2020-21 Academic Catalog

What's for dinner? The answers to that question--and others like it--have never been more complicated or consequential than they are today. Behind a glance into the refrigerator or the shelves of any supermarket lie a myriad of concerns, ideas, and cultural developments that touch on everything from health and nutrition to taste, tradition, identity, time, cost, and environmental stewardship. This seminar will consider the evolution of these interconnected issues in American history, giving particular attention to the rise, inner workings, and effects of the agro-industrial food system and to contemporary movements that seek a new path forward.

This course provides an introduction to the global history of exploration. We will examine the scientific and artistic aspects of expeditions, and consider how scientific knowledge--navigation, medicinal treatments, or the collection of scientific specimens--helped make exploration, and subsequently Western colonialism, possible. We will also explore how the visual and literary representations of exotic places shaped distant audiences’ understandings of empire and of the so-called races of the world. Art and science helped form the politics of Western nationalism and expansion; this course will explore some of the ways in which their legacy remains with us today.

The struggle for independence from colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent involved a wide array of nationalist movements, prominently including the struggle led by M. K. Gandhi, who forged a movement centered on non-violence and civil disobedience which brought down the mighty British empire. We will study this alongside numerous other powerful nationalist currents, particularly those based on Islamic ideas and symbols. A significant part of the course will involve a historical role-playing game, Reacting to the Past: Defining a Nation, wherein students will take on roles of actual historical figures and recreate a twentieth century debate about religious identity and nation-building in the colonial context.

In this seminar we explore dramatic cultural and religious changes that reshaped Britain and Ireland in the early Middle Ages. In particular, we will examine the complex and powerful role that outsiders and immigrants played in these transformations through a sustained conversation with voices from the past brought to life in written primary sources, objects, and images. We will work to develop our ability to read and analyze sources critically, to discern the different perspectives preserved in every source, and to formulate interpretations that do justice to the available evidence. A course goal will be to learn some of the ways to articulate uncertainties as well as arguments and claims with clarity and effectiveness. Our work will also provide opportunities to strengthen research skills and to understand better scholarly modes of argument and presentation. No previous knowledge of the Middle Ages is necessary or assumed.

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.

Women and men of all races, ethnicities, and classes passed through the courts of early America. This course will be based primarily on trial transcripts and other court papers from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. We will use these documents as windows onto the contemporary legal, cultural, and social issues that these trials challenged. Using secondary sources, the seminar will then put these issues into the larger contexts of slavery, colonization and empire in Dutch, Spanish, French, and British America.