2016-17 Academic Catalog

This seminar will examine the wide array of nationalist movements which struggled for independence from colonial rule in South Asia. Most prominent among these was the anti-colonial struggle led by Mohandas K. Gandhi. In this course we will examine the historical forces and the people which comprised these socio-political movements, in an effort to understand the complex and intriguing ways in which Gandhi's movement intersected, combined, and conflicted with other nationalist trends. Topics including the role of political violence and non-violence, conceptions of masculinity and femininity, caste, class, and race will also form part of our material.

This course explores how Africans have remembered and retold their own history in the colonial and post-colonial contexts (nineteenth-twenty-first centuries). Students will examine memories of origin, the slave trade, conversion, and colonialism as well as of personal and communal triumphs and tragedies. Both long-standing historical texts like praise-names and rituals and modern texts like journals, court records, and letters will be explored. What is the relationship between the historical medium and the memory? Drawing from select cases in West, East and South Africa, students will come to understand the rich and varied history of Africa's creative expression. 

Why did barbarians invade? Traders trade? Pilgrims travel? Vikings raid? Medieval Europe is sometimes caricatured as a world of small villages and strong traditions that saw little change between the cultural high-water marks of Rome and the Renaissance. In fact, this was a period of dynamic innovation, during which Europeans met many familiar challenges—environmental change, religious and cultural conflict, social and political competition—by traveling or migrating to seek new opportunities. This course will examine mobility and migration in northern Europe, and students will be introduced to diverse methodological approaches to their study by exploring historical and literary sources, archaeological evidence and scientific techniques involving DNA and isotopic analyses.

This course examines the often fraught, complicated relationship between music and politics from the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth. Our field of inquiry will include all of Europe, but will particularly focus on Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union. We will look at several composers and their legacies in considerable detail, including Beethoven, Wagner, and Shostakovich. While much of our attention will be devoted to "high" or "serious" music, we will explore developments in popular music as well.

This seminar introduces students to historiography of slavery in antebellum America. Debates over slavery are important to Americans generally and to historians of the American South in particular. The topic illuminates our understanding of human bondage through emphasis on the development of skills in historical analysis, writing, and oral argumentation. Major readings from the early twentieth century to the present engage the problem of methodology, relations between masters and slaves, the slave community, gendered work, and expressive culture. A mixture of short assignments and response papers and a final essay is required.

In the 1340s, the Black Death swept through the Middle East and Europe, killing up to a third of the population in some areas. How can we understand what this catastrophe meant for the people who lived and died at the time? In this seminar, we will examine the Black Death (primarily in Europe) from a range of perspectives and disciplines and through a range of sources. We will seek to understand the biological and environmental causes of the disease, therapies, and the experience of illness, but also the effects of the mortality on economic, social, religious, and cultural life.