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.

R 11:00AM – 11:50AM |   5233 Humanities | Instructor: Charles Kim

Critical Theory, Marxism and Gender

Today, the adjectives critique and critical are ubiquitous.  However, we rarely scrutinize what these terms mean.  This course will examine attempts to explain what it means to be critical or think critically, with a special emphasis on what “critique” implies when applied to social theory.  The course will begin by examining Kant and Hegel’s respective attempts to be critical with respect to philosophy.  Through these texts, we gain a perspective on what it means to subject categories to “critique.”  The method that we use to reflect critically on our thinking could aid in developing a critique of society.  Without this initial step of subjecting our thinking to critique, our reflections on society risk being uncritical because there is no justification of our foundational categories, such as freedom, equality, man, woman or even more basic categories such as, identity, change and becoming.  Keeping such ideas in mind, we will turn to Marx’s Capital, which has the subtitle: “critique of political economy” and ask how Marx’s conception of critique relates to his idealist predecessors.   In this manner, we will see how the concept of “critique” can be applied to a specific social form such as capitalism.  Frankfurt School theorist, such as Adorno and Horkheimer combine the insights of Kant, Hegel and Marx to construct a social theory, which they explicitly contend is critical.  Indeed, many identify critical theory with the Frankfurt School.  This course deals with how they explain critical theory and how they put such theory into practice, in classic texts such as the Dialectic of Enlightenment.  More recently, the so-called second and third generation Frankfurt School philosophers have returned to Kant and Hegel to rethink the normative foundations of social critique.  However, in the past few decades, scholars have raised the question of whether the later generation Frankfurt School scholars uncritically accept some assumptions of the capitalist system.  We will also examine to what extent theorists inspired by Marx and Hegel have dealt with issues related to gender and race.  This will take us beyond the usual limits of critical theory à la Frankfurt School.

Regardless of their stance on gender and race, Western critical theory has been charged with being Eurocentric and consequently uncritical.  We will read attempts by non-Western intellectuals to rethink critical theory by addressing issues related to race, gender and imperialism.  From this perspective, we will read certain key texts of postcolonial and decolonial theory.  The course will end by discussing contemporary Asian intellectuals, including Karatani Kojin from Japan and Wang Hui from China, who rethink critical theory by explicitly engaging with key texts from the Western cannon.

M 3:30PM – 5:25PM |  2611 Humanities | Instructor: Viren Murthy

Environmental History

This graduate seminar offers a thematic introduction to environmental history, an interdisciplinary field that broadly examines changing human relationships with the natural world. It will teach you how considering the environment can change your understanding of the past and also will show you how to look differently at the landscapes around you today. The course is designed to be accessible to students from a range of disciplines, but will require 150-300 pages of historiographical reading each week as well as reflective writing assignments. Course themes will include ecological imperialism, environmental determinism, histories of forestry and conservation, capitalist ecologies, engaging scientific knowledge, struggles for land, and race, gender, and Indigenous studies. We will also focus on methods, as one of the challenges of doing environmental history is finding, and interpreting, sources that speak to changing landscapes.

Highly recommended if you think you might do an exam list in environmental history! The syllabus will be available the week classes start.

F 8:50AM – 10:45AM | 110 Science Hall  | Instructor: Elizabeth Hennessy

Africans in the Americas

Between 1492 and 1830, Africans represented the largest immigrant stream to the Americas, outnumbering European migrants by a ratio of 4:1. The purpose of this course is to introduce students to some of the major themes in the study of the Africans in the Atlantic world, from 1441, when the first Africans arrived into Europe via the Atlantic, until the end of the slave trade.  Slavery, the slave trade, and memories of the slave trade figure prominently in the readings, but we will also examine the development of diasporic identities, religions, kinship structures, gender constructions, political expressions, and so on.  The impacts of Africa on the Atlantic world, though often muted in the historical literature, were at least as profound as European influences.  We will explore how and why.  In addition, we will devote time each week to a critical discussion of primary sources and methods that allow scholars to construct histories of Africans in the Americas.  This portion of the class will operate as a workshop on how to think capaciously and creatively beyond the colonial archive.  The course will ask you to concentrate your efforts on weekly reading, writing (750-word response papers), and discussion instead of a lengthy final paper.

T 1:20PM – 3:15PM | 345 Education Building  | Instructor: James Sweet

Transnational War & Society

This course introduces students to the field of “War & Society.” Within the broader field of military history, War & Society Studies ask how and why societies organize and deploy violence on their collective behalf and question the reciprocal effects of these choices upon societies over time. Reflecting the broad scope of Wisconsin’s War in Society & Culture Program (WISC) — for which this is the core graduate seminar — this course encompasses cases from antiquity to the present day and from around the world.

W 1:20PM – 3:15PM | 5257 Humanities  | Instructor: John Hall

Historiography of Middle East and North Africa

Acquire a critical understanding of the major debates and scholarly trends in the historiography of North Africa and the Middle East since the 18th century. Intended for graduate students interested in the professional study of the Middle East and North Africa, or related fields. Assignments include scholarly book reviews and review essays.

F 8:50AM – 10:45AM | 5257 Humanities  | Instructor: Daniel Stolz

Writing Dissertation and Grant Proposals

Grant writing is a crucial skill for academic careers and yet it is often assumed that students simply possess this skill by virtue of being in graduate school. This seminar is focused on strategies for planning, writing and revising effective proposals for external fellowships to fund dissertation research. Since we will break down the components of an effective dissertation project summary, the strategies you learn can also be used to develop a dissertation prospectus. They will be transferable to other proposals as well, such as dissertation completion and post-doctoral fellowships. Participants will take part in a 14-week hands-on, workshop-style seminar with the aim of writing and refining a dissertation prospectus or grant proposal tailored to competitions available in the participant’s field of study.

M 3:30PM – 5:25PM | 5257 Humanities | Instructor: Louise Young

Education and the Civil Rights Movement

This seminar explores the historical relationship between education and the African American freedom struggle. Organized both chronologically and thematically, the course takes students from the separate and unequal schoolhouses of the Jim Crow era, through the decades-long legal struggles of Brown v. Board of Education, to the streets and campuses of Selma, Alabama, Oakland, California, and New York City. In addition to examining schools and colleges as targets and sites of civil rights activism, students will consider the varied ways in which education and educational philosophies influenced the course of the movement. They will also explore broader questions pertaining to the capacity and mechanisms for affecting social, political, and economic change as well as questions regarding the relationship between race and power, past and present, politics and history, and education and equity.

W 2:25PM – 5:25PM | L150 Education Building | Instructor: Walter Stern

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 003). If you prefer to enroll in the on-campus course (section 001), please contact Lisa Woerpel, iSchool Curricular Representative at enrollment@ischool.wisc.edu

Online | Instructor: Rachel Erpelding

New Directions in Southeast Asian History

Our seminar will examine the state of the field of Southeast Asian history through a selection of monographs which have won the Harry Benda Prize—awarded by the Association for Asian Studies to the best first book on the region. We will explore major contemporary themes, as well as turns and trends in the historical scholarship of Southeast Asia, so as to prepare graduate students studying the region to make sense of the state of the field, to identify and productively engage with current scholarly conversations, and to articulate their own future interventions and contributions to our analysis of the region. We shall read and analyze these monographs with three goals in mind: to think of these prize-winning books structurally as models of writing and scholarship; to think with the arguments of the books to understand how their methods, theories, or archival sources represent new directions or a refinement of classic concerns in the scholarship of Southeast Asia; and to think about our own work could fit into, or perhaps even productively challenge, the intellectual conceptualization of the region.

T 2:25PM – 5:25PM | B215 Van Vleck Hall | Instructor:  Juan Fernandez

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.

F 1:20PM – 3:15PM | 5257 Humanities | Instructor: Anne Hansen

Introduction to History for U.S. Historians

This seminar introduces early-career graduate students of North American/U.S. history to the ideas and practices that have shaped Americanist scholarship to date, as well as to major challenges and tensions in the field historically and presently. Faculty guests will visit the seminar to discuss their areas of specialization and offer wisdom about doing U.S. history today. The broad historiographical emphasis of the course is intended to prepare students to contextualize their own research interests and to begin thinking about the teaching of U.S. history.

R 1:20PM – 3:15PM | 5257 Humanities | Instructor: Simon Balto

Circuits of American Empire

This seminar explores the circuits that govern movement and displacement within and across the United States empire.  We will examine how the reaches of people, goods, and ideas are essential components of U.S. colonization and imperial expansions and how they dictate modes of resistance, decolonization efforts, and coalitional politics. We will also investigate how movement and displacement generate transnational and diasporic identities that reconfigure conceptions of the national while expanding and sometimes unsettling the sense of belonging and rootedness.

T 1:20PM – 3:15PM | L173 Education Building  | Instructor: Cindy Cheng

Modern Europe: West and East

This reading seminar will introduce graduate students to the comparative and transnational history of 20^th century Europe, with a focus on the Soviet Union and France. We will explore the imprint of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, the rise of Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, decolonization, Cold War conflict, and the extension of Soviet power on the countries of Europe. The class will alternate between two methodological approaches to the material:

(1) The majority of weeks, we will adopt a comparative approach, exploring a common theme (e.g., socialism, national identity, empire-building, the politics of religion, immigration and displacement, reproductive politics, environmentalism) across two different national/imperial contexts. On these weeks, we will read the history and historiography of the Soviet case against the history and historiography of the French case –- and vice versa.

(2) Intermittently, we will instead adopt a transnational approach, exploring historical entanglements between France and the USSR and considering recent literature on diasporic actors, internationalist visions, and east-west vectors of exchange in order to track the transmission of ideas, culture, political formations, and people across European borders. We will end with an evaluation of the new political, social, and cultural transfigurations that emerged in Europe in the wake of the Revolutions of 1989.

T 1:20PM – 3:15PM | 5255 Humanities | Instructors: Francine Hirsch and Emma Kuby

Historiography and Methods

This course provides an introduction for graduate students (in all disciplines) to the history of science, medicine, and technology (HSMT). We will examine both HSMT’s more distant and more recent historiographic concerns with our present-day ones, exposing both continuities and changes in the approaches historians of science, technology, and medicine have taken to our field(s). In doing so, it will also offer practical analytical tools for understanding these trends and developing new intellectual directions.

W 1:20PM – 3:15PM | 5255 Humanities | Instructor: Devin Kennedy

Science, Medicine, and Technology Across Asia

This seminar explores Asia as a global nexus through the lens of science, medicine, and technology. It is designed to be accessible to students from both the history of science and Asian studies, both broadly defined. For the former group, this seminar uses Asia as method to decenter the West and cultivate a pluralistic, historically grounded understanding of sci/med/tech. For the latter, it offers an opportunity to systematically engage with this particular approach(es) to Asia that is not yet dominant but vibrant and fast-developing; it also serves as an introduction to key historiographical trends in the history of science. Together, this seminar aims to foster meaningful conversations among students with diverse disciplinary training and intellectual backgrounds.

Course readings draw primarily from the history of science, with attention to works from STS,  anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. Organized roughly along the timeline from the early modern period to the present, the syllabus covers topics such as knowledge traditions, transnational exchange, empire, colonialism and post-colonialism, the natural and built environment, infrastructure, race, gender, medicine, information and media, and biopolitics.

Students will complete a book review during the semester and a final historiographical essay tailored to their interests and academic goals. Advanced auditing students are encouraged to design a syllabus related to the theme of the seminar.

M 1:20PM – 3:15PM | 5255 Humanities | Instructor: Yang Li