Graduate Courses

History in a Global Perspective

An introduction to history as a graduate and professional discipline. Comprises practical and intellectual discussions of historical study and research, including questions of how to be a graduate student in the department, how to “do” history, and how to become a professional in the field. Includes talks from department faculty, staff, and outside lecturers. Required for all History graduate students in their first year.

W 3:30PM – 4:20PM |   5218 Levy Hall | Instructor: Charles Kim

Land Tenure Center

For more than fifty years, the University of Wisconsin’s Land Tenure Center existed as an interdisciplinary research center, attracting students from around the world to study land reform, and often, to implement it. The Center has left behind two extraordinary archives: its research archives, containing one-of-a-kind primary documents, and its institutional archive, which casts light on the history of the Cold War, global development, and questions of reform and revolution. Most of this course is devoted to exploring these archives as a class, to gain research experience that will support students’ dissertation research and writing process. We will be working together to produce an edited volume on the history of the LTC, as part of a global research team making use of these materials. Students with interests in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Cold War U.S. are all welcome and encouraged to enroll.”

T 11:00AM – 12:55PM | 5218 Levy Hall  | Instructor: Patrick Iber

Introduction to Professional Research in History

Introduction to professional research in the discipline of history. Discuss recent, exemplary historical monographs and explore diverse methodological approaches. Identify how authors start from a set of questions and concerns and develop them into a full historical study. Focus on developing as ethical, conscientious, and reflexive historians.

W 11:00AM – 12:55PM | 5240 Levy Hall  | Instructors: Geoffrey Durham and Allison Powers Useche

Introduction to Archives and Records Management

An introduction to the archives profession and basic theory and practice of archives and records administration, including the uses of primary sources in research, appraisal, access, and preservation.

This course is offered by Library and Information Sciences (LIS) as an online course (section 002). If you prefer to enroll in the on-campus course (section 003), please contact Lisa Woerpel, iSchool Curricular Representative at enrollment@ischool.wisc.edu

Online | Instructor: Rachel Erpelding

CIA Covert Warfare

Designed for undergraduates and graduate students with some background in U.S. diplomatic history or international relations, the course will probe the dynamics of CIA covert wars through comparative case histories over the past 75 years. By focusing on armed conflicts in world regions such as Europe, Latin America, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia, the seminar will explore the central role these covert wars played in the Cold War and its aftermath. These clandestine interventions often succeeded brilliantly from a U.S. perspective. But they sometimes left behind ruined battlegrounds and ravaged societies that became veritable black holes of international instability.

After several sessions reviewing the origins of the CIA and its distinctive patterns of clandestine warfare, the seminar will apply a case-study approach to covert wars in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America—including, the anti-Mossadeq coup in Iran, overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia, Lumumba’s murder in the Congo, and the protracted war in Afghanistan. Reflecting the significance of Southeast Asia to CIA operations, the seminar will also devote four sessions to this region, including anti-Sukarno operations in Indonesia, anti-communist pacification in the Philippines, counter-guerilla operations in South Vietnam, and the secret war in Laos—arguing that the latter two operations are central to understanding more recent conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq.

Through the sum of such content, students should finish the seminar with knowledge about a key facet of U.S. foreign policy and a lifelong capacity for critical analysis of international relations, particularly its geopolitical dimension. Beyond such an approach, the course will give students sharpened analytical abilities, refined research skills, improved oral presentations, and better writing.

Note: This course is offered as History 600/755. As such, there is a limited number of seats reserved for graduate students. Please contact the instructor ASAP if you wish to enroll.

T 11:00AM – 12:55PM | 5240 Levy Hall | Instructor:  Alfred McCoy

Research Seminar in History

The central purpose of this class is to support History graduate students complete an initial draft of their MA paper or turn a historical research paper into an article. We’ll work together to help craft a research question, design and plan your project, consider its historiographical context, identify sources, and begin the writing process. The seminar will provide you with structure, peer support, feedback, and a discussion forum while you are writing and revising. The focus of the seminar will be on writing, discussion, and presentation.

R 3:30PM – 5:25PM | 5218 Levy Hall | Instructor: Matt Villeneuve

Seminar in Japanese History

This course is designed to help students develop bibliographic and historiographic command of modern Japanese history as a teaching and research field. We open with a series of discussions about the ways American academic institutions and scholarship have constituted Japan as a field of studies from the 1950s to the present. The remainder of the course focuses on close readings of eight research monographs, most published in the past two years but including several classics. These readings reflect the preoccupation with empire and post-empire in recent historiography.  We will use the readings as an entry point into central concerns in Japanese history-writing, and connect them with previous scholarship and core debates in the field.  We will also use these books to explore methodologies and narrative strategies for producing Japan knowledge.  Writing assignments include weekly reflections on the readings, a choice of annotated bibliography or book review, and a final paper on a topic of your choice.  Japanese language ability is not required, though special assignments may be made for students with advanced reading ability and interest in exploring Japanese language historiography.

Readings include:

• Hannah Shepherd, The Narrowing Sea: Fukuoka, Pusan, and the Rise and Fall of an Imperial Region
• Sayaka Chatani, A Nation Within: North Korean Zainichi in Postimperial Japan
• Joseph Seeley, Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan’s Empire in Korea and Manchuria
• Simon Avinell, Asia and Postwar Japan: De-imperialization, Civic Activism and National Identity
• Yumi Kim, Madness in the Family: Women, Care, and Illness in Japan
• Eiichiro Azuma, In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire 
• John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
• Andrew Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan

M 1:20PM – 3:15PM | 5216 Levy Hall| Instructor: Louise Young

The History of Africa

This course has two primary objectives: 1) to introduce you to the life of a professional historian, with an emphasis on Africa and the African diaspora; and 2) to give you supervised space and time to pursue your own research projects. During the first five weeks of the course, we will read roughly a book per week, most focusing on the “history” of African history. We will spend the first hour of each class period discussing these works. During the second hour we will discuss a variety of professional issues, including: how to stay up-to-date on literature in your field, how to conduct research in an archive, how to present at a conference, how to write and submit an academic article, how to apply for a job (including non-academic jobs), etc. I will conduct these mini-symposia in 30 minutes or less. In the last half hour of class, we will discuss issue(s) raised in The Chronicle of Higher Education. In most cases, The Chronicle deals with “hot button” academic issues that should inspire discussion and debate. In other instances, it offers advice columns, examinations of intellectual culture, etc. During the middle weeks of the course, you will conduct independent research in consultation with the instructor. In the final two weeks, we will present our research in a conference format.

R 11:00AM – 12:55PM | 5218 Levy Hall | Instructor: James Sweet

History of Colonial North America

The history of North America from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, with the primary focus on Anglo-America.

R 11:00AM – 12:55PM | 5216 Levy Hall  | Instructor: Gloria Whiting

Violence in the Archives

This seminar begins with a basic interrogation of how we conceptualize and anticipate two key concepts: violence and the archive.  As a collective group, we will examine and discuss various approaches that scholars have taken to challenge notions of how and where to locate and expose violence in the historical archive.  This course strives to offer a temporal and geopolitical range of case studies, and students should be prepared to read works from premodern to more contemporary eras.  The discussion will revolve around three facets of violence: methods, sites, and temporality.  How does an examination of our own assumptions regarding forms of violence impact how we analyze and frame an “event” for historical analysis?

And, of course, our attention also turns to the violence of the archive itself, especially the state archive.  The acts of recording, preserving, and categorizing will be broken down as we discuss the bureaucratic/notarial gesture in relation to violence.  We will discuss how we can unsettle the logic of certain state archives by bringing them in tension with other kinds of “archives.”  Each student will work towards creating a critical, creative juxtaposition of different archival materials towards their own research question for their final paper.  From the experimenting with tension between different archival materials to the narrating of “violence” within our analyses, we will engage with the politics of both methodology and narrative.

The two most important elements for this seminar are class participation and the final research paper, which will be 18-25 pages in length. Students are welcome to focus research papers on any time period or geographic area.  In addition to the final research essay, there will be a preliminary research exercise on an archive of the student’s choosing- in short essay form – that is a requirement for the course.  This short essay serves as a foundation for the final research paper. Another preparatory assignment will be the annotated bibliography or historiographical essay, where you will be laying out the scholarly conversations you are simultaneously bringing together and in which you are participating. For the weeks we meet as a class to discuss our core texts, readings responses are also mandatory.

T 2:25PM – 5:25PM | 5206 Levy Hall | Instructor: Monica Kim

American Military History

This course provides a broad introduction to recent and significant works in American military history as well as the “state of the field.” It will familiarize students with the paramount historiographical issue within the field—American “ways of war”—as well as recent works in substantive subfield of “war and society,” thereby fulfilling one of the curricular requirements for the War in Society and Culture Program. Students may also fulfill temporal requirements for the U.S. field by arranging for concentrated readings in the desired century/centuries.

W 1:20PM – 3:15PM | 5240 Levy Hall | Instructor: John Hall

Slavery, Emancipation, and Religion in West Africa

This seminar explores core concepts, key debates, and current research trends in the history and historiography of slavery, emancipation, and religion in West Africa. The history of internal and external slaving and slave trading (e.g. African, trans-Saharan, and Atlantic slave trades) will be examined from a variety of geographic, temporal, and disciplinary perspectives, thinking critically about meanings and practices of slavery, emancipation, and religious transformations with a geographical emphasis on West African region, and with a special focus on state formation, race, gender, resistance, agency, freedom,  colonialism, abolition, and the afterlife of slavery.

No previous work in African history is required, and seminar members engage together to explore selected works in the literature. Participants will choose one of the following research options, in consultation with the instructor: 1) write a 15-page formal historiographic essay reviewing the primary and secondary sources relevant to the research topic; 2) write several short essays analyzing primary sources relevant to the topic; 3) produce a 15-page formal, journal-style research essay relevant to their research; 4) write a 15-page proposal that situates future research into a conceptual/ historiographical context; or 5) produce a detailed course syllabus for a thematic course in West African history (including an annotated bibliography).

T 3:30PM – 5:25PM | 5216 Levy Hall | Instructor: Khaled Esseissah