2020-21 Academic Catalog

This course examines music and movement in Atlantic World history and introduces methods from the digital humanities. It analyzes how hybrid cultural practices began in the period of colonization and the transatlantic slave system. It considers how these practices influenced national identities during the nineteenth century and continued to cross between the Americas, Africa, and Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The course addresses broad themes including immigration, race, class, nationalism, and transnational exchange. A digital humanities approach enables the course to ask and answer new questions about these topics. No previous experience with digital humanities is required.

As the twentieth century's first major social revolution, the Mexican Revolution represents a watershed moment in Latin American history. This course examines the origins of the conflict and its key domestic and international dimensions. It also explores how a collective memory of the Revolution was crafted and contested by the post-revolutionary state, artists, intellectuals, and peasants through the means of photography, murals, education, popular protest, commemorations, and shrines. Emphasis will be placed on agrarian leader and rebel chieftain Emiliano Zapata as both historical figure and myth.