History
The Department of History offers the Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in History. The department specializes in American political culture; the ideas, culture, and society of Central Europe; early modern Europe; East Asia; international urban history; religion in the medieval Mediterranean world; and slavery and freedom in national and transnational contexts in 17th- through 19th-century America. These core fields draw on the expertise of substantial segments of the faculty and provide significant opportunities for innovative graduate study that bridges conventional historical fields and fosters interdisciplinary research. The department also offers any historical specialization covered by a tenured faculty member.
The graduate program admits only a small number of graduate students each year to promote a close working relationship between students and faculty. We invite applications from mature and self-directed students with well-defined research interests. Our seminars are small and flexible, and we encourage students to develop creative, self-tailored programs of doctoral study.
Our graduates are accomplished professionals in academia, private high schools, nonprofits, business, and the public sector.
Contact Info
Phone: | 314-935-5450 |
Email: | history@wustl.edu |
Website: | https://history.wustl.edu/graduate |
Chair
Corinna Treitel
William Eliot Smith Professor of History
PhD, Harvard University
Modern European History
Director of Graduate Studies
Steve Hindle
Derek Hirst Endowed Professor of Early Modern British History
PhD, University of Cambridge
Early Modern European History
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Peter J. Kastor
Samuel K. Eddy Professor
PhD, University of Virginia
U.S. History
Department Faculty
Cassie Adcock
Associate Professor
PhD, University of Chicago
Modern South Asian History
Iver Bernstein
Professor
PhD, Yale University
U.S. History and the Civil War
Daniel Bornstein
Stella K. Darrow Professor of Catholic Studies
PhD, University of Chicago
Early Modern European History
Flora Cassen
Associate Professor
PhD, New York University
Jewish History, Early Modern Europe
Shefali Chandra
Associate Professor
PhD, University of Pennsylvania
Modern South Asian History
Douglas Flowe
Associate Professor
PhD, University of Rochester
U.S. History
Christine R. Johnson
Associate Professor
PhD, Johns Hopkins University
Early Modern European History
Jonathan Judaken
Gloria M. Goldstein Endowed Chair in Jewish History & Thought
PhD, University of California, Irvine
Jewish History, Racism, Existentialism
Krister Knapp
Teaching Professor
PhD, Boston University
U.S. Intellectual History
Uluǧ Kuzuoǧlu
Associate Professor
PhD, Columbia University
Modern Chinese History
Nataliia Laas
Assistant Professor
PhD, Brandeis University
Environmental History and Modern Russian and Eastern European History
Kenneth Ludmerer
Mabel Dorn Reeder Distinguished Professor in the History of Medicine
PhD, MD, Johns Hopkins University
Medical History
Steven B. Miles
Professor
PhD, University of Washington
Chinese History
Diana J. Montaño
Associate Professor
PhD, University of Arizona
Latin American History
Sowandé Mustakeem
Associate Professor
PhD, Michigan State University
Atlantic Slave Trade and the Middle Passage
Tim Parsons
Professor
PhD, Johns Hopkins University
African History
Mark Pegg
Professor
PhD, Princeton University
Medieval European History
Christina Ramos
Associate Professor
PhD, Harvard University
Latin American History, History of Medicine
Nancy Y. Reynolds
Associate Professor
PhD, Stanford University
Middle Eastern History
Anne Schult
Assistant Professor
PhD, New York University
Modern European History
Dalen Wakeley-Smith
Assistant Professor
PhD, University of Michigan
U.S. History
Marjan Wardaki
Assistant Professor
PhD, University of California
History of Science
Lori Watt
Associate Professor
PhD, Columbia University
Japanese History
Affiliated Faculty
William Bubelis
Associate Professor of Classics
PhD, University of Chicago
Classics
Joanna Dee Das
Associate Professor of Dance
PhD, Columbia University
Adrienne D. Davis
William M. Van Cleve Professor of Law
JD, Yale University School of Law
Martin Jacobs
Professor of Rabbinic Studies
PhD and Habilitation, Free University of Berlin
Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies
Zhao Ma
Associate Professor of Modern Chinese History and Culture
PhD, Johns Hopkins University
East Asian Languages and Cultures
Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp
Archer Alexander Distinguished Professor
PhD, Yale University
Danforth Center on Religion and Politics
Rebecca Messbarger
Professor of Italian and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
PhD, University of Chicago
Romance Languages and Literatures
Eric P. Mumford
Rebecca and John Voyles Professor of Architecture
PhD, Princeton University
Architecture
Michelle Purdy
Associate Professor of Education
PhD, Emory University
Leigh E. Schmidt
Edward C. Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor
PhD, Princeton University
Danforth Center on Religion and Politics
Claudia Swan
The Inaugural Mark Steinberg Weil Professor of Art History
PhD, Columbia University
Mark Valeri
Reverend Priscilla Wood Neaves Distinguished Professor of Religion and Politics
PhD, Princeton University
Danforth Center on Religion and Politics
Hayrettin Yücesoy
Associate Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies
PhD, University of Chicago
Steven Zwicker
Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities
PhD, Brown University
English
Professors Emeriti
Jean Allman
J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities
PhD, Northwestern University
African and African-American Studies
Andrea S. Friedman
PhD, University of Wisconsin
U.S. Women's History
Steven Hause
PhD, Washington University
Derek M. Hirst
William Eliot Smith Professor Emeritus of History
PhD, Cambridge University
Gerald N. Izenberg
PhD, Harvard University
Hillel J. Kieval
Gloria M. Goldstein Professor of Jewish History and Thought
PhD, Harvard University
Jewish History
David T. Konig
PhD, Harvard University
Linda J. Nicholson
Susan E. and William P. Stiritz Distinguished Professor Emerita of Women's Studies
PhD, Brandeis University
Max J. Okenfuss
PhD, Harvard University
Laurence Schneider
PhD, University of California, Berkeley
HISTORY 5001 Independent Work
Prerequisite: Permission from the chair of the department.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 5010 Dissertation Research in History
This is a research course.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 5011 Historical Methods- Trasregional
This is a small-group reading course in which students are introduced to the skills essential to the historian's craft. Emphasis will be on acquiring research skills, learning to read historical works critically, and learning to use primary and secondary sources to make a persuasive and original argument. See Course Listings for current topics. Required for history majors. Preference given to History majors; other interested students welcome.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
HISTORY 5080 Nuns
Nuns -- women vowed to a shared life of poverty, chastity, and obedience in a cloistered community -- were central figures in medieval and early modern religion and society. This course explores life in the convent, with the distinctive culture that developed among communities of women, and the complex relations between the world of the cloister and the world outside the cloister. We look at how female celibacy served social and political, as well as religious, interests. We read works by nuns: both willing and unwilling; and works about nuns: nuns behaving well, and nuns behaving scandalously badly; nuns embracing their heavenly spouse, and nuns putting on plays; nuns possessed by the devil, and nuns managing their possessions; nuns as enraptured visionaries, and nuns grappling with the mundane realities of life in a cloistered community.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H
HISTORY 5092 Advanced Seminar: Humanitarianism and Human Rights: Power, Paradigms, Protection
This course charts the twin development of Western humanitarianism and human rights, with a particular focus on aid and protection as forms of European and US imperialism. Each week, we will focus on one particular set of actors in the humanitarian field: representatives of states, international organizations, NGOs, philanthropists, emergency workers, legal experts, reporters, and not least the affected communities themselves. We will conclude with a discussion of how the complicated history of Western humanitarianism frames our understanding of more recent humanitarian emergencies, such as the European refugee crisis of 2015.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
HISTORY 5110 Teaching in History
This course covers the teaching of History.
Credit 2 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 5114 Seminar: Perceptions of Time and Place in Early Modern England
This seminar analyses perceptions of time and place in England, c.1500-1800, and their relationship to both personal and social identity. These issues will be explored using appropriate theoretical and substantive readings and both visual and textual primary sources. Particular attention will be given to the use of visual images as historical evidence. Specific issues addressed include the development of cartography, chorography and antiquarianism; conventions of time reckoning and the dating of events; perceptions of the life course; the creation of social memory and historical narratives; representations of social place; agrarian change and the transformation of the landscape; the impact of the Reformation on the calendar, the landscape, and senses of the past; and representations of previously unknown places and peoples. Primary sources for discussion include maps and prospects; chorographical surveys; illustrated antiquarian writings; almanacs; pictorial representations of notable events; engravings; paintings (portraits; 'country house portraits'; landscapes; 'conversation pieces'; history painting and 'documentary' works); memorials; family histories; extracts from court records.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
HISTORY 5120 Teaching in History
This course covers the teaching of History.
Credit 2 units.
Typical periods offered: Spring
HISTORY 5130 Islamic History: 600-1200
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
HISTORY 5131 Teaching in History
This course covers the teaching of History.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 5150 The Middle East in the 20th Century
This course surveys the history of the Middle East since World War I. Major analytical themes include: colonialism; Orientalism; the formation of the regional nation-state system; the formation and political mobilization of new social classes; changing gender relations; the development of new forms of appropriation of economic surplus (oil, urban industry) in the new global economy; the role of religion; the Middle East as an arena of the Cold War; conflict in Israel/Palestine; and new conceptions of identity associated with these developments (Arabism, local patriotism, Islamism).
HISTORY 5151 The Late Ottoman Middle East
This course surveys the Middle East in the late Ottoman period (essentially the 18th and 19th centuries, up to the First World War). It examines the central Ottoman state and the Ottoman provinces as they were incorporated into the world economy, and how they responded to their peripheralization in that process. Students will focus on how everyday people's lived experiences were affected by the increased monetarization of social and economic relations; changes in patterns of land tenure and agriculture; the rise of colonialism; state efforts at modernization and reform; shifts in gender relations; and debates over the relationship of religion to community and political identity.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
HISTORY 5165 A History of Modern China
This course explores the nineteenth and twentieth-century history of China. Its purpose is to provide students with a historical foundation to understand the momentous changes the country underwent during its traumatic transition from an empire to a nation-state. We start the course at the height of the empire's power in late-eighteenth century, when the Qing dynasty (1637-1912) conquered vast swathes of lands and people in Inner Asia. We then move on to the Qing's troubled relationship to Western capitalism and imperialism in the nineteenth century, which challenged the economic, social, and ideological structures of the imperial regime, culminating in the emergence of China as a nation-state. Situating its national history within a global context, the course outlines in detail the transformations that took place in the twentieth century, from the rise of communism and fascism to the Second World War to Maoism to Cultural Revolution. We end the semester with yet another major change that took place in the 1980s, when a revolutionary Maoist ideology was replaced with a technocratic regime, the legacies of which are still with us today. This course is for Graduate students.
HISTORY 5169 Theories and Practices of U.S. Empire, 1776 to Present
This historically-based, cross-disciplinary course investigates theories and practices of American empire in the long era of US nationhood, 1776-to present. We will pay special attention to definitional questions--in what sense can the United States be considered an empire? To what extent has it been so considered, and why (or why not)? In what ways has the empire-building project in the U.S. been imperial or/and colonial? Formal or/and informal? How have fundamental imperial contradictions--the search for unity as opposed to the need to manage the politics of difference--been experienced? What have been the dynamics of imperial violence and anticolonial resistance in US history? How have the practices of anticolonial resistance and anticolonial violence shaped the course of US empire? And what are the politics of collective memory and/or amnesia that have followed in the wake of these experiences? Such questions will be explored with both a comparative awareness and with attention to the fields of literature, law, political theory and art history where problems of representing and historicizing US empire have been addressed. The course takes the form of an intensive seminar, requiring commitment to weekly readings, informed discussion, and critical writing; it will include a final essay that can either be a research paper based on the analysis/interpretation of primary sources, or a historiographical essay.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Spring
HISTORY 5190 Independent Reading
This is an independent study course.
Credit 9 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall
HISTORY 5193 Modern South Asia
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
HISTORY 5220 Advanced Reading
This course is for independent study.
Credit 9 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall
HISTORY 5230 Advanced Reading
This course is for independent study.
Credit 9 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 5261 The Early Medieval World: 300-1000
This course begins with the crisis of the Roman Empire in the third century and the conversion of the Emperor Constantine to Christianity in 312. We will study the so-called barbarian invasions of the fourth and fifth centuries and the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West. The Roman Empire in the East (and commonly known as the Byzantine Empire after the seventh century) survived intact, developing a very different style of Christianity than in the lands of the former western empire. Apart from examining Christianization in the deserts of Egypt or the chilly North Sea, we will discuss the phenomenon of Islam in the seventh century (especially after the Prophet Muhammad's death in 632) and the Arab conquests of the eastern Mediterranean and north Africa. In the post-Roman world of the West we will read about the Anglo-Saxons, the Carolingians, and the Vikings. In exploring these topics we will have to think about the relationship of kings to popes, Emperors to patriarchs, of missionaries to pagans, of cities to villages, of the sacred to the profane. Our attention will be directed to things as various as different forms of monasticism, the establishment of frontier communities, the culture of the Arabian peninsula, magic, paganism, military tactics, Romanesque churches, sea travel, manuscript illumination, the architecture of mosques, early medieval philosophy, the changing imagery of Christ, holiness, and violence as a redemptive act.
HISTORY 5264 Graduate Seminar: Race, Crime, and American Prisons
This course will explore the politics of race, crime, policing, criminal justice, and the American prison system. Students will read a number of important texts that engage these subjects and will become familiar with the prominent ideas in a growing historiography that addresses inequality in law enforcement. We will also examine a number of historical theories that have shaped this scholarship in order to understand how historians have dealt with the problem of racial prejudice in crime and punishment. As a result, the class will begin with themes of criminalization along lines of gender and racial identity, and ultimately lead to a history of the American carceral state.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall
HISTORY 5275 Palestine, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict
This course examines the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Topics include: Palestine in the late Ottoman period; the development of modern Zionism; British colonialism and the establishment of the Palestine Mandate; Arab-Jewish relations during the Mandate; the growth of Palestinian nationalism and resistance; the establishment of the state of Israel and the dispersion of the Palestinians in 1948; the Arab-Israeli wars; both Palestinian uprisings; and the peace process.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
HISTORY 5280 Historiography of Late Imperial China
This course introduces students to the variety of scholarly interpretations of late imperial, primarily Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911), Chinese history. This course is designed for M.A. and PhD students in history, Chinese Literature, and East Asian Studies.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Spring
HISTORY 5302 Middle Eastern History: Law and Revolution in Modern Egypt
This is a small-group reading course in which students are introduced to the skills essential to the historian's craft. Emphasis will be on acquiring research skills, learning to read historical works critically, and learning to use primary and secondary sources to make a persuasive and original argument. See Course Listings for current topics. Required for history majors. Preference given to History majors; other interested students welcome.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
Typical periods offered: Spring
HISTORY 5303 Theory, History, Asia and Empire
In this seminar we consider how historically minded scholars use the theoretical insights of others to enrich their tellings of the past. First we read, summarize in writing, and discuss our understanding of a particular theoretical essay. Then we read a work of history that makes specific use of the essay. This approach provides us with the opportunity to practice writing about our theoretical work, compare our understanding with scholars who have made use of the same set of ideas, and assess their use of those ideas.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Spring
HISTORY 5304 Proseminar: Early Modern British History
This course, of intensive readings and discussion, will examine main interpretive currents in the historiography of early-modern Britain. Permission of the instructor required.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall
HISTORY 5305 Proseminar: Modern Latin American History
This course is an introduction to the historiography of Latin Amarica from the colonial period to the present. Topics include: the Spanish Empire in comparative and Atlantic perspectives; colonial Latin American industries and the "world system"; sociocultural histories of colonial women, gender, and religion; peasants in the emergence of nation-states and liberal political regimes in the nineteenth century; race and nation in former slave societies; and the transition from dependency theory to imperial and transnational paradigms. This course is designed for M.A. and PhD students. Reading knowledge of Spanish is recommended, but not required.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Spring
HISTORY 5307 Seminar in Modern European History
This course introduces students to central concepts and problems in the historiography of modern Europe from the late eighteenth century to the present. Possible topics include the French Revolution; industrialization and the making of the working class; ideas and movements such as liberalism, socialism, nationalism, and feminism; state formation, citizenship, and welfare; imperialism and its impact both in Europe and beyond; Nazism and Stalinism as alternatives to liberalism; and key themes such as consumption, decolonization, and multiculturalism in the post-1945 era.
Each student must also register for the instructor's correlating section in 49IR.
Credit 3 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall
HISTORY 5314 Islamic History: 1200-1800
An introduction to Islamic polities and societies from the Mongol conquests to the thirteenth century to the collapse and weakening of the colossal gunpowder empires of the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals in the early eighteenth century. Broadly speaking, this course covers the Middle Period (1000-1800) of Islamic history, sandwiched between the Early and High Caliphal Periods (600-100) on the one hand and the Modern Period (1800-Present) on the other hand. Familiarity with the Early and High Caliphal periods is not assumed. The course will not be a survey of this period but a series of windows that will allow you to develop both an in-depth understanding of some key features of Islamic societies and a clear appreciation of the challenges (as well as the rewards!) that await historians of the Middle Period. Particular attention is given to the Mamluk and Ottoman Middle East, Safavid Iran and Mughal India.
HISTORY 5321 Japan Since 1868
For some, the word Japan evokes Hello Kitty, animated films, cartoons, and sushi. For others, it makes them think of the Nanjing Atrocity, comfort women, the Bataan Death March, and problematic textbooks. Still others will think of woodblock prints, tea ceremonies, and cherry blossoms or perhaps of Sony Walkmans and Toyota automobiles. At the same time, still others may have no image of Japan at all. Tracing the story of Japan's transformations - from a preindustrial peasant society managed by samurai-bureaucrats into an expansionist nation-state and then into its current paradoxical guise of a peaceful nation of culture led by conservative nationalists - provides the means for deepening our understandings of historical change in one region and grappling with the methods and aims of the discipline of history.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
HISTORY 5330 Out of the Shtetl: Jews in Central & Eastern Europe Between Empire, State, and Nation
Credit 3 units. EN: H
HISTORY 5332 The Christian Middle Ages
This course examines the ways in which the European Middle Ages can appropriately be characterized as Christian and explores how notions of what it meant to be Christian shifted over the thousand years of the Middle Ages. The assigned readings mix important recent monographs with some classic treatments of the topic, allowing students to measure developments in scholarship over the last generation and trace the roots of current debates. Brief extracts from primary sources will be used to illustrate the range of medieval documents and ground our discussion of their modern interpretations.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Spring
HISTORY 5333 Crusade, Conflict, and Coexistence: Jews in Christian Europe
This course will investigate some of the major themes in the history of the Jews in Europe, from the Middle Ages to the eve of the French Revolution. Jews constituted a classic, nearly continuous minority in the premodern Christian world-a world that was not known for tolerating dissent. Or was it? One of the main purposes of the course is to investigate the phenomenon of majority/minority relations, to examine the ways in which the Jewish community interacted with and experienced European societies, cultures, and politics. We will look at the dynamics of boundary formation and cultural distinctiveness; the limits of religious and social tolerance; the periodic eruption of persecution in its social, political, and religious contexts; and the prospects for Jewish integration into various European societies during the course of the Enlightenment era.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC BU: ETH, HUM, IS EN: H
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 5337 Becoming Modern: Emancipation, Antisemitism, and Nationalism in Modern Jewish History
This course offers a survey of the Jewish experience in the modern world by asking, at the outset, what it means to be-or to become-modern. To answer this question, we look at two broad trends that took shape toward the end of the eighteenth century-the Enlightenment and the formation of the modern state-and we track changes and developments in Jewish life down to the close of the twentieth century with analyses of the (very different) American and Israeli settings. The cultural, social, and political lives of Jews have undergone major transformations and dislocations over this time-from innovation to revolution, exclusion to integration, calamity to triumphs. The themes that we will be exploring in depth include the campaigns for and against Jewish emancipation; acculturation and religious reform; traditionalism and modernism in Eastern Europe; the rise of political and racial antisemitism; mass migration and the formation of American Jewry; varieties of Jewish national politics; Jewish-Gentile relations between the World Wars; the destruction of European Jewry; the emergence of a Jewish nation-state; and Jewish culture and identity since 1945.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H UColl: HEU, HSM
HISTORY 5338 History of the Jews in Islamic Lands
This course is a survey of Jewish communities in the Islamic world, their social, cultural, and intellectual life from the rise of Islam to the Imperial Age.Topics include: Muhammad, the Qur'an and the Jews; the legal status of Jews under Islam; the spread of Rabbinic Judaism in the Abbasid empire; the development of new Jewish identities under Islam (Karaites); Jewish traders and scholars in Fatimid Egypt; the flourishing of Jewish civilization in Muslim Spain (al-Andalus); and Sephardi (Spanish) Jews in the Ottoman empire. On this background, we will look closely at some of the major Jewish philosophical and poetical works originating in Islamic lands. Another important source to be studied will be documents from the Cairo Genizah, reflecting social history, the status of women, and other aspects of daily life.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
HISTORY 5340 Gender in Early Modern Europe
This course will examine the major scholarly developments in the study of women's history, masculinity, and gender(ed) representations in early modern Europe. Topics covered will include: gender and politics; gender and work; marriage and family life; honor and social control; sodomy; witchcraft; religious experience and Reformation; and masculinity and science.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Spring
HISTORY 5342 The Reformation
This graduate seminar will examine the Protestant Reformation from its late-medieval roots to the toward religious toleration in the seventeenth century. We will also study Catholic responses to the changing religious and political environment and the impact of these changes on society and culture within and beyond the boundaries of Latin Christendom.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Spring
HISTORY 5351 Out of the Shtetl: Jewish Life in Central and Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Out of the Shtetl is a course about tradition and transformation; small towns and urban centers; ethnicity and citizenship; and nations, states, and empires. At its core, this course asks the following questions: What did it mean for the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe to emerge from small market towns and villages to confront modern ethnicities, nations, and empires? What lasting impact did the shtetl experience have on Jewish life in a rapidly changing environment? The focus is on the Jewish historical experience in the countries that make up Central and Eastern Europe (mainly the Bohemian lands, Hungary, Poland, and Russia) from the late 18th century to the fall of the Soviet Union. Among the topics that we will cover are Jews and the nobility in Poland-Lithuania; the multicultural imperial state; Hasidism and its opponents; absolutism and reform in imperial settings; the emergence of modern European nationalisms and their impact on Jewish identity; antisemitism and popular violence; nationalist and radical movements among Jews; war, revolution, and genocide; and the transition from Soviet dominion to democratic states.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
HISTORY 5353 Vienna, Prague, Budapest: Politics, Culture and Identity in Central Europe
The term Central Europe evokes the names of Freud and Mahler; Kafka and Kundera; Herzl, Lukács, and Konrád. In politics, it evokes images of revolution and counter-revolution, ethnic nationalism, fascism, and communism. Both culture and politics, in fact, were deeply embedded in the structures of empire (in our case, the Habsburg Monarchy)--structures which both balanced and exacerbated ethnic, religious, and social struggles--in modern state formation, and in the emergence of creative and dynamic urban centers, of which Vienna, Budapest, and Prague were the most visible. This course seeks to put all of these elements into play--empire, nation, urban space, religion, and ethnicity--in order to illustrate what it has meant to be modern, creative, European, nationalist, or cosmopolitan since the 19th century. It engages current debates on nationalism and national identity; the viability of empires as supra-national constructs; urbanism and modern culture; the place of Jews in the social and cultural fabric of Central Europe; migration; and authoritarian and violent responses to modernity.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
HISTORY 5357 Graduate Seminar in History
This graduate seminar is a topics course, topics vary by semester. Please see semester course listings for current topics.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 5358 Graduate Seminar in History: The Second British Empire
This world history seminar traces the history of the Second British Empire from its inception during the new imperial era of the 1880s to its demise in the decades after the Second World War. Topics include: imperial administration; police and military institutions; settlement commerce and investment; economic development; gender; race and racism; agriculture; urbanization; education; and popular culture.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Spring
HISTORY 5362 Methods and Materials for Research On Early Modern China
This seminar provides an introduction for graduate students to the methods and materials used in conducting research on early modern (or late imperial) China. Lectures, discussions, and exercises will present fundamental paradigms and problems specific to the study of early modern China, as well as familiarizing students with the vast body of print and web-based research tools necessary to work with original texts in Chinese. We will also explore how social, cultural, and literary historians have used various texts in their scholarly works. Students will be encouraged to use the course to pursue individual research interests as they explore the broader contexts, approaches, and questions central to the study of early modern China and introduces graduate students to important recent scholarly literature on the history of early modern (essentially Ming and Qing) Chinese history.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Spring
HISTORY 5377 Science and Technology in East Asia
The aim of this graduate course is to provide a broad introduction to Science and Technology Studies (STS) in East Asia that has recently been undergoing momentous transformations. How did STS in East Asia change from the early twentieth century onward? What are the main historiographical trends in writing East Asian sciences? And what kinds of questions are left unexplored? This course will in particular focus on the transformation from the early modern to the modern period (ca. 1600 to 2000), during which the organization of natural knowledge in East Asia witnessed a significant reconfiguration. Situating historical change at the intersection of local and global dynamics, this course will introduce a variety of subjects including histories of epistemology, technologies of governance, global circuits of knowledge transfer, the uneasy ties between colonialism and modern science, and issues around energy, infrastructure, and environment. Apart from familiarizing themselves with the history of science and technology, students will also obtain a firm grasp of historiographical and methodological problems that pertain to STS in East Asia from Joseph Needham's groundbreaking works to post-Needham critiques, to more recent debates around capitalism, science, and technology.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall
HISTORY 5401 Proseminar in History
This research seminar trains graduate students in historical research and writing. Each student will develop a focused research topic at the beginning of the semester and will produce an essay of approximately 30-40 pages. Seminar papers should serve as the basis for portfolio papers, publishable articles, or dissertation chapters. Students are invited to explore topics that advance their particular research goals. Students are also encouraged to use this course as an opportunity to deepen existing skills or to explore new methodological approaches.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Spring
HISTORY 5410 Core Seminar in American History: Introduction to American History Since 1865
Graduate reading and critical discussion of major secondary works that address principal problems in analyzing and understanding change in the United States since 1865.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Spring
HISTORY 5411 Proseminar: Introduction to Graduate Study of American History to 1865
This course will serve as an introduction to graduate-level work in American history. It surveys major historical works, themes and controversies, beginning with the earliest contacts between Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans on the North American continent and continuing through the Civil War. What constitutes good history and the relation of theory and practice in the writing of history are among the issues that will be addressed. The course is required for all departmental graduate students doing advanced work or field preparation in American history (and strongly suggested for non-historians incorporating history in an American Culture Studies program); advanced undergraduates may be admitted with permission of the instructor.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall
HISTORY 5431 Core Seminar in Comparative and World History
The Core Seminar in Comparative and World History examines a historical institution, idea, phenomenon, or process across range of cultures and regions. Although the specific case studies will vary from year to year, topics might include: empires, urbanization, revolutions, famines, or evangelism. The seminar will be of interest to students of all historical fields seeking to develop comparative historical models to their own areas of research.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall
HISTORY 5432 Advanced Seminar in History: Medieval Foundations of Modern Law
This seminar will study the law codes, legal theories, forensic methods, modes of litigation, judicial processes, criminal punishments, and legal cultures of the medieval West from the fifth century to the fifteenth. Topics to be discussed include the Late Roman Theodosian and Justinianic Codes, law in a lawless world after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the early English (or Anglo-Saxon) law codes, laws as songs, monastic Rules, Carolingian capitularies, the early medieval penitentials, feudal law, the Gregorian Reforms, secular and canon law, the rediscovery of Roman law, the rise of lawyer popes, the first university law schools in the twelfth century, the Fourth Lateran Council, Magna Carta, the early inquisitions into heretical depravity, courtroom testimony and confession, methods of interrogation and cross-examination, torture, life imprisonment, the development of English common law and the jury system, law as a secular profession, and the writing of laws and legal documents in vernacular languages (especially English and French) rather than Latin by the fifteenth century. The modern legal system of the United States (and the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia) was founded upon the legal history of this medieval millennium. The fundamental differences between Anglo-American and European law (and much of Central and South American law) also derives from these early centuries. Students will participate in weekly seminars reading and discussing primary and secondary sources in translation. Students are required to write a historiographic essay (4-6 pages) and a research essay (20-30 pages) on topics of their choosing. No prerequisites. 4 Units.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 5441 Core Seminar in World and Comparative History
The course examines a historical institution, idea, phenomenon, or process across range of cultures and regions. Although the specific case studies will vary from year to year, topics might include: empires, urbanization, revolutions, famines, or evangelism. The seminar will be of interest to students of all historical fields seeking to develop comparative historical models to their own areas of research.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall
HISTORY 5446 Core Seminar in Comparative & World History
Please see course listings for current topics.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Spring
HISTORY 5451 Modern Germany
This course surveys the political, social, economic, and cultural forces that have shaped German history since 1800. After examining the multiplicity of German states that existed in 1800, we will identify the key factors that resulted in unification in 1871. We then turn to a study of modern Germany in its various forms, from the Empire through the Weimar Republic and Third Reich, to post-war division and reunification. A major focus will be the continuities and discontinuities of German history, particularly with regard to the historical roots of Nazism and attempts to break with the past after 1945.
HISTORY 5472 Writing Historical Proposals and Prospectuses
This course is designed to introduce students to the craft of dissertation and grant proposal writing. It is organized as a weekly workshop that will culminate in the production of one funding application and a dissertation prospectus that will serve as a first draft and model for the submission of that prospectus as part of the qualifying requirements. While the course is intended for PhD students in History, students in related disciplines may also find it useful.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Spring
HISTORY 5473 Literature of History
This course is designed to introduce you to some of the most significant works in the writing of history, books and articles that have changed fields, generated new strategies for analyzing historical events, and deployed new or innovative theories in historical studies. The texts chosen for this course are, in a sense, some of the greatest hits in the literature of history and at the same time an idiosyncratic list, skipping many significant works and including some that might not make it onto another scholar's list. The aim is to trace some of the changes in theory and methods of historical studies over the course of the second half of the twentieth century and, most importantly, to offer students of varied periods and places diverse strategies for tackling particular historical problems.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall
HISTORY 5532 The Culture of the Renaissance
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
HISTORY 5548 Histories of the Japanese Archipelago
This course seeks to provide graduate students with an understanding of the sweep of the Japanese past, from the early modern period through the twenty-first century. Students will engage in several key debates in Japanese historiography and learn how scholars of Japan have drawn on and contributed to important methodologies. This course is ideal for graduate students who plan to cultivate Japanese history as an area of research and teaching expertise, and who intend to use Japanese history as one of the three fields necessary for completing the qualifying exams required by the Department of History. Advanced undergraduates with an interest in the topic should contact the instructor for permission to enroll.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall
HISTORY 5550 Advanced Topics in Modern Chinese History
A topics course in modern Chinese history. Subject matter varies by semester; consult current semester listings for topic.
Credit 3 units.
HISTORY 5560 Socialist and Secular? A Social History of the Soviet UNion
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
HISTORY 5565 American Pragmatism
This course examines the history of American pragmatism through three of its primary founders, the philosophers Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. It considers pragmatism as a response to the experience of uncertainty brought on my modernity, and contextualizes it amidst late nineteenth and early twentieth century thought and politics, namely, scientific methodology, evolutionary theory, the probabilistic revolution, Transcendentalism, the rise of secularism, slavery, Abolitionism, and the Civil War. Major essays by each thinker will be read as well as three intellectual biographies and one critical survey.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
HISTORY 5566 The Fascist Challenge in Europe
European Fascism was both a transnational and an international phenomenon. This course will focus on the study of national and transnational cultures of Fascism and fascist networks, the range and consistency of their ideological specificity, their internal cohesion as well as their ideas about the future. The central theme of the course will be the potential for violence and destruction, which became a horrific reality during the Second World War and the Holocaust.
HISTORY 5676 Beyond the Harem: Women, Gender, and Revolution
This course examines the history and current situations of women in Middle Eastern societies. The first half of the course is devoted to studying historical changes in factors structuring women's status and their sociopolitical roles. The second half of the course will focus on several case studies of women's participation in broad anticolonial social revolutions and how these revolutions affected the position of women in those societies.
HISTORY 5697 Heroes and Saints in India: Religion, Myth, History
This course provides an introduction to the history of modern India and Pakistan through the voices of the Indian subcontinent's major thinkers. We will spend time in the company of saints, from the great-souled Mahatma Gandhi to the Sufi scholar Ashraf 'Ali Thanawi, and we will travel alongside the heroes of peasant politics, women's rights, and struggles for national and social freedom and equality. We will immerse ourselves in the rich narrative heritage of India -- as it has been challenged, reworked, and harnessed for present and future needs -- from the 19th century through the present. Lecture and discussion format; prior knowledge of India or Pakistan not required.
HISTORY 5698 American Intellectual History Since 1865
This course concentrates on social, cultural, philosophical and political thought since the end of the Civil War, and investigates how American thinkers have responded to the challenge of modernity. After an examination of the end of the old religious order and the revolt against Victorianism, it analyzes the subsequent rise of pragmatism, progressivism, literary modernism, radical liberalism, political realism, protest movements and the New Left, neo-conservatism and the New Right, and the current state of intellectuals in post-911 America.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H
HISTORY 5709 Food Histories in East Asia
The course broadly conceives East Asia as a geographical unit of inquiry and explores food and foodways in context of not only what people eat, but how people conceive food beyond a material object to fulfill their corporeal appetite. Scholars in different disciplines have employed food and foodways as a useful category of analysis and have explored a variety of social and cultural dimensions in which people live and have lived.
HISTORY 5747 Modern European Intellectual History
With a focus on Western Europe, this course is designed to make you familiar with the major intellectual movements and thinkers in the modern period. We cover both the towering, canonical figures and those critical of the canon. We look at the main schools of thought, the major political doctrines, and key literary and artistic groups, including humanism, Protestantism, Enlightenment rationalism, Romanticism, realism, nationalism, liberalism, capitalism, socialism, racism, feminism, colonialism, impressionism to surrealism, fascism, existentialism, and postmodernism. We also discuss the most significant conceptual categories that have defined the modern European world, including the concepts of nature, human nature, God, truth, reason, freedom, justice, gender, and race. The course differs from other history courses in that its emphasis is on intellectual matters--ideas, discourses, thinkers, schools of thought--and differs from a philosophy, literature or social science course in its emphasis on how ideas both reflect and contest their historical contexts.
Credit 3 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 5770 Spanish Republic and Civil War in Spain
Credit 4 units.
HISTORY 5802 Advanced Seminar: Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan
The division of India and Pakistan at the time of Independence from British colonial rule was a major event that has left its mark on the lives, memories, and politics of contemporary South Asians. Why did British India break apart along apparently religious lines? Was sectarian or communal violence inevitable, or endemic in South Asian society? How was Partition - a time of violence, mistrust, dispossession, displacement, and mass migration -- experienced by ordinary people? How is the traumatic memory of this event borne by individual women, children, by families? How does its legacy persist, and how is it being remembered, and reckoned with, today? In this course, we will not find final answers to these difficult questions, but we will learn how to explore them responsibly, using literature, film, and other archival sources. This course provides students with a forum to discuss and explore topics of their own choosing.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
Typical periods offered: Fall
HISTORY 5811 Between Sand and Sea: History, Environment, and Politics in the Arabian Peninsula
Although it is today primarily associated with oil, the Arabian peninsula was for most of its history defined by water: its surrounding seas, its monsoon-driven winds, and its lack of water in its vast and forbidding interior deserts. As home to the major holy cities of Islam and a key source of global oil, the region has played an important role in the Western European and North American imagination. Despite being relatively sparsely populated, the peninsula hosts millions of believers each year on the annual Muslim pilgrimage, and it has been the site of major wars and military occupations by European, American, and other Middle Eastern countries for much of the 20th and 21st centuries. It has been an outpost of the Ottoman Empire, a center of British colonialism and (at Aden) an axis of its global empire, the location of Egypt's Vietnam (its long war in Yemen in the 1960s), the Gulf Wars I and II, and the recent wars in Yemen, to name just a few of the major conflicts. Often depicted as unchanging until caught up by the influx of massive oil wealth, this region is frequently characterized as a place of contradictions: home to some of the world's largest skyscrapers and also the most inhospitable and largest sand desert in the world, known as the Empty Quarter; the location of crucial American allies and the home of al-Qa'eda founder `Usama Bin Laden. In this course, we will examine the development of the peninsula historically to understand these contradictory images. We will investigate changes in the following arenas: environment and society; colonial occupation; newly independent states; the demise and development of key economic sectors (pearling; shipping; agriculture; oil; finance; piracy); political regimes; resources such as water, oil, and date palms; the growth of oil extraction infrastructure and its effects on the political regimes and societies in the region; the emergence of new Gulf cities; Islamic law; women's rights; human rights debates; and religious and ethnic minorities.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
HISTORY 5850 Shrinking City or Growth Machine?: The History of the Post-Industrial City
This course will explore the way that American cities have evolved in the face of shrinking de-industrialized economies and the shift to neo-liberal post-industrial growth. Focusing on the 1960s to the present, the class will examine the process of urban change in the late 20th century, including: de-industrialization; urban decline; growth policies; and gentrification.
HISTORY 5851 Prisons, Politics and Activism
Prison reformers argue that de-criminalizing nonviolent offenses will be enough to reduce mass incarceration, while prison abolitionists argue that we need to dismantle the entire carceral state in the U.S., which is maintained by a racially stratified system of public schooling, housing, employment and health care. What is at stake in these deabtes? Are we seeking to promote basic humanity, racial and gender equality or utopian visions of rehabilitation? This course seeks to historically contextualize prison reform and abolitionism from the 13th Amendment's re-articulation of slavery to current resistance to mass incarceration. Special attention will be paid to the intersections between the prisoner's rights movement and the Black & Brown Power, feminist, queer and disability movements.
HISTORY 5870 Topics in American History: Race and Drugs in American History
This course explores the racial construction of the use of legal and illegal substances in American history from the mid-19th century to the present. We will spend time engaging in a historical analysis of the social, economic, and racial dynamics that defined drug addiction in popular imagination, and examine how these factors contributed to discussions about legality, access to substances, one's ability to be rehabilitated, and criminal status. Regarding criminality we will particularly explore sociological and theoretical perspectives of labeling, habitual and occasional offenders, and moral panic in order to understand how racial minority groups were targeted for different rhetorical, legislative, and economic purposes. One major goal of the course will be to outline the early 20th century beginnings of the war on drugs and connect it to the century long growth of a militarized police system and prison industrial complex. We will secondly work to understand the role of local and national political actors, law enforcement, and the media in manufacturing and maintaining connections between race, crime and drugs. Ultimately, we will use our study of drugs to contextualize 21st century issues of police violence, increases in homicide in minority communities, mass incarceration, poverty, segregation, and mass movements of protest.
HISTORY 5872 Colonial Cities and the Making of Modernity
Massive urban growth has been a central result of the incorporation of many areas--both central and peripheral--into the global economy in the 19th and 20th centuries. Scholars have long theorized urbanization as a key component of modernity, but they have usually done so by looking at urbanization and modernization from the perspective of the West. This course will investigate the character of cities in the colony and then use these empirical and analytical entry points to examine critically some theories of modernity. The geographical focus of the course will be primarily on cities in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Spring
HISTORY 5876 Mexican Agriculture: Land, Politics and Development
Access to and ownership of land has been a major issue in Mexican history. Land tenure in economic development has been a constant source of tension and debate since the 18th century. Paradoxically, land tenure has been put forth as both the obstacle and the solution to the country's modernization. Given its centrality in the construction of the modern period, this course examines liberalism, agrarian revolts, the revolution, the green revolution and neoliberalism through the lens of land issues. This course will also explore how these have shaped and have been shaped by indigenous peoples and peasants, from land disentailment to the fight against GMO maize. Students will evaluate agrarian reforms, agricultural modernization programs, concepts of and transformations of natural resources, food production/consumption and social policies.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
HISTORY 5880 Oil and Modern America
This course will provide a chronological and and thematic examination of the history of oil in modern America (emphasis on 1890s-present). The course will focus its attention on key personalities, tensions and debates, and periods of swift progress and destabilization in the long history of U.S. petroleum, and will flesh out oil's broader impact on American life as well as the effects of American political culture on the internal mechanisms of the oil industry.
HISTORY 5884 Advance Seminar: The Roots of the American Working Classes: Myths, Realities, Histories
The diverse realities of American labor and working-class experience have long been submerged under layers of politics and ideology. How should we study the lives of working people? What questions should we ask? Where do we go to answer them? This research seminar engages the lived experiences of the American working classes, in all their complexity, over the long 19th- and 20th-centuries, to the present. The course has the double project of (1) exploring the roots of mythologies about American working people that have the effect of distorting or erasing their experiences, efforts and accomplishments, and struggles for organization, visibility, citizenship, and power, with special attention to mythologies about American workers who are non-white, non-male, and non-U.S.-born who did/do not fit conventional tropes of American labor or the white worker; and (2) exploring the roots of working people's experiences, as shaped by forces of technology, class, race, gender and sexuality, religion, nationalism, and violence : what are the challenges, conceptual and archival, of studying the people, in their working and familial/community lives, as producers and consumers, in their organizing efforts, and in their civic and political capacities? How did the transformation of work, technology, culture, and society over this long era from Enslavement to Artificial Intelligence, from Blackface Minstrelsy to Hip Hop, shape working people's lives and struggles? How did working people survive cataclysmic crises, from the Civil War to Covid, and mold the evolution of American citizenship and democracy? Each student will produce a 12-15 page original research paper related to the course material, based on an analysis of primary sources, in consultation with the instructor, and due at the end of the semester; the course is designed to closely mentor students in this project.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC BU: HUM EN: H
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 5886 Advanced Seminar: Medicine, Disease and Empire
This course examines the history of medicine in connection to the politics of colonialism and empire-building, spanning the sixteenth century through the twentieth century. Topics covered include: epidemic disease outbreaks (e.g. smallpox, cholera, malaria); the role of science and medicine in endorsing the civilizing missions of empires; tropical climates and tropical diseases as western constructs; tensions between western medicine and indigenous healing practices and beliefs; ideas of race and racism in science and medicine; modern advancements in sanitation and public health and their implementation overseas; and the historical roots of the modern global health movement.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 5888 Advanced Seminar: Digital Frontiers in History
Can digital technologies offer new ways to rethink historical narratives? Is DH the future of the humanities and of history as a profession? Can DH and critical inquiry be brought together? This course explores the history, present, and future of digital humanities (DH) to seek responses to these questions. From its origins in the Cold War to its rise to fame in the 1990s, the digital turn in the humanities has garnered excitement and support as well as critique and even disavowal from historians. In this course, we will examine the debates in the field of DH and learn about new ways in which historians are using digital tools for academic research as well as public outreach and activism. The course will be divided into two parts. The first half of the course will be devoted to understanding the historical growth and the present status of the field. In the second half, students will be learning basic digital tools to conduct research. The purpose of the course is not to turn historians into coders; it is to understand what codes can do for historians.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
HISTORY 5893 The U.S. in Vietnam: Origins, Developments and Consequences
This course will focus on America's involvement in Vietnam from the era of French colonialism through the collapse of United States intervention. Special attention will be given to political, military, economic, and cultural aspects, as well as to international relationships, and the significance of the experience and subsequent developments upon both American and Vietnamese societies.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: HUM EN: H
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 5901 Advanced Seminar: Meet Me in St. Louis
This seminar uses the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition held in St. Louis as a lens to explore the intersection of exhibitionary culture, nation building and history. In the second half of the 19th century, world's fairs became a fact of life in many parts of the world. By the end of the century, American historian and cultural critic Henry Adams argued there was indeed a religion of world's fairs. These international expositions, as sites of pilgrimages not only informed people's perception of the world but also were ideal stages for young countries to showcase their achievements, to attract investors and to craft a national identity. Students will examine the rise of exhibitionary culture and the construction of patriotic histories and national symbols, the manufacturing of racial ideologies and otherness, and how these were all embedded in debates on civilization, modernity and progress.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
Typical periods offered: Spring
HISTORY 5902 Slavery in America: The Politics of Knowledge Production
TThis course focuses on the long history of chattel slavery in North America, from origins through emancipation, encompassing Black and Indigenous enslavement. The course foregrounds the struggles over power, over life and death, that were at the heart of slavery's traumatic and grotesquely violent two-hundred-fifty-year career in North America, with attention to hemispheric context. At the same time, it highlights the fiercely contested historical battleground where scholars have argued about how to define American slavery--as a system or site of labor, production, and reproduction; law, property, and dispossession; racial and gender domination; sexual violation, rape, and incest; psychological terror and social death; containment and marooning; selfhood and nationality; agency and resistance; anti-colonial and revolutionary liberation and millennial redemption. Finally, it engages the politics of knowledge production that have produced the slavery archive, replete with its annihilating silences, repressions, and erasures, and overdetermined presences. In the end, the course's overarching question is how the politics of slavery, of its material experiences, interpretations, and archives, have shaped the lives and afterlives of slavery and race, to the present day. Students will conduct original research on topics related to North American slavery in consultation with the instructor that will culminate in a 12-15-page final essay. The course includes attention to the role of slavery in the founding and development of Washington University, and research projects that engage the University's slavery archive and questions related to enslavement in the history of the University and/or the history of St. Louis are welcome and will be supported by Olin Library Special Collections and other resources. Modern, U.S. PREREQUISITE: SEE HISTORY HEADNOTE.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: BA, ETH, HUM EN: H
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 5903 Inventing India
From Christopher Columbus' misguided search for a mythical notion of India, to the Incredible India branding campaign launched by the Indian State's Department of Tourism, to the allure of yoga and true love, the notion of India has its own history. In this Advanced Seminar we trace the invention of India - as a concept - over time. We'll learn how the fabrication of India has proceeded through the centuries, and how the many meanings of India coalesce, nimbly side-stepping any popular or professional narrative of Indian history. Mobilizing an array of interdisciplinary tools, we will plot how the fetishization of India has itself become a flexible industry, how the management of Indian exceptionalism drives caste expansion. We'll study how the process renders certain subject positions and hierarchies as neutral and hegemonic while violently discarding others; how India is a product collectively manufactured, circulated, and consumed by a range of people around the world; the very real work of translation in bringing India into our everyday lives and imaginaries. This course fulfills the History major capstone requirement as an Advanced Seminar.
HISTORY 5904 Topics in Environmental History
This course is intended to be an introduction to the study of environmental history. The semester begins with a general inquiry into the methods of the field and then we will use what we have learned to move into a focused sub-topic. Readings will include seminal works in the field, as well as philosophical, scientific, and science fiction texts that will help us to explore more abstract questions dealing with the relationship between humankind and the natural world.
Credit 3 units.
HISTORY 5906 Religion and the Secular: Struggles Over Modernity
A generation ago, scholars and observers around the world felt assured that modernization would bring the quiet retreat of religion from public life. But the theory of secularization now stands debunked by world events, and a host of questions has been reopened. This course provides students with a forum to think through these issues as they prepare research papers on topics of their own choosing.
HISTORY 5910 The Collapse of Communism
This course examines the political, social, economic, and cultural factors that led to the demise of the USSR in 1991. Focusing on the lands from the Socialist Bloc in Eastern Europe to the Soviet east, it broadly engages post-WWII Soviet history and in particular, focuses on the politically stable and largely socially tranquil decades spanning the 1960s to the 1980s.
HISTORY 5911 Independent Research for Capstone
This course is to be taken in addition to any Advanced Seminar for which a student registers. Course is 1 unit.
Credit 1 unit. EN: H
HISTORY 5912 Advanced Seminar: Blood & Sacred Bodies: Ritual Murder & Host Desecration Accusations
This seminar follows the history of the Ritual Murder and Host Desecration accusations from the origins in 12th and 13th century Europe to the 20th century. It pays close attention to the social and political functions of the narratives; their symbolic importance in Christianity's salviric drama; attacks on such beliefs from both within and outside the community of the faithful; the suppression and decline of the ritual murder accusation; the integration of Jews into European societies in the 19th century; and the reappearance of the blood libel in the aftermath of emancipation.
HISTORY 5913 Fixing Boundaries, Crossing Borders: History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
HISTORY 5915 Japan in World History--History and Memory
This course examines the history of World War II in Asia and how it has been remembered in the postwar era. We will trace the war, from the first Japanese military attack on China in 1931 through the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. We will also examine several postwar controversies concerning how the war has been forgotten and remembered in Japan, in the rest of Asia, and in the United States. Goals include grasping the empirical history of the war as a step to becoming familiar with the theories and methods of Memory Studies in History.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 5916 Advanced Seminar: Visual Culture and American History
How does United States history look different with visual culture at the center of the story? Focusing on the nineteenth century in particular, this course investigates how images and other visual objects did not simply reflect, but also shaped society, culture, politics, ideas and identities. The course moves from the Revoltion to the mass-culture society of the early twentieth century. During this period, American experienced a litany of profound transformations in the growth of cities to the emancipation of slaves.
HISTORY 5917 Advanced Seminar: Women and Gender in Modern Caribbean History
This course will highlight women in the making of Caribbean history, and it will consider how men and women were made in the English-speaking Caribbean from emancipation (1838) to the present. We will explore women and gender issues within the context of significant political shifts including the transition from slavery to wage and indentured labor, the labor rebellions of the 1930s, the rise of labor unions and political parties, anti-colonial activism, decolonization and nationalism. The course will also situate the Caribbean within an international context, paying attention to migration, black internationalism and the Third World movement.
HISTORY 5919 Gender and Power in Comparative Perspective
This course provides a thematic overview of the intellectual question, methodoligical challenges, and historiographical innovations that arise when gender as a category of historical analysis is used to interrogate the ideologies and institutions of public and private power in comparative perspective.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Spring
HISTORY 5920 Sexuality in the United States
Does sex have a history, and if so, how can we study it? This seminar examines important themes in the history of sexuality: the relationship between sexual ideologies and practices; racial hierarchy and sexuality; the policing of sexuality; construction of sexual identities and communities; and sexual politics at the end of the century. Students will also spend time discussing theoretical approaches to the history of sexuality, as well as methodological issues, including problems of source and interpretation.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
HISTORY 5922 Planning Global Cities
This team-taught advanced seminar will address the history and theory of a variety of metropolitan environments from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Readings will move from the nineteenth century state-centered urbanism of Paris of Vienna, through the colonial remaking of cities like Manila or Caracas and their connections to urban reform and the City Beautiful movement in the U.S., then through the rise of planning, zoning, auto-centered cities, federal interventions like urban renewal, the emergence of the preservation movement and new urbanisnm.
Credit 3 units.
HISTORY 5923 Egypt and the Arab Spring: Middle Eastern Revolution in Historical Perspective
The uprisings of the Arab Spring of 2011 captivated global media and observers. The movements brought down established regimes in Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, and Egypt. The focus of this course will be to understand the historical background and primary contemporary issues that have shaped Egypt's Arab Spring, and to examine the huge popular effort to document Egypt's revolution. Each student will design, research, and write a 25-page paper on a topic of his/her choice related to the Arab Spring.
HISTORY 5924 The Founding Fathers' Government in an Electronic Age
This is a research seminar that examines how Americans sought to translate their notions of government into a realistic set of priorities and a functioning set of public institutions. Extending from 1789 through the 1820s, this course investigates how the federal government came into being, what it did, and who populated the civilian and military rank of American officialdom. This is also a course in digital history. Students will create new knowledge through their own contributions to an ongoing digital project that seeks to reconstitute the early federal workforce. In the process, students will learn a variety of digital techniques, ranging from encoding languages to electronic systems to software packages.
HISTORY 5925 The Enlightenment in Latin America: Science & Reason On the Colonial Frontier
What is Enlightenment? Neither the harbinger of a utopian society 'philosophes' and bureaucrats in the Age of Revolutions anticipated nor as totalitarian or destructive as social critics judged from the twentieth century, the projects of self-styled rationalists and empiricists have had repercussions in seemingly every aspect of life. This course invites students to consider the contributions of non-Western actors to the emergence of our modern world. Specifically, we examine the variety of ways scientists, administrators, and laypeople in Latin America and the Caribbean thought about medicine and disease, race, religion, social and political organization, and problems of truth and empiricism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The goal is to engage critically with the view that the modern world emerged from predominantly textual, literate, English, or French traditions and to think about how we can recover the cultural contributions of non-literate groups of indigenous American, African, and Spanish descent.
HISTORY 5926 Gender, Sexuality, and the Body in Latin America
This course offers students an immersion in the relevent debates on gender, sexuality, and the body as lenses through which Latin America can be understood. Through a variety of methodologies, perspectives, and document types, students will engage such diverse topics as: colonial gender systems; state violence; homosexuality; love and relationship; work; emotive culture; social discourse; citizenship; revolution; and identity. Through memoirs, primary archival sources, and secondary treatments of the past and present, as well as film, we will explore how gender, sexuality, and the body are not only important in understanding Latin America, but vital.
Credit 4 units. EN: H
HISTORY 5927 Money Talks: Readings in Economic History
To date, economic history has been dominated by quantative research. In recent years, however, there has been a turn toward more qualitative analysis. With his landmark Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty argued that Economics ought to return to its origins in political and moral philosophy. Similarily, on this side of the Atlantic, a new generation of historians has begun to revisit the history of capitalism with methods that combine both numbers and narrative. In this advanced seminar, students will read both contemporary and seminal works in the field of economic history as well as writings from a wide variety of social scientists and humanistic scholars who study the economy. The aim of this course is to think critically about the historical construction of both economics as a discipline and the economy as a field of inquiry.
Credit 3 units. EN: H
Typical periods offered: Fall
HISTORY 5929 Blacks and Indians in Latin America
The goal of this course is to introduce students to the study of indigenous and African-based resistance and rebellion in the Americas and the Caribbean from the colonial period to the nineteenth century. Throughout the course, we will discuss how concepts such as agency, popular or subaltern politics, and resistance have been variously interpreted by scholars of both indigenous and African diasporic societies. By beginning in the early colonial period when Indians and Blacks became new social and racial categories, we will think about the relevance and changing meanings of such categories over time, and look beyond national and/or linguistic borders.
HISTORY 5942 Europe's Jewish Problem: Antisemitism & Jewish-Christian Confrontation in European History
The so-called Jewish Question was a product of European modernity. It emerged in conjunction with the formation of modern states, Enlightenment projects for political reform, the decline of religious influence in society, and struggles over Jewish emancipation. In this seminar, students will examine the unusual career of this obsession from the sixteenth through the twentieth century by focusing selectively on a number of illustrative episodes: Christian Hebraism and the Reformation; the Enlightenment assault on religious power; European debates on Jewish emancipation; the emergence of the Jewish Question in the nineteenth century; antisemitism as a modern political phenomenon; the renewed discourse of Jewish ritual murder at the turn of the 20th century; Zionism and other forms of Jewish nationalism; and the question of anti-Zionism in the reformulation of the Jewish Question during the past half-century.
HISTORY 5951 The Inquisition in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, 1200-1700
This seminar will study the history of the Inquisition from its beginnings in southern France in the first half of the 13th century up to the investigations undertaken by Dominicans and Franciscans in 17th century Mexico and Peru. Along the way the seminar will focus upon other inquisitions in Europe (especially those made in Italy, Spain, and Germany), and the hunt for heresy in Goa and the Phillipines. This course will read inquisitional manuals (books on how to conduct an inquisition), and original inquisitional documents (the records of the trials and interrogations). Consequently, the history of heresy and witchcraft, as understood by people in the past and historians in the present, will be discussed.
HISTORY 5964 Magic, Heresy, and Witchcraft in the Medieval World, 350-1550
This seminar will study the history of magic, heresy, and witchcraft in the medieval world. It will begin in the fourth century after the conversion of Constantine the Great and end with the great witchcraft trials of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The seminar will read magical treatises, ecclesiastical polemics against vulgar belief, inquisitorial trials, chronicles, and histories, in our attempt to define what was considered the ordinary and the extraordinary, the natural and the supernatural, good and evil, the boundaries of heaven and earth. How do modern historians use medieval documents to evoke the lives of men, women, and children who believed in magic or were accused of heresy? Can this only be done through a form of historical anthropology? What methods do historians use in trying to understand past ideas and practices? What is historical truth then? What is the relationship of supposedly heterodox belief and behavior with religious orthodoxy? How do we define religion? A theme throughout this seminar will be the definition of evil and the powers of the devil. Students will write a short historiographic essay and a long research essay. Pre-modern, Europe. PREREQUISITE: Sophomore standing or permission of the instructor.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
HISTORY 5976 The American Trauma: Representing the Civil War in Art, Literature and Politics
This seminar is an interdisciplinary examination of how Americans represented the Civil War during and after the titanic conflict, with special attention given to the period between 1865 and 1915. The course explores how painters, novelists, photographers, sculptors, essayists, journalists, philosophers, historians, and filmmakers engaged the problems of constructing narrative and reconstructing national and individual identity out of the physical and psychological wreckage of a war which demanded horrific sacrifice and the destruction of an enemy that could not be readily dissociated from the self.
HISTORY 5979 Gender, Race and Class in South Africa, 1880-Present
By focusing on the complex historical dynamics of race, gender and class in South Africa over the past 120 years, this course is aimed at understanding the development of segregation, apartheid, and racial capitalism, as well as the emergence of multiple forms of resistance to counter white minority rule. Topics include: white settler expansion and the defeat of the African peasantry; the rise of mining capital and the emergence of a racially divided working class; the origins of African and Afrikaner nationalisms; migrant labor and the subordination of African women; and the prospects for a non-racial, non-sexist democracy in a unified South Africa.
HISTORY 5980 Advanced Seminar: Historical Perspectives on Human Rights
This course offers a historical perspective on the modern international human rights regime, using materials drawn from diplomatic, legal, political, and cultural studies. Successful completion of this seminar involves designing, researching, and writing a 25-30 page paper on a historically-oriented, human-rights-related topic of your choice.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 5984 The Problem of Freedom: The Age of Democratic Revolution in the Americas
Ever since the improbable alliance of the English pirate and slave trader Sir Francis Drake and the fugitive slave Cimarrons on the Atlantic coast of Panama many centuries ago, the history of freedom in the New World has unfolded in unlikely fits and starts. The course will explore two related conjectures: first, that maroon politics (the often short-lived alliances between slaves, quasi-free blacks and white allies), slave rebellion, provincial secession and civil war were the widespread and normative conditions of post-colonial regimes throughout the New World; and second, that the problem of freedom was especially challenging in a New World environment in which freedom was fleeting and tended to decompose. Special attention will be given to antislavery insurgencies, interracial politics and alliances in the Unites States and the perspectives on freedom they produced, but the readings will also include materials on debates over freedom in the Caribbean and South America over the course of the long age of democratic revolution, 1760-1888.
HISTORY 5985 Advanced Seminar: Renaissance Florence and Venice
Venice was the most famously stable city-state in Renaissance Italy, Florence the most notoriously unstable one. This course explores how those contrasting political environments and experiences shaped social relations and cultural production (and vice versa) in those two cities.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
HISTORY 5991 History of the Body
Do bodies have a history? Recent research suggests that they do. Historians have tapped a wide variety of sources - including vital statistics, paintings and photographs, hospital records, and sex manuals - to reconstruct changes in how humans have conceptualized and experienced their own bodies. We will pay particular attention to the intersection of European cultural history and history of medicine since 1500. This course fulfills the History major capstone requirement as an Advanced Seminar.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
HISTORY 5997 Women and Religion in Medieval Europe
This course explores the religious experience of women in medieval Europe and attempts a gendered analysis of the Christian Middle Ages. In it, we will examine the religious experience of women in a variety of settings - from household to convent. In particular, we will try to understand how and why women came to assume public roles of unprecedented prominence in European religious culture between the twelfth century and the sixteenth, even though the institutional church barred them from the priesthood and religious precepts remained a principal source of the ideology of female inferiority.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
HISTORY 5999 The Crusades
This seminar will study the phenomenon of crusading in medieval Latin Christendom, from the First Crusade proclaimed by Pope Urban II in 1095 to the late crusades of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. We will particularly focus on crusading in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the ideas and practices of being a martial pilgrim were developed and formalized by the Church. The concept of holy war in Latin Christianity and Islam will be examined. We will analyze the Fourth Crusade and the sack of Constantinople in 1204. We will investigate the Albigensian Crusade (1208-1229) into what is now southern France, when Christians were promised salvation for killing other Christians and whether genocidal moments occurred during this holy war against heretics. Topics to be discussed are the Kingdom of Jerusalem and other crusader colonies in the Levant, women on crusade, the poetry of crusading, chivalry, military orders like the Knights Templars and the Hospitallers, and violence as a redemptive act. One historiographic paper and a research essay are required.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
HISTORY 6001 Readings in Religion and Politics
This course will include religion and politics readings.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 6010 Readings in Early American History
Early American History readings will be covered in this course.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 6020 Readings in Modern United States History
This course will cover Modern United States History.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 6030 Readings in Latin American History
This course will cover Latin American History.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 6040 Readings in British History
This course will cover British History.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Spring
HISTORY 6050 Readings in European History
This course will cover European History.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 6060 Readings in African-American History
This course will cover African American History.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 6070 Readings in Women's History
This course will cover Women's History.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 6080 Readings in Middle Eastern History
This course will cover Middle Eastern History.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 6090 Readings in Jewish History
This course will cover Jewish History.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 6100 Readings in East Asian History
This course will cover East Asian History.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 6110 Readings in Russian History
This course will cover Russian History.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 6120 Readings in Comparative History
This course will cover Comparative History.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 6130 Readings in African History
This course is a graduate reading seminar in African history. Selected topics will include: African geography and environmental history, the classical kingdoms of the Sahel, the development of Swahili culture, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the historical roots of Apartheid, the intellectual and material culture of colonialism, African resistance and adaptation to social change during the colonial era, decolonization, and roots of some of the major problems facing modern Africa.
Credit 3 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 6140 Readings in World History
This course will cover World History.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 6150 Readings in Legal History
This course will cover Legal History.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall
HISTORY 6160 Readings in Environmental History
This course will cover Environmental History.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 6170 Readings in History of Medicine, Science and Technology
This course will cover the History of Medicine, Science and Technology.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 6180 Readings in American Frontier History
This course will cover American Frontier History.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 6190 Readings in American Legal History
This course will cover American Legal History.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall
HISTORY 6200 Readings in Modern American Legal History
This course will cover Modern American Legal History.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall
HISTORY 6210 Readings in South Asian History
This course will cover South Asian History.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
HISTORY 6225 Readings in Carribean History
2 or 4 units with permission of instructor.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall
HISTORY 6227 Readings in American History
This course will cover American History.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall
HISTORY 6229 Readings in Atlantic History
This course will cover Atlantic History.
Credit 4 units.
HISTORY 6245 Introduction to American Culture Studies
An introduction to interdisciplinary approaches to the study of American culture. The class will examine the relationship between cultural criticism and scholarship on American culture, the history of the American Studies and cultural studies movements, the simultaneous turn to historicist approaches in literary studies and to textualist approaches to historical studies, the moral and interpretive implications of the shift from a modernist to a postmodernist stance in cultural inquiry, and the challenges that multiculturalist and trans-national perspectives pose to the study of a national American culture. Many of the readings will emphasize trends in cultural history, but will also include works in anthropology, art and architectural history, literary history, media studies, political and social theory, and religious studies.
Credit 4 units.
HISTORY 6260 Readings in Ancient History
This course will cover Ancient History.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Spring
HISTORY 6280 Readings in Caribbean History
This course will cover Caribbean History.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Spring
HISTORY 6300 Readings in American History
2 or 4 units with permission of instructor.
Credit 4 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall
HISTORY 7885 Master's Nonresident
This course is for nonresident History Master's students.
Credit 0 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall
HISTORY 8886 Doctoral Nonresident
This course is for nonresident History Doctoral students.
Credit 0 units.
Typical periods offered: Spring