The City & the Archive

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.

• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Manan Ahmed
  CULPA: 6 Wikipedia h-index: 6 Info
• 4 points

North Korean History, Culture and Politi

North Korea is widely regarded as a country without a history; as enigmatic as it is isolated. Dispensing with this cliché, this course invites students to engage with North Korean history using a variety of primary and secondary sources. We begin in the medieval period to trace the distinct features of the northern region that made it uniquely receptive to outside ideas. Understanding the north as a frontier zone of experimentation and adaption allows us to examine the attractive power of modernity in the north during the early twentieth century via the influence of Christianity, capitalism and communism. Utilizing texts and materials made in North Korea and internationally, including feature and documentary films, women’s magazines, graphic novels, literary fiction and testimony, the course investigates the conditions within which knowledge about North Korea has been produced, circulated and repressed. Key topics to be explored include the history of Christianity and capitalism in Pyongyang and the northern provinces, communist cadres in the 1930s, the allure of the North in the 1940s, the Korean War and the purges that followed, North Korea’s relations with neighbors and the world, and the high cost its citizens pay for the country’s brutal sanction economy.

• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Ruth Barraclough
  Info
• 4 points

American Radicalism in the Archives

US Radicalism in the Arch

“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.

• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Thai S Jones
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 4 points

RES SKILLS/MTHDS-INT/WRLD HIST

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.

• F 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• 3 points

PERSP ON INT'L & WORLD HISTORY

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.

• Instructor: Line Lillevik
  Info
• 1-3 points

GRADUATE SEMINAR

US-Mexico Borderlands

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.

• Instructor: Lori Flores
  Info
• 4 points

EARLY MODERN SOUTH ASIA

This graduate seminar focuses on  the material and political orders from 1500-1800 in South Asia. We pair primary, historical texts (in translation) with recent monographs which demonstrate the intersections between narrative and polity within material and epistemic realms. Our guiding interests will be in understanding the intimate relationship between power, agency and materiality within specific political spaces. Eschewing the center/periphery models, we take globally connective approach incorporating Western Asian, North American and Northern European histories. Some key ideas for the seminar include, “oceanic” perspective of the Indian and Atlantic oceans, role of “agents” (travelers, merchants, bureaucrats etc.), theories of colonization and decolonization, gender and sexuality.

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Manan Ahmed
  CULPA: 6 Wikipedia h-index: 6 Info
• 4 points

THE JEWISH BOOK IN EARLY MOD WORLD

This course will situate the Jewish book within the context of the theoretical and historical literature on the history of the book: notions of orality and literacy, text and material platform, authors and readers, print and manuscript, language and gender, the book trade and its role in the circulation of people and ideas in the early age of print.

• M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Elisheva Carlebach
  CULPA: 6 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Knowledge and Materiality in the Early M

Knowledge/Materiality Ear

Intended for advanced graduate students, this course considers classic and recent works in materiality and material culture in the early modern period (ca. 1400-1700), especially as they are fruitful for the history of science and knowledge. Class sessions will include discussion, museum visits, and hands-on work in the Making and Knowing Lab. Topics to be considered: embodied knowledge, material complexes, materialized concepts and identities, agentive matter, human-environment relations, and material imaginaries.

• MW 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Pamela Smith
  CULPA: 4 Info
• 4 points

Memory and History in Central Europe

Memory & History in C. Eu

The aim of the seminar is to introduce the images of the national past of the individual Central European nations (Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs, and Croats). The course will deal with general theoretical questions of historical theory and historiography, and then examine how the identity-forming influence of national history manifested itself in each era from the Middle Ages to the end of the 20th century. Remembering the past took on different forms in the era of 19th-century nationalism (during the Habsburg Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy), between the two world wars, and during the communist dictatorships that emerged in the region. The manifestations of memory politics in Central Europe (monuments, school education) will also be presented and analyzed.

• W 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Csaba Fazekas
  Info
• 4 points

New Directions in Eastern European, Russ

E. European Eurasian Hist

This is an intense reading seminar in new directions in East European, Russian and Eurasian history from the turn of the nineteenth century to the present. The seminar explores the “Other Europe” as a constellation of specific regions as much as key localities from which to view the world. The course is based on the premise that global history should be narrated beyond center-periphery frameworks, and from any place where people have reimagined their relationship to a shared global modernity. We will investigate topics ranging from multi-confessional and multi-ethnic land empires (German, Russian, Habsburg, Ottoman, Soviet) and their post-imperial forms; globalization and isolation; nationalisms and internationalisms; modernization; communisms; borderlands; dictatorships; Orientalism outside of Western Europe; migration and expulsion across borders and the rise of so-called closed societies; interethnic and communal violence, genocide, and mass killing. Through the lens of cultural, intellectual, social, international, transnational, environmental, regional, urban, legal and gender history, and the history of science and technology, we will explore the region’s historic liminality (as a bridge between “East” and “West’) and its historic ties with Western Europe, the Ottoman Empire, the United States, and Southeast Asia.

• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• 4 points

Readings in Labor History

This seminar traces major historical trends, transformations, events, and eras that have shaped labor and the lives of workers, mostly in the United States but also around the world. With some prefatory readings about the 18th and 19th centuries, this seminar will concentrate on the 20th and 21st centuries and examine different sectors of work and the varied laboring lives of individuals and communities. Topics covered include labor during Reconstruction; the racialization and feminization of labor; industrial factory work; agribusiness’s power and the food industry; union formation and campaigns; workplace traumas and tragedies; citizen-migrant tensions and solidarities; globalization and outsourcing; sex, tech, and gig work; and how cultural changes and political schisms affect attitudes in the working and middle classes.

• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Lori Flores
  Info
• 4 points

History, Politics, Theory: Keywords

HIST, POL, THEORY: Keywor

This graduate seminar (cross-listed in the departments of History and Anthropology) explores a series of contemporary keywords in history, politics, and theory.  Through the close readings of primary sources as well as classic and more recent historical and theoretical texts, we will consider questions of war, violence, genocide, trauma, memory, liberalism and illiberalism, and fascism.  The course is designed to introduce graduate students to concepts and debates in History, Anthropology, and critical theory with a view of thinking about the present political moment.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• 4 points

METHODS IN HISTORY OF SCIENCE

• T 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Malgorzata Mazurek
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 4 points

RESISTANCE & THE BLK ATLANTIC

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.”

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Natasha J Lightfoot
  CULPA: 5 Info
• 4 points

RESEARCH SEMINAR FOR PHD STUDENTS

This course will provide a structured environment in which graduate students will write a research paper. It will be offered in the spring and will not be field-specific. It will be recommended for first-year students in particular, who will be expected to enter from GR8910 (the required first-year course) and with a topic and/or prospectus for the paper they plan to complete in the course. The aim of the course is to ensure that all PhD students complete one of their two research papers within the first year. This seminar is recommended for, and restricted to, PhD students in the History Department. The aim of the seminar is to guide and assist students in the completion of a 10,000-12,000 word research paper appropriate for publication in a scholarly journal. The seminar is not field-specific, and students may work on any subject of their choosing. The paper must however be based on primary source research and represents a substantial departure from earlier work. The assignments for the course are designed to help students complete a polished piece of work by the end of term.

• W 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Catherine Evtuhov
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 4 points

Capitalism and Democracy

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.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Adam Tooze
  CULPA: 3 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points