Ancient History of the Middle East - DIS
Ancient Hist - Middle E -
Required discussion section (DISC) for HIST 1002 (Ancient History of the Middle East)
- 0 points
ANCIENT GREEK HIST, 800-146 BC
A review of the history of the Greek world from the beginnings of Greek archaic culture around 800 B.C. through the classical and hellenistic periods to the definitive Roman conquest in 146 B.C. with concentration on political history, but attention also to social and cultural developments.Field(s): ANC
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Instructor:
Richard A Billows
CULPA: 40
Wikipedia
Info
- 4 points
History of the City in Latin America
HIST CITY LATIN AMERICA
This course covers the historical development of cities in Latin America. Readings, lectures, and discussion sections will examine the concentration of people in commercial and political centers from the beginnings of European colonization in the fifteenth century to the present day and will introduce contrasting approaches to the study of urban culture, politics, society, and the built environment. Central themes include the reciprocal relationships between growing urban areas and the countryside; changing power dynamics in modern Latin America, especially as they impacted the lives of cities’ nonelite majority populations; the legalities and politics of urban space; planned versus unplanned cities and the rise of informal economies; the way changing legal and political rights regimes have affected urban life; and the constant tension between tradition and progress through which urban society was formed. There are no prerequisites for this course. Attendance at weekly Discussion Sections required.
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Instructor:
Amy E Chazkel
CULPA: 1 Info - 4 points
DISC - History of the City in Latin Amer
DISC-HIST CITY LAT AMERIC
REQUIRED DISCUSSION SECTION for HIST UN 1786 History of the City in Latin America. Students must first register for HIST UN 1786.
- 0 points
DAILY LIFE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE
This course is designed as travellers guide to medieval Europe. Its purpose is to provide a window to a long-lost world that provided the foundation of modern institutions and that continues to inspire the modern collective artistic and literary imagination with its own particularities. This course will not be a conventional history course concentrating on the grand narratives in the economic, social and political domains but rather intend to explore the day-to-day lives of the inhabitants, and attempts to have a glimpse of their mindset, their emotional spectrum, their convictions, prejudices, fears and hopes. It will be at once a historical, sociological and anthropological study of one of the most inspiring ages of European civilization. Subjects to be covered will include the birth and childhood, domestic life, sex and marriage, craftsmen and artisans, agricultural work, food and diet, the religious devotion, sickness and its cures, death, after death (purgatory and the apparitions), travelling, merchants and trades, inside the nobles castle, the Christian cosmos, and medieval technology. The lectures will be accompanied by maps, images of illuminated manuscripts and of medieval objects. Students will be required to attend a weekly discussion section to discuss the medieval texts bearing on that weeks subject. The written course assignment will be a midterm, final and two short papers, one an analysis of a medieval text and a second an analysis of a modern text on the Middle Ages.
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Instructor:
Neslihan Senocak
CULPA: 5
Wikipedia
Info
- 4 points
DAILY LIFE IN MED EUR-DISC
MANDATORY Discussion Section for HIST UN 2072 Daily Life in Medieval Europe. Students must also be registered for HIST UN 2072.
- 0 points
European Intellectual History
EURO INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
This course provides an introduction to some of the major landmarks in European cultural and intellectual history, from the aftermath of the French Revolution to the 1970s. We will pay special attention to the relationship between texts (literature, anthropology, political theory, psychoanalysis, art, and film) and the various contexts in which they were produced. Among other themes, we will discuss the cultural impact of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, industrialism, colonialism, modernism, the Russian Revolution, the two world wars, decolonization, feminism and gay liberation movements, structuralism and poststructuralism. In conjunction, we will examine how modern ideologies (liberalism, conservatism, Marxism, imperialism, fascism, totalitarianism, neoliberalism) were developed and challenged over the course of the last two centuries. Participation in weekly discussion sections staffed by TAs is mandatory. The discussion sections are 50 minutes per session. Students must register for the general discussion (“DISC”) section, and will be assigned to a specific time and TA instructor once the course begins.
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Instructor:
Camille A Robcis
CULPA: 2 Wikipedia Info - 4 points
DISC - European Intellectual History
DISC-EURO INTELLECTUAL
Required Discussion Section for HIST 2310 European Intellectual History. Students must first register for HIST 2310.
- 0 points
World economy, Empire & War: 1900-50
World Econ/Empire/War: 19
World economy, Empire and War: 1900-1950 covers the dramatic upheavals in the world economy that brought nineteenth-century era of globalization to an end an initiated a new era of national economics and global geopolitics. The course will cover the age of imperialism, the crises of the interwar period, the arms race of the 1930s, World War II and the Cold War.
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Instructor:
Adam Tooze
CULPA: 3 Wikipedia Info - 4 points
World economy, Empire & War: 1900-50 - D
World Econ/Empire/War DIS
Required zero-point/ungraded discussion section for “World economy, Empire & War: 1900-50” lecture (HIST 2344)
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Conquests and Transformations: Ireland s
Ireland since 1500
We are often led to believe that Ireland is a place defined by timeless tradition: ancient songs and stories, a rural way of life, persistent and mysterious religious antagonisms. The real history of modern Ireland, however, is defined by dramatic and restless change: political, social, economic, even environmental. This lecture course will introduce you to the broad sweep of modern Irish history, acquainting you with a rich historical literature and striking primary sources covering everything from the contentious and deadly politics of potato-farming to the secret lives of combatants in the Northern Ireland Troubles. It will view Ireland not as a place out of time but as somewhere from which we can gain a unique perspective on some of the historical forces that have shaped our world: empire, capitalism, religion, migration, and nationalism.
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Instructor:
James Stafford
Info - 4 points
Conquests and Transformations: Ireland s
Ireland since 1500 - DISC
Required zero-point/ungraded discussion section for “Conquests and Transformations: Ireland since 1500” lecture (HIST 2347)
- 0 points
Shadow of the Sun King: Early Modern Fra
Early Modern France
This course will offer a survey of French history from the Wars of Religion to the Revolution, when the kingdom was the predominant power in Europe. Topics to be addressed include the rise of the Bourbon monarchy, the crystallization of absolutism as a political theology, the spectacular rise and collapse of John Law’s financial system, the emergence of the philosophe movement during the Enlightenment, and the gradual de-legitimation of royal power through its association with despotism. Thematically, the course will focus on shifting logics of representation—that is, the means by which political, economic, and religious power was not only reflected, but also generated and projected, through a range of interrelated practices that include Catholic liturgy, courtly protocols, aristocratic codes of honor, financial experimentation, and the critical styles of thinking and reading inculcated by the nascent public sphere.
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Instructor:
Charly J Coleman
CULPA: 7
Info
- 4 points
Shadow of the Sun King: Early Modern Fra
Early Modern France - DIS
Required discussion section for HIST UN2353
- 0 points
Indigenous History of North America - DI
Indigenous Hist N Amer -
Required discussion section for Indigenous History of North America (HIST UN1488)
- 0 points
Immigration in American History
This course traces, from the colonial era to the present, the development of policies toward immigrants from Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Key topics include assimilation and integration; the daily lives of im/migrants and multi-status families; guestworkers and labor; xenophobia and pro-immigrant rights movements; twenty-first century debates over immigration; and the impact of economics and foreign policy upon border and citizenship legislation.
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Instructor:
Lori Flores
Info - 4 points
HEALTH INEQUALITY: MODERN US
Through assigned readings and a group research project, students will gain familiarity with a range of historical and social science problems at the intersection of ethnic/racial/sexual formations, technological networks, and health politics since the turn of the twentieth century. Topics to be examined will include, but will not be limited to, black women's health organization and care; HIV/AIDS politics, policy, and community response; benign neglect; urban renewal and gentrification; medical abuses and the legacy of Tuskegee; tuberculosis control; and environmental justice. There are no required qualifications for enrollment, although students will find the material more accessible if they have had previous coursework experience in United States history, pre-health professional (pre-med, pre-nursing, or pre-public health), African-American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, or American Studies.
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Instructor:
Samuel K Jr Roberts
Info - 4 points
DISC-HEALTH INEQUALITY: MODERN US
DISC-HEALTH INEQUALITY MO
Required DISCUSSION SECTION for HIST UN2523, History of Health Inequality in Modern US. Students must first register for main class.
- 0 points
US LESBIAN & GAY HISTORY
This course explores the social, cultural, and political history of lesbians, gay men, and other socially constituted sexual and gender minorities, primarily in the twentieth century. Since the production and regulation of queer life has always been intimately linked to the production and policing of “normal” sexuality and gender, we will also pay attention to the shifting boundaries of normative sexuality, especially heterosexuality, as well as other developments in American history that shaped gay life, such as the Second World War, Cold War, urbanization, and the minority rights revolution. Themes include the emergence of homosexuality and heterosexuality as categories of experience and identity; the changing relationship between homosexuality and transgenderism; the development of diverse lesbian and gay subcultures and their representation in popular culture; the sources of antigay hostility; religion and sexual science; generational change and everyday life; AIDS; and gay, antigay, feminist, and queer movements.
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Instructor:
George Chauncey
CULPA: 13
Wikipedia
Info
- 4 points
AI: A History
How can history help us understand the current AI hype? And when would a history of AI begin? This course turns to the past to better understand the present. Rather than beginning with the dawn of digital computers, the course situates contemporary artificial intelligence within a longer tradition of attempts to build automata and calculating machines. The course interrogates three interrelated ideas that have been instrumental in the development of AI: Intelligence, Automation, and Fiction. The course will consider questions such as: How have ideas about what intelligence is and who possesses it been inscribed in the computing devices researchers design and build? How in turn have computational approaches shaped what does and does not count as intelligence? What can earlier efforts to automate labor tell us about contemporary conversations about the end of work? And what role has speculative fiction, the promissory, and fictive futurity played in the development of AI?
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Instructor:
Alma Steingart
CULPA: 3 Info - 4 points
LATIN AMERICAN CIVILIZATION I
This course aims to give a portrait of the development of Latin America from the first contact with the Europeans to the creation of independent states. We will focus on society and interaction among the various ethnic and socio-economic groups at the level of daily life. For each class, students will have to read sections of a core text as well as a primary source, or document, from the period; before the end of every class there will be 15 minutes to discuss the document together. In addition, students will enroll in discussion sections held by TAs.
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Instructor:
Caterina Pizzigoni
CULPA: 24
Info
- 4 points
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
This course will cover the seven-century long history of the Ottoman Empire, which spanned Europe, Asia, and Africa as well as the medieval, early modern, and modern period. The many levels of continuity and change will be the focus, as will issues of identities and mentalities, confessional diversity, cultural and linguistic pluralism, and imperial governance and political belonging of the empire within larger regional and global perspectives over the centuries. The course also seeks to cultivate appreciation of the human experience through the multifarious experiences culled from the Ottoman past.
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE-DISCUSSION
MANDATORY Discussion Section for HIST UN 2701 Ottoman Empire. Students must also be registered for HIST UN 2701.
- 0 points
GENDER & SEXUALITY IN AFRICA
This course examines the history of gender, sexuality and ways of identifying along these lines in Africa from early times through the twentieth century. It asks how these aspects have shaped key historical developments, from African kingdoms and empires to postcolonial states, from colonial conquest to movements for independence, from indigenous healing practices to biomedicine, from slavery to the modern forms of work. It will also explore the history of different sexualities and gender identities on the continent. A key objective is to extend the historical study of gender and sexual identity in Africa beyond ‘women’s history’ to understand gender as encompassing all people in society and their relationships, whether domestic or public.
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Instructor:
Rhiannon Stephens
CULPA: 2 Info - 4 points
GENDER & SEXUALITY IN AFRICA-DISC
Required discussion for HSWM UN2761 lecture "Gender & Sexuality in Africa"
- 0 points
GENDER & SEXUALITY IN AFRICA-DISC
Required discussion for HSWM UN2761 lecture "Gender & Sexuality in Africa"
- 0 points
GENDER & SEXUALITY IN AFRICA-DISC
Required discussion for HSWM UN2761 lecture "Gender & Sexuality in Africa"
- 0 points
GENDER & SEXUALITY IN AFRICA-DISC
Required discussion for HSWM UN2761 lecture "Gender & Sexuality in Africa"
- 0 points
GENDER & SEXUALITY IN AFRICA-DISC
Required discussion for HSWM UN2761 lecture "Gender & Sexuality in Africa"
- 0 points
GENDER & SEXUALITY IN AFRICA-DISC
Required discussion for HSWM UN2761 lecture "Gender & Sexuality in Africa"
- 0 points
WEST AFRICA
This course offers a survey of main themes in West African history over the last millenium, with particular emphasis on the period from the mid-15th through the 20th century. Themes include the age of West African empires (Ghana, Mali, Songhay); re-alignments of economic and political energies towards the Atlantic coast; the rise and decline of the trans-Atlantic trade in slaves; the advent and demise of colonial rule; and internal displacement, migrations, and revolutions. In the latter part of the course, we will appraise the continuities and ruptures of the colonial and post-colonial eras. Group(s): C Field(s): AFR
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Instructor:
Gregory Mann
CULPA: 15 h-index: 13 Info - 4 points
HISTORY OF SOUTH ASIA I
This survey lecture course will provide students with a broad overview of the history of South Asia as a region - focusing on key political, cultural and social developments over more than two millennia. The readings include both primary sources (in translation) and secondary works. Our key concerns will be the political, cultural and theological encounters of varied communities, the growth of cities and urban spaces, networks of trade and migrations and the development of both local and cosmopolitan cultures across Southern Asia. The survey will begin with early dynasties of the classical period and then turn to the subsequent formation of various Perso-Turkic polities, including the development and growth of hybrid political cultures such as those of Vijayanagar and the Mughals. The course also touches on Indic spiritual and literary traditions such as Sufi and Bhakti movements. Near the end of our course, we will look forward towards the establishment of European trading companies and accompanying colonial powers.
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Instructor:
Manan Ahmed
CULPA: 6
Wikipedia
h-index: 6
Info
- 4 points
HIST OF SOUTH ASIA I-DISC
MANDATORY Discussion Section for HSME 2811 South Asia: Empire and Aftermath. Students must also be registered for HSME 2811.
- 0 points
Making Modern Korea
This course explores Korea’s history from the late nineteenth century to the present with a particular focus on caste/class, gender, war and industrialization. Using primary and secondary texts as well as documentary film and literary ephemera, the seminar analyses such topics as the relationship between imperialism and rebellions in the nineteenth century; the uneven experience of Japanese colonial rule; Korea’s early feminist movement; how North Korea became a communist society; the deep scars of the Korean War; cultures of industrialism in South and North Korea; counter-cultural movements in 1970s, 1980s and 1990s South Korea; and contemporary challenges facing the peninsula. This course will give students a thorough grounding in modern Korean history and introduce them to major interpretative currents in the study of Korean history.
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Instructor:
Ruth Barraclough
Info - 4 points
Making Modern Korea - DISC
Required discussion section for “Making Modern Korea” lecture (HIST 2851)
- 0 points
WAR & SOCIETY SINCE 1945
This course surveys the second half of the most violent century in human history. It examines the intersection of war and human society in the years after 1945 by focusing on two monumental and intertwined historical processes: Decolonization and the Cold War. While the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union would fail to produce any general wars between two belligerents, this superpower rivalry would help to make the global process of decolonization in the developing a particularly violent affair.
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Instructor:
Paul T Chamberlin
CULPA: 3 Info - 4 points
Mobility and Identity in the Roman World
Mob & Identity in Roman W
This course considers how identity increased, limited, controlled, or otherwise shaped the mobility of individuals and groups in the Roman world, including women, slaves, freedpeople, and diaspora communities. We will identify the structures that produced differences in mobility and consider how such groups understood and represented themselves in a variety of media as possessing a specific, shared identity and community. The course will draw on a range of primary sources, including inscriptions and literary texts (both poetry and prose), and cover the period from the second century BCE to the third century CE.
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Instructor:
Sailakshmi Ramgopal
CULPA: 2 Info - 4 points
History of Urban Crime and Policing in L
Urban Crime/Policing Lati
This seminar will examine the social construction of criminality and the institutions that developed to impose and enforce the criminal law as reflections of Latin American society throughout the region’s history, with a particular emphasis on the rise of police forces as the principal means of day-to-day urban governance. Topics include policing and urban slavery; policing the urban “underworld”; the changing cultural importance of police in urban popular culture; the growth of scientific policing methods, along with modern criminology and eugenics; policing and the enforcement of gender norms in urban public spaces; the role of urban policing in the rise of military governments in the twentieth century; organized crime; transitional justice and the contemporary question of the rule of law; and the transnational movement of ideas about and innovations in policing practice. In our readings and class discussions over the course of the semester, we will trace how professionalized, modern police forces took shape in cities across the region over time. This course actually begins, however, in the colonial period before there was anything that we would recognize as a modern, uniformed, state-run police force. We will thus have a broad perspective from which to analyze critically the role of police in the development of Latin American urban societies—in other words, to see the police in the contemporary era as contingent on complex historical processes, which we will seek to understand.
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Instructor:
Amy E Chazkel
CULPA: 1 Info - 4 points
Novels, Netflix & the British Empire
Novels/Netflix/British Em
Nothing seems to hold our attention quite like Britain’s early-nineteenth century and the women who wrote about it. But why are so many of the stories most resonant with modern audiences love stories? How can we account for the tenacious staying power of the Regency romance? What is lost, and gained, in the reinterpretations (or reinventions) of these works, and what does it say about the legacy of Britain and its empire? These are some of the questions to be explored in this course, which will engage with the original texts and put those texts in conversation with recent adaptations.
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Instructor:
Julia P Burke
Info - 4 points
IMMIGRANT NEW YORK
For centuries, New York City has served as a primary gateway city for immigrants to the United States. In the early twentieth century, according to the 1910 Census, New York City’s population was roughly 40% foreign-born. The problems these immigrants presented to government officials, doctors, religious leaders, industrialists, the police, and educators in New York City transformed not only the local debate on immigration but the national discussion of “Americanization” as well. According to the most recent census, approximately 40% of the city's population is foreign-born. Like their predecessors at the turn of the twentieth century, contemporary immigrants, arriving from the Caribbean, Africa, Central America, Asia, and Europe, have posed serious challenges to the civic, educational, and political institutions of New York City. How are these foreign-born residents reshaping the city today? This seminar explores the intersection of immigration, race, culture, and politics in New York City, both from the perspective of history and in relation to contemporary realities as it explores the forces shaping the century-old encounter between immigrants and New York City.
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Instructor:
Rebecca Kobrin
CULPA: 7 Info - 4 points
COLUMBIA UNI & SLAVERY
In this course, students will write original, independent papers of around 25 pages, based on research in both primary and secondary sources, on an aspect of the relationship between Columbia College and its colonial predecessor Kings College, with the institution of slavery.
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Instructor:
Karl Jacoby
CULPA: 2 h-index: 8 Info - 4 points
Art in America, 1968-2000: Culture at th
Historians often approach the late 20th century through the lens of politics and economics, tracking the rise of conservatism, neoliberalism, and the dominance of global capitalism following the end of the Cold War. These narratives, however, leave little room for the arts during a time when American culture became a worldwide export and artists around the country produced inventive work that transformed the culture industry. How does our understanding of the late 20th century change when we focus on the arts? What do we learn from artists about those more familiar subjects of politics and economics. This seminar seeks to answer such questions, exploring cities that emerged as artistic hubs around the United States from 1968-2000. We will survey New York, California, the Sun Belt, and Pacific Northwest, examining subjects such as the rise of Wall Street and the art market; the national “culture war” between conservative politicians and artists; changes in the Hollywood studio system; the development of Silicon Valley, the internet, and tech-culture; the cultural hybridity of the Borderlands/la frontera; the utopian, free-market aspirations of Disney; and artistic responses to globalization. A goal of this class is to practice doing cultural history across artistic genres. Rather than focus on a single type of art, this course encompasses a variety of forms and media so that students can learn to make connections between different modes of cultural expression. We will pair these primary sources with works of historical scholarship so that we can contextualize the role of art in society and think about how it changes at the end of the 20th century. There are no prerequisites for this course, which will enrich majors in History and American Studies, as well as Ethnicity and Race Studies, AAADS, Urban Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Art History, Film and Media Studies, Drama and Theatre Arts, and Dance.
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Instructor:
Juliana A Devaan
Info - 4 points
Jews in Early Modern Europe, 1492-1750
Jews Early Mod Euro 1492-
A seminar on the historical, political, and cultural developments in the Jewish communities of early-modern Western Europe (1492-1789) with particular emphasis on the transition from medieval to modern patterns. We will study the resettlement of Jews in Western Europe, Jews in the Reformation-era German lands, Italian Jews during the late Renaissance, the rise of Kabbalah, and the beginnings of the quest for civil Emancipation. Field(s): JWS/EME
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Instructor:
Elisheva Carlebach
CULPA: 6
Wikipedia
Info
- 4 points
The World of the Crusades, c.1050-c.1500
What were the Crusades? This seemingly straightforward question is not so easily answered. In fact, there are few historical subjects that are at once so superficially recognizable and yet so inadequately understood. The Crusades have been called armed pilgrimages and penitential holy wars; but also framed as an apocalyptic movement; or a proto-colonial one. Against whom were the Crusades directed? Certainly, they often entailed assaults against Muslims in the Middle East. But they also touched off anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe and were declared and fought against pagans in Livonia; perceived heretics in the south of France; Mongols in Poland and Hungary; and Christian political enemies of the papacy in Italy and elsewhere. This course has three principal aims. The first is to interrogate the origin, evolution, and consequences of the crusading movement in western Europe. The second is to examine and understand the various impacts on, and experiences of, those who were the target of crusading—Muslims, pagans, heretics, political enemies, etc.—in both the Middle East and other regions. Finally, we will conclude by considering the long “afterlife” and complicated reception of the Crusades—both how their study has been institutionalized in scholarship and universities, as well as the various ways they have been remembered, romanticized, appropriated, popularized, and vilified in the West and the Islamic world from the Middle Ages until the present day.
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Instructor:
Jesse W Izzo
Info - 4 points
African Climate and History
This course examines how Africa’s climate has changed in the past and with what consequences for the people living on the continent. It looks at the scope, duration and intensity of past climate events and their impacts, while using these historical climate events to teach fundamental climate concepts. Central to the course is the human experience of these events and the diversity of their responses. The major question underpinning this course is, therefore, how have people responded to past climate events, whether short-term, decadal or longer in scope? This question is predicated on the complexity of human society and moves away from the binary of collapse vs. resilience that dominates much thinking about the impact of climate changes on past societies. This framing recognizes the significance of climate for food production and collection, as well as trade and cosmologies. It does not take climate to be the determining factor in history. Rather it foregrounds the myriad ways people acted in the face of, for example, multi-decadal below average rainfall or long periods of more reliable precipitation.
- 4 points
Law and Society in Colonial India
Law & Society / Colonial
This course explores the relationship between law and society in colonial India. It features cases relating to marriage and divorce, property and inheritance, sedition and criminal conspiracy woven through the lives of ordinary people in nineteenth and twentieth century India. Through a range of materials, we will explore how British colonial officials reformulated what “law” was and how it was to be interpreted. We will also explore how these interpretations were understood and challenged. We will encounter judges, lawyers, and notaries that mediated the relationship between law and society, courts, and litigants, while catching a fascinating glimpse of what arguments, evidence, and sentencing looked like in these courts. As we go through our readings and attend classes, we might ask: how does this perspective from India shape our understanding of the relationship between law and colonialism, and what are its contemporary implications?
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Instructor:
Kalyani Ramnath
Info - 4 points
SENIOR THESIS SEMINAR
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.
Approved application through the History Department is required to join this seminar.
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Instructor:
Tunc Sen
Info -
Instructor:
James Stafford
Info -
Instructor:
Michael F Stanislawski
CULPA: 66 Wikipedia Info - 4 points
SLAVERY/ABOLITION-ATLANTC WRLD
This seminar investigates the experiences of slavery and freedom among African-descended people living and laboring in the various parts of the Atlantic World. The course will trace critical aspects of these two major, interconnected historical phenomena with an eye to how specific cases either manifested or troubled broader trends across various slaveholding societies. The first half of the course addresses the history of slavery and the second half pertains to experiences in emancipation. However, since the abolition of slavery occurs at different moments in various areas of the Atlantic World, the course will adhere to a more thematic and less chronological structure, in its examination of the multiple avenues to freedom available in various regions. Weekly units will approach major themes relevant to both slavery and emancipation, such as racial epistemologies among slaveowners/employers, labor regimes in slave and free societies, cultural innovations among slave and freed communities, gendered discourses and sexual relations within slave and free communities, and slaves’ and free people’s resistance to domination. The goal of this course is to broaden students’ comprehension of the history of slavery and freedom, and to promote an understanding of the transition from slavery to freedom in the Americas as creating both continuities and ruptures in the structure and practices of the various societies concerned.
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Instructor:
Natasha J Lightfoot
CULPA: 5
Info
- 4 points
THE BLACK SEA IN HISTORY
We are used to thinking of history in national terms, or at least in reference to major civilizations (“Western civilization,” “Near Eastern civilization,” etc.). In “real life,” however, interactions among people, linguistic communities, and cultures frequently cut across political divisions. Water - rivers, streams, seas - is often an invitation to settlement, commerce, and conquest. This course offers a look (inspired in part by Fernand Braudel's Mediterranean) at a body of water - the Black Sea - and the lands around it, in sweeping historical perspective. Focus is on those moments when the various civilizations and empires that originated and flourished around the Black Sea met and intersected in friendship or in enmity. We will look at ancient civilizations, Greek colonization, Byzantine-Slav interactions, the period of Ottoman dominance, Russian-Turkish rivalry, and decolonization and wars in the 19th and 20th centuries. We hope that we will be able to pay particular attention to questions of ecology, language, religion, and cultural interaction throughout.
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Instructor:
Catherine Evtuhov
CULPA: 2 Info - 4 points
CULTURE IN POLISH LANDS
Few places in the world have witnessed the shift from a multiethnic territory to a nationally homogeneous nation-state as profoundly as the Polish lands. A crucial site of the collapse of Central and Eastern European empires, the Holocaust, ethnic cleansings, Nazi occupation, Soviet-style socialism, and accession to the European Union, Poland’s twentieth-century and contemporary culture has developed in the shadow of catastrophe and political and economic revolutions.
This seminar investigates shifting meanings of cultural difference and sameness from 1918 to the present, including Polish debates on multiculturalism spurred by the ongoing European refugee crisis. We will examine meanings attached to people, things, and landscapes - Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian, German, Nazi or Soviet - through the lens of visual arts, everyday objects, scholarly discourses, and urban and rural topographies. While we will pay special attention to the historiography of twentieth-century Eastern Europe, the course relies on interdisciplinary approaches and welcomes students interested in the history of art and architecture, literature, social history, anthropology, cultural studies, and critical museology.
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Instructor:
Malgorzata Mazurek
CULPA: 2 Info - 4 points
Pascal and the Modern Self
This seminar is one of the series “History of the Modern Self” which includes Montaigne, Rousseau, and soon Nietzsche. This semester will focus on Pascal’s conception of the self as revealed by his
humanistic
case for religious faith in response to the skeptical challenge of Montaigne. The aim is to understand all the implications of this encounter for the history of modern Western thought about human psychology, religion, and politics.
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Instructor:
Mark Lilla
CULPA: 57
Wikipedia
Info
- 4 points
Stalinism
The quarter century during which Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union witnessed some of the twentieth century's most dramatic events: history's fastest plunge into modernity, an apocalyptic world war, and the emergence of a socialist state as a competitive world power. This tutorial will offer students a deep dive not only into the historical depths of the Stalin era but into the gloriously complex historiographical debates that surround it. Some of the questions that will animate the readings, writings, and discussions that students will engage in are as follows: Did Stalin depart from or represent a continuation of the policies introduced by his predecessor Vladimir Lenin? Did he rule in a totalitarian fashion or in ways comparable to other twentieth century regimes? Were his policies destructive or possibly productive? And perhaps most boggling of all: why did no one resist Stalinist rule?
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Instructor:
Yana Skorobogatov
Info - 4 points
Democracy and its Technocrats
Science and technology have become increasingly central to the basic functioning of democratic societies The administrative state, both on the local and national level, is dependent on technological systems to ensure democratic rule and deliver services: from voting machines and welfare databases to passport scanners and the laboratory equipment necessary to set environmental standards. Just as necessary are the numerous experts – engineers, statisticians, epidemiologists, and environmental scientists – who either work for or advise the state in its dealings. How should we think about the technocratic nature of modern democracy? Is it an inevitable and necessary pre-condition for governing modern mass society? Or is it an alarming aspect, an undemocratic impulse, that undermines the promise of democratic rule?The course will examine the coproduction of science and politics. In the first part of the semester, students will gain conceptual tools with which to rethink the connection between science, technology, power, politics, policy, and democracy. They will consider the role of expertise in modern politics, as well as the construction of the public. In the second part of the semester we will consider in greater detail the way technocratic governance developed in the United States from the end of the nineteenth century to the contemporary moment.
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Instructor:
Alma Steingart
CULPA: 3 Info - 4 points
Topics in U.S. Foreign Relations History
This course will explore various topics in the History of U.S. foreign relations. Drawing on a wide range of scholarly writings, we will explore the history of the United States and the world with an eye toward the impact of American power on foreign peoples. Students will also use the semester to design, research, and write a substantial essay that draws on both primary and secondary sources on a topic chosen in consultation with the professor.
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Instructor:
Paul T Chamberlin
CULPA: 3 Info - 4 points
Jews in the Ancient City: Politics and M
This course will examine the experience of Jews in the cities of the eastern Roman Empire, offering a challenge to modern hypotheses of Jewish corporate stability in that setting and contributing to modern discussions of the relations between the Roman state, Greek cities, and Jewish and Christian subjects.
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Instructor:
Seth R Schwartz
CULPA: 1 Wikipedia Info - 4 points
Indigenous Worlds in Early Latin America
This seminar deals with the presence of indigenous peoples in Latin American colonial societies and aims to analyze indigenous responses to conquest and colonization. How did indigenous people see themselves and interact with other groups? What roles did they play in shaping Latin American societies? What spaces were they able to create for themselves? These and similar questions will guide our discussion through the semester. Every week, we will read documents written by the indigenous people themselves, as well as academic studies of their cultures and societies. The course will offer a survey of the main indigenous groups; however, the case studies are by necessity just a selection. The seminar is conceived for students interested in race and ethnic relations and in the mechanisms of colonization and responses to it, as seen through the lenses of Latin America, between the 16th and the 18th centuries.
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Instructor:
Caterina Pizzigoni
CULPA: 24
Info
- 4 points
WRITERS ON HISTORY: THOMAS MANN
WRITERS ON HISTORY:THOMAS
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 Thomas Mann in the context of the First and Second World Wars. This will include his relation to the German “conservative revolution,” the Weimar political experience, and the United States, where he spent several years in exile. We will pay particular attention to his conceptions of modern history as expressed in his novels.
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Instructor:
Mark Lilla
CULPA: 57
Wikipedia
Info
- 4 points
ORIENTALISM/HIST OF OTHER
This course will examine some of the problems inherent in Western historical writing on non-European cultures, as well as broad questions of what itmeans to write history across cultures. The course will touch on therelationship between knowledge and power, given that much of the knowledge we will be considering was produced at a time of the expansion of Western power over the rest of the world. By comparing some of the others which European historians constructed in the different non-western societies they depicted, and the ways other societies dealt with alterity and self, we may be able to derive a better sense of how the Western sense of self was constructed. Group(s): C Field(s): ME
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Instructor:
Marwa Elshakry
CULPA: 2 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 Master's 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.
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Instructor:
Line Lillevik
Info - 1 points
Perspectives on International and World
Persptvs on Int'l & World
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 (www.history.columbia.edu). (The Center for International History - cih.columbia.edu - and the Heyman Center for the Humanities - heymancenter.org/events/ - also have impressive calendars of events, often featuring 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.
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Instructor:
Line Lillevik
Info - 1-3 points
COLLOQ IN ATLANTIC HISTORY
This colloquium provides an intensive exploration of the Atlantic World during the early modern era. Readings will attend to the sequence of contact, conquest, and dispossession that enabled the several European empires to gain political and economic power. In this regard, particular attention will be given to the role of commerce and merchant capitalism in the formation of the Atlantic World. The course will focus also, however, on the dynamics of cultural exchange, on the two-way influences that pushed the varied peoples living along the Atlantic to develop new practices, new customs, and new tastes. Creative adaptations in the face of rapid social and cultural change will figure prominently in the readings. Students may expect to give sustained attention the worlds Africans, Amerindians, and Europeans both made together and made apart.
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Instructor:
Christopher L Brown
CULPA: 5
Info
- 4 points
Blackness and the Psy Disciplines in Nin
19th-20th Cen Blackness &
This course offers a sample of historical research on debates around African-American intelligence, mental health, family organization, and other social scientific controversies from the era of slavery to the late 20th century. The principal assignment is a lesson plan, instructions for which will be supplied on the CourseWorks site.
Please note that you may not take this course as an auditor or pass/fail without the permission of the instructor.
Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences guidelines may be found at
http://gsas.columbia.edu/
. Those for the history department may be found at
http://history.columbia.edu/graduate/index.html
.
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Instructor:
Samuel K Jr Roberts
Info - 4 points
Readings in Twentieth Century U.S. Histo
Readings in 20th C. U.S.
This course, intended for graduate students, exposes students to some “classics” in 20th century U.S. historiography with newer scholarship that reconceptualizes the American past. Readings cover topics including labor, class and capitalism; political divides and comparative civil rights movements; race and migration; gender, sexuality, and reform; urbanization and suburbanization; health and environment; and relationships between human and non-human historical agents. Discussions of texts will build necessary skills in critical reading and understanding authors’ arguments, sources and methods, scope and style, and historiographical intervention. This course will require one oral presentation on a supplementary book; a historiographical essay on a 20th c. topic of the student’s choosing; and a professional assignment of writing either a lesson plan or lecture.
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Instructor:
Lori Flores
Info - 4 points
BORDERLANDS HISTORY COLLOQUIUM
This course will argue for a broader spatial history of empire by looking at sites such as frontiers and borderlands in a theoretical and comparative perspective. The course will familiarize students to “frontier thesis” to the “spatial turn” and to the emergence of “Borderland Studies” before embarking on specific monographs highlighting borderlands scholarship in a global context. Formulations of power, race, gender, and class will be central to our comparative units of historical analysis and allow us to create conversations across area-studies boundaries within the discipline.
- 4 points
HISTORIOGRAPHY-LAT AM-MOD PER
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Instructor:
Pablo Piccato
CULPA: 22 h-index: 20 Info - 4 points
METHODS IN MIDDLE EAST HISTORY
This graduate seminar will examine key themes and methods in Middle East History. It is intended to provide graduate training for advanced students who plan to pursue a dissertation topic on or related to Middle East history. Please contact the professor first if you wish to apply for this course.
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Instructor:
Marwa Elshakry
CULPA: 2 Info - 4 points
Migration and Empire
This seminar explores key topics in the historiography of migration and empire. This includes slavery, abolition and indenture, quarantine and public health restrictions on migration, diaspora and displacements of the twentieth century, revolutionaries on the move, borders and border policing, the politics of guestworker programs, globalization, migration and development, among others. The course adopts a capacious understanding of Asia and Asian migrations, to facilitate thinking, reading, and writing across disciplinary boundaries. How did empires regulate migration? How were social and political identities shaped by imperial forces, and vice versa? What are the afterlives of the imperial regulation of migration? The final paper will be a literature review on a topic of your choosing.
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Instructor:
Kalyani Ramnath
Info - 4 points
Historical Method and Craft
This course is designed to introduce all first-year graduate students in History to major books and problems of the discipline. It aims to familiarize them with historical writings on periods and places outside their own prospective specialties. This course is open to Ph.D. students in the department of History ONLY.
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Instructor:
Gregory Mann
CULPA: 15 h-index: 13 Info - 4 points
APPROACHES TO INTL/GLOBAL HIST
How do international and global perspectives shape and conceptualization, research, and writing of history? Topics include approaches to comparative history and transnational processes, the relationship of local, regional, national, and global scales of analysis, and the problem of periodization when considered on a world scale.
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Instructor:
Mark Mazower
CULPA: 10
Wikipedia
Info
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Instructor:
Rebecca Kobrin
CULPA: 7 Info - 4 points
Dissertation Prospectus Writing Workshop
DISSERTATION PROSPECTUS W
The workshop provides a forum for advanced PhD students (usually in the 3rd or 4th year) to draft and refine the dissertation prospectus in preparation for the defense, as well as to discuss grant proposals. Emphasis on clear formulation of a research project, sources and historiography, the mechanics of research, and strategies of grant-writing. The class meets weekly and is usually offered in both fall and spring semesters.
Consistent attendance and participation are mandatory.
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Instructor:
Kimberly K Phillips-Fein
Info - 3 points