sub-theme involves American policy and actions, including those of civil society organizations, vis-à-vis African nation-states.
Discussion course for lecture UN2438 description below:
This course offers a survey of the political history of contemporary Africa, with a focus on the states and societies south of the Sahara. The emphasis is on struggle and conflict - extending to war - and peace.
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 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.
Required zero-point/ungraded discussion section for “Medieval Middle East” lecture (HIST 2709)
“The Ottoman Empire and the West” is a course designed to familiarize undergraduate students with the major developments concerning the Ottoman Empire’s relations with the West throughout the ‘long’ nineteenth century, roughly from the end of the eighteenth century to the outbreak of World War I. The course will adopt a predominantly chronological structure but will address a wide range of themes, from politics and ideology to economics and diplomacy, and from religion and culture to gender and orientalism.
Required zero-point/ungraded discussion section for “The Ottoman Empire and the West in the 19th Century” lecture (HIST 2717)
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.
Required zero-point/ungraded discussion section for “A History of the Indian Ocean, 19th Century to the Present” lecture (HIST 2820)
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.
The aim of the course is to introduce students to the highly heterogeneous ethnic and religious relations of Central and Eastern Europe and the interrelationship between them. By Central and Eastern Europe, I mean primarily the territory of the former Habsburg Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and its neighbors. The end of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century were, for all ethnic groups, a time of both the birth of modern nations and the general secularization. Religions and churches played different roles in the birth of each nationalism. During the semester, students will learn about the most important religions and denominations, their history, spread, structure, teachings, role in the organization of societies: Roman Catholic Church, Greek Catholic Church, Greek Orthodox Church; Protestantism (Calvinist, Lutheran, Unitarian Churches); Judaism and Neo-Protestant denominations. Students will learn how the role of Catholicism in Polish or Croatian nationalism, Greek Orthodoxy in Serbian nationalism, and the presence of several dominant denominations in the Hungarian, Romanian or Slovakian nations became decisive. Conflicts between denominations often expressed conflicts of an ethnic, social or political nature. The laws enacted by the state made several attempts to ensure the coexistence of the denominations. Until 1918, all this took place within the framework of the Habsburg Empire, hence the importance of the relationship of the Empire and the Churches (especially the Catholic Church) to the state, and the phenomenon of Josephinism.
This reading and writing-intensive course explores the history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands through prisms including those of race, labor, politics, gender and sexuality, the environment, the law, indigeneity and citizenship, and migration and mobility. What is the definition of a “borderland” and who or what creates one, physical or imagined? What makes the U.S.-Mexico borderlands a unique space, and how has it changed from the Spanish colonial period to the present day? By the end of the semester students will have enough experience in analyzing primary documents and secondary sources to produce their own original research papers related to some aspect and era of U.S.-Mexico borderlands history.
A remarkable array of Southern historians, novelists, and essayists have done what Shreve McCannon urges Quentin Compson to do in William Faulkners Absalom, Absalom!--tell about the South--producing recognized masterpieces of American literature. Taking as examples certain writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, this course explores the issues they confronted, the relationship between time during which and about they wrote, and the art of the written word as exemplified in their work. Group(s): D Field(s): US Limited enrollment. Priority given to senior history majors. After obtaining permission from the professor, please add yourself to the course wait list so the department can register you in the course.
The United States was founded on Indigenous land and in conversation with Indigenous nations who shared possession to most of the territory claimed by the republic. The expansion of the U.S. beyond the original thirteen states happened in dialogue, and often in open conflict with the Native peoples of North America. This course will examine the creation and expansion of the American nation-state from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous history. Most histories of the Republic equate the founding of the U.S. with the severance of colonial ties to Great Britain and the proceed to characterize America as a post-colonial society. We will study the U.S. as the first New World colonial power, a settler society whose very existence is deeply intertwined with the Indigenous history of North America.
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 examines 20th-century American political movements of the Left and Right. We will cover Socialism and the Ku Klux Klan in the early twentieth century; the Communist Party and right-wing populists of the 1930s; the civil rights movement, black power, and white resistance, 1950s-1960s; the rise of the New Left and the New Right in the 1960s; the Women's liberation movement and the Christian right of the 1970s; and finally, free-market conservatism, neoliberalism, white nationalism and the Trump era. We will explore the organizational, ideological and social history of these political mobilizations. The class explores grass-roots social movements and their relationship to “mainstream” and electoral politics. We will pay special attention to the ways that ideas and mobilizations that are sometimes deemed extreme have in fact helped to shape the broader political spectrum. Throughout the semester, we will reflect on the present political dilemmas of our country in light of the history that we study.
This course analyzes Jewish intellectual history from Spinoza to the present. It tracks the radical transformation that modernity yielded in Jewish thought, both in the development of new, self-consciously modern, iterations of Judaism and Jewishness and in the more elusive but equally foundational changes in "traditional" Judaisms. Questions to be addressed include: the development of the modern concept of "religion" and its effect on the Jews; the origin of the notion of "Judaism" parallel to Christianity, Islam, etc.; the rise of Jewish secularism and of secular Jewish ideologies, especially the Jewish Enlightenment movement (Haskalah), modern Jewish nationalism, and Zionism; the rise of Reform, Modern Orthodox, and Conservative Judaisms; Jewish neo-Romanticism and neo-Kantianism, and American Jewish religious thought.
For many centuries, historians have adhered to an unwritten rule – history is made by using textual documents. But how can we uncover the histories of those not included in the textual sources, and how can we complement and enrich the textual archives? This course interrogates one answer to these questions – that of material culture, and narrate the history of Africa through things. Borrowing methods from a variety of disciplines, most notably women’s and gender studies, anthropology, archaeology, and art history, historians have begun to use artifacts and objects to uncover the untold historical narratives. The course refers to the entire African continent, challenging the common division between North Africa (which is usually more closely associated with the Middle East in modern scholarship) and Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as many other divisions. In response to its decades-long marginalization in modern scholarship, Africa, in all its various subdivisions, is places at the center. As the course unfolds, the centrality of Africa in the international movement of things will become clear.
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.
A year-long course for outstanding senior majors who want to conduct research in primary sources on a topic of their choice in any aspect of history, and to write a senior thesis possibly leading toward departmental honors. Field(s): ALL
Russian ideas are familiar to the world through Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s novels. In this course, we will examine key texts in the intellectual tradition that forms the backdrop to these famous works. Emphasis is on close textual readings; but also on how Russian ideas have been read and interpreted across national and cultural boundaries, including in recent English-language works like Tom Stoppard’s play,
Coast of Utopia
. Thinkers include Schellingians and Hegelians, Slavophiles, Populists and Pan-Slavists, and Vladimir Soloviev.
This seminar explores the Cold Wars impact on Eastern Europe (1940s-1980s) and Eastern Europes Cold War-era engagements with the wider world. We will address the methodologies used by historians to answer questions like these: What was the Cold War? What did it mean, and for whom? We will also look at the Cold War as something more than a series of events; we will consider its value, uses, and limits as a device for framing the second half of the twentieth century.
Why did millions of Ukrainians starve under Stalin? In this seminar, we will engage with the contentious historiography of the famine of 1932-34 – a defining event of Soviet and Ukrainian history, and an essential touchstone for understanding the Russo-Ukrainian War today. Without losing sight of the famine’s human tragedy, we will focus especially on questions of causality, intent, and agency at multiple levels, from the Kremlin to the village. Drawing on studies of other famines within and outside the Soviet context (Russia, Kazakhstan, and China), participants will develop a robust comparative toolkit. The seminar aims to highlight historiographical advances, explore newly-available primary sources, and identify the remaining gaps in our understanding.
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.
This course aims to familiarise students with the extraordinarily rich historiography on fascism. Its goal is to enable a more critical approach to the subject, to parse its conceptual and historical ambiguities and to engage with theoretical framings of the subject through an immersion in the main case studies. Focusing on the emergence of fascist regimes in interwar Italy and Germany, it will range across countries and time, distinguishing fascism from other forms of the authoritarian Right, exploring the extent to which the Second World War marked a watershed in fascism’s fortunes, and asking to what extent the term remains a useful one in the early twenty-first century. Course readings will include contemporary documents, classic articles and major monographs on the subject. Students will be expected to read widely.
This course examines how Americans have used culture as a means to respond to, interpret, and remember acute social crises over the last century. Why do some periods of social upheaval create breaks in cultural forms and practices while others encourage an impetus to defend cultural practices, thereby facilitating the “invention of tradition”? How are the feelings released in such moments—whether trauma, outrage, rage, insecurity, or fear—turned into cultural artifacts? What is at stake in how they get memorialized? To answer these questions, this course examines responses to the lynching of black Americans, the Great Depression, World War II and the black freedom struggle during the postwar period. We will examine a wide range of individually and collectively produced artifacts about these events, including photography, plays, songs, movies, comic books, novels, government sponsored programs, and world fairs.
This course will offer an examination of the birth and development of the Franciscan Order between 1200-1350. The topics will include Francis of Assisi, the foundation of the three orders of Franciscans, education, poverty, preaching, theology internal strife, antifraternalism, and relations with secular governments and papacy.
“Imag(in)ing the Ottoman Empire: A visual history, 18th-20th centuries” is an undergraduate/graduate seminar focusing on visual representations of the Ottoman Empire during the last two centuries of its existence, from the early eighteenth to the early twentieth century. The objective is to study the development of visual representations both
by
and
about
the Empire, from Ottoman miniatures to early European paintings, and from the surge of Western illustrated magazines to the local uses of photography. The seminar’s chronological thread will be complemented by a thematic structure designed to explore different aspects and influences concerning the production and diffusion of images: curiosity, documentation, exoticism, propaganda, orientalism, modernity, self-fashioning, eroticism, policing, to name just a few.
This course examines the history of science, technology and medicine in the modern Middle East. We will consider a number of themes from energy infrastructures and communication and transportation systems to modern medical, agricultural and environmental developments.
What does nationalism do to memory, and how do those memories get telegraphed, circulated and preserved? This research seminar brings together media history and memory studies towards an exploration of how Iran’s history has been written, remembered, and mediated inside and outside Iran over the course of the modern period. It investigates the kinds of knowledge production involved in maintaining or rejecting a national history, and the forms of visual media harnessed to deploy such historical narratives from both government and grassroots perspectives. This course will consider the different forms of media mobilized in public history, national and institutional histories, and personal histories, all of which speak to the preservation and suppression of the past. This course follows a general chronological timeline and examines how these different narratives often center Tehran while also looking towards alternate histories that offer regional or provincial perspectives, as well as texts speaking to global trends and theoretical interventions. By examining photography, archives, museums, architecture, and other forms of new media production alongside academic historical texts and personal memoirs, this course investigates at the various ways different historiographical trends have been broadcast and institutionalized with regards to Iran’s modern history.
Africa has long been construed in the Western mind as a place of disease – from the ‘White Man’s Grave’ of West Africa in the Atlantic Era through the colonial epidemics of sleeping sickness and syphilis and to the recent past the AIDS pandemic and most recently outbreaks of Ebola and the COVID-19 pandemic. Colonial medical officials presented themselves as introducing biomedicine to the continent as part of the “civilizing mission.” The post-colonial flourishing of humanitarian and medical non-governmental organizations has in large part continued this self-projection. As such, ‘traditional’ or non-biomedical healers have found themselves alternatively the target of campaigns to prevent them from working and of efforts to bring them into the medical system by rationalizing their work through efforts such as the scientific evaluation of herbal medicines.
This course seeks to chart the history of health and healing from a perspective interior to Africa. We explore changing practices and understandings of disease, etiology, healing and well-being from pre-colonial times into the post-colonial. A major theme running throughout the course is the relationship between medicine, the body, power and social groups. We will explore changing understanding of disease and practices of healing through specific themes and case studies.
This seminar
explores a tradition of historical writing (historiography) that constructs “Africa and France,” or “France and Africa,” or “FrançAfrique” as an historical object and as an object of knowledge. That body of writing accounts in various and sometimes contadictory ways for the peculiar, intense, and historically conflictual relationship that exists between France and the sub-Saharan nation-states that are its former African colonies.
This course offers an understanding of the interdisciplinary field of environmental, health and population history and will discuss historical and policy debates with a cross cutting, comparative relevance: such as the making and subjugation of colonized peoples and natural and disease landscapes under British colonial rule; modernizing states and their interest in development and knowledge and technology building, the movement and migration of populations, and changing place of public health and healing in south Asia. The key aim of the course will be to introduce students to reading and analyzing a range of historical scholarship, and interdisciplinary research on environment, health, medicine and populations in South Asia and to introduce them to an exploration of primary sources for research; and also to probe the challenges posed by archives and sources in these fields. Some of the overarching questions that shape this course are as follows: How have environmental pasts and medical histories been interpreted, debated and what is their contemporary resonance? What have been the encounters (political, intellectual, legal, social and cultural) between the environment, its changing landscapes and state? How have citizens, indigenous communities, and vernacular healers mediated and shaped these encounters and inserted their claims for sustainability, subsistence or survival? How have these changing landscapes shaped norms about bodies, care and beliefs? The course focuses on South Asia but also urges students to think and make linkages beyond regional geographies in examining interconnected ideas and practices in histories of the environment, medicine and health. Topics will therefore include (and students are invited to add to these perspectives and suggest additional discussion themes): colonial and globalized circuits of medical knowledge, with comparative case studies from Africa and East Asia; and the travel and translation of environmental ideas and of medical practices through growing global networks.