ENROLL

David Tompkins

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.

Held for new first year students

Harry M Williams

This seminar introduces students to developments in slavery studies since the 1970s. Then the “new social history” emphasized stories of enslaved men and women who resisted the institution. New directions zero in on facets of black bondage such as commodification, community, and comparison. Readings and writing assignments will spark discussions how history is studied, practiced, and the rationale for the discipline.

Held for new first year students

Susannah Ottaway

Soot, smog, water pollution, cholera, asthma... all of these and many more are environmental and health problems that we associate with industrialization. In this course, we trace the history of industrialization through the the lens of the impact of this major social and economic change on the built and natural environment and on public health. The course will focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, with significant comparative work on France, and a broader chronological and regional view where appropriate.

Held for new first year students

Serena Zabin

Susannah Ottaway

George Vrtis

Harry M Williams

This seminar considers what makes good graphic novels by non-historians and good history written by historians trained in American traditions of scholarship. Expressionist representational narratives concerning Nat Turner, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Zora Neale Hurston challenge us to rethink definitions about what is history. Discussions and paper topics for graphic novels as popular history and academic history concentrate on these topics: the subject matter or plot; the techniques for narration and representation; the truth status of products; and audience.

Prerequisite: One course in History, American Studies or Africana Studies

Extra Time Required

David Tompkins

Amna Khalid

The objective of this course is to analyze the historical institutions, practices and traditions that define the position of women in India. We consider the various ways in which the trope of the Goddess has been used for and by Indian women in colonial and post-colonial India; the colonial state's supposed rescue of Indian women; the position and role of European women in colonial India; how women's bodies come to embody and signify community honor and become sites of communal contest. We explore the making of Mother India; the connection between nation, territory and the female form; and the ways in which women have been represented in history as well as Indian cinema. 

Adeeb Khalid

Amna Khalid

At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947 India and Pakistan, two new nation states emerged from the shadow of British colonialism. This course focuses on the political trajectories of these two rival siblings and looks at the ways in which both states use the other to forge antagonistic and belligerent nations. While this is a survey course it is not a comprehensive overview of the history of the two countries. Instead it covers some of the more significant moments of rupture and violence in the political history of the two states. The first two-thirds of the course offers a top-down, macro overview of these events and processes whereas the last third examines the ways in which people experienced these developments. We use the lens of gender to see how the physical body, especially the body of the woman, is central to the process of nation building. We will consider how women’s bodies become sites of contestation and how they are disciplined and policed by the postcolonial state(s).

Seungjoo Yoon

This course explores the phenomenon of settler colonialism in East Asia. We will focus on the dynamics of emigration in the age of mass migration since the early nineteenth century onwards. We will begin by examining colonial encounters in which Chinese and Japanese middlemen either competed against or collaborated with the Europeans as they covered a range of areas of the globe. In the second half of the course, students will undertake projects focusing on a specific region and period of settler colonialism, identify and present source materials, develop a substantial (20-page) research paper, and engage in peer review.

Prerequisite: One prior six credit History course