Graduate Courses

Traditional & Early Modern Chinese Intellectual History

This seminar is designed to introduce graduate students in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean history, art history, literature, anthropology, sociology, political science, and other fields to key issues and debates in the history of Late Imperial China. It does not assume extensive preparation in Chinese history, but welcomes those who do. Topics covered will include environment, cities and urbanization, development of commercial society, cultural change, family, social, and government organization, relations with Japan, Korea, Mongols, and Manchus (before 1800), education, ethnic and cultural identity in Ming and Qing, and other topics. Because students have varying interests, approximately one-third of each student’s readings will be chosen by the student (in consultation with Professor Dennis) based on individual interest. Students who read foreign languages may select relevant readings in those languages.

Grading will be based on participation in class discussions, weekly posting of reaction papers on the collective readings, periodic reports on individually-selected readings, and a final historiographic essay.

T 1:20PM – 3:15PM | 5255 Mosse Humanities | Instructor: Joe Dennis

Designing Courses

This seminar is designed a one-semester workshop on course design for History and HSMT graduate students. Each week, we will discuss one element of course design. In some weeks, we will discuss basic concepts or frameworks in teaching and learning and ask how these can help us design courses that better fit our goals as teachers, and how to apply the principles of course design to different settings. Over the course of the semester, each student will design and develop a course syllabus, learning activities, and an assessment plan. Students will also develop one full module (or equivalent).

W 3:30PM – 5:25PM | 5257 Mosse Humanities | Instructor: Daniel Ussishkin

Writing the Past

Historians are storytellers. But there is no single way to tell a story. This class demystifies the act of historical storytelling by engaging with an array of texts that experiment with narrative in different ways. We’ll pay attention to questions such as: Where do we begin–and end–the story? How do we gain the trust of our readers? How do we balance narrative and analysis? What genres (e.g., the murder mystery) might we borrow from? And where is the line between fiction and history? It is our hope–as two instructors who continue to wrestle with the joys and challenges of writing stories–that students will leave the class both excited about the possible pathways forward for their own work and more prepared for how to navigate them.

W 11:00AM – 12:55PM | 5257 Mosse Humanities | Instructors: Kathryn Ciancia and Stephen Kantrowitz

Proseminar in Southeast Asian History

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 case histories over the past 75 years. By focusing on world regions such as Europe, Latin America, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia, the seminar will explore the central role these covert wars played in international history during 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 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. Beyond such an approach, the course will give students sharpened analytical abilities, refined research tactics, improved oral presentations, and better writing skills. [Meets with Hist 600]

T 11:00AM – 12:55PM | 5257 Mosse Humanities | Instructor: Alfred McCoy

Seminar – Central European History

This graduate-level seminar takes stock of the impact of transnational and global approaches to Central European history, which have transformed the field over the past two decades. At the same time, we will ask what role studies of nationalism and the nation (should) continue to play. The course defines “Central Europe” broadly to encompass German-speaking Europe as well as the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its successor states. The course will also address the region’s interactions with the world beyond Europe, through commerce, imperialism, colonialism, and migration. We will focus on the period since 1850. However, graduate students specializing in other regions and periods, including students in adjacent departments, are welcome to enroll. There is wide flexibility in selecting a topic and format for the final paper. The seminar will be enriched by bringing together participants with diverse areas of regional expertise and methodological approaches.

In addition to introducing graduate students to major recent works of Central European historiography, many of them based on the authors’ dissertations, this course places significant emphasis on building professional skills. A portion of each meeting will be devoted to discussion of professional development and workshopping relevant documents. The assignments, including a publishable book review and a final paper related to a potential master’s thesis or dissertation topic, are designed to produce tangible benefits for students’ graduate careers.

M 3:30PM – 5:25PM | 5257 Mosse Humanities | Instructor: Brandon Bloch

Seminar – The History of Africa

Conventionally, historians have understood African decolonization as the transfer of political sovereignty from European colonizers to independent African nations. Yet even as formal decolonization was unfolding, African activists and intellectuals contested the meaning of “flag independence,” and many expressed deeper and more ambitious visions of what decolonization could mean. For example, some argued that decolonization required the creation of a more just global economic order. For others, it called for the dissolving of colonial borders to create a pan-African community. In some places, decolonization offered a political language to challenge gendered hierarchies, while in others, it became a justification for entrenching patriarchy. For some, decolonization was about liberating the mind, while some argued that the real target of decolonization was land. Following on the work of African intellectuals and activists, this course asks: what was colonialism? What are its legacies? And, following from that, what is decolonization? This course takes up some of the latest scholarship on decolonization in Africa, with particular attention to what scholar Adom Getachew has called African “world-making.”

M 1:20PM – 3:15PM | L151 Education  | Instructor: Emily Callaci

Studies in American History: U.S.-Mexico Gendered Migrations

This seminar invites students to explore the history of gendered migrations across the US-Mexico borderlands during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will analyze the social, political, labor, economic, and legal debates surrounding ethnic Mexican gendered migrations and their effects on migrants and their families. The assigned readings include books and articles that utilize diverse methodologies including memory, archival research, and oral history. Students will engage in the process of conducting archival research and oral histories. To do so, students will engage in critical discussions of assigned readings that employ diverse intersectional methodological approaches. This will serve as a way of introduction to help students decide on the methodology they want to use as they begin their own research.

T 3:30PM – 5:25PM | 5255 Mosse Humanities | Instructor: Marla Ramírez

Histories and Historiography of International Law

This graduate seminar explores histories and historiographies of international law. It considers “legal history” in the broadest possible sense–thinking about the many ways that scholars across subfields interpret law and use legal sources in their research. Methodologically we will draw on a range of approaches to interrogate international law’s entanglements with colonialism and racial capitalism, and to investigate how social and political movements have invoked international legalities in the service of particular worldmaking projects. Assigned readings include both foundational texts and recent field defining scholarship. We will consider conjunctures of international legal concepts, frameworks, and institutions with histories of empire and decolonization, slavery and abolition, debt and recognition, ecology and environment, migration and movement, surveillance, policing, and incarceration, investment and inequality. Tracing errant paths of efforts to structure inter-polity order from the fifteenth century to the present, the seminar investigates how contests over the subjects of international law have shaped global power struggles. Along the way we will consider the ongoing legacies of the past—and the stories we tell about it in international law today.

W 1:20PM – 3:15PM | 5255 Mosse Humanities | Instructor: Allison Powers Useche

Seminar – Medieval, Renaissance, and 17^th Century Science

In this graduate seminar, we will discuss  works that approach the histories of science, medicine, technology and the body in the Middle Ages and early modernity from a global perspective (including Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas).

Readings will represent a wide range of disciplinary perspectives and geographical/cultural areas. The writing requirement for this seminar will be tailored to students’ particular needs in their respective programs of study. Students will gain familiarity with current scholarly trends in history of science, print culture, material culture, and archives among others; expand their analytical and interpretive skills; and strengthen their oral and written communication skills. (Meets with Hist Sci 911)

W 1:20PM – 3:15PM | 5257 Mosse Humanities | Instructor: Pablo Gómez

Seminar – Eighteenth Century Science

In this graduate seminar, we will discuss  works that approach the histories of science, medicine, technology and the body in the Middle Ages and early modernity from a global perspective (including Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas).

Readings will represent a wide range of disciplinary perspectives and geographical/cultural areas. The writing requirement for this seminar will be tailored to students’ particular needs in their respective programs of study. Students will gain familiarity with current scholarly trends in history of science, print culture, material culture, and archives among others; expand their analytical and interpretive skills; and strengthen their oral and written communication skills. (Meets with Hist Sci 903)

W 1:20PM – 3:15PM | 5257 Mosse Humanities | Instructor: Pablo Gómez

Seminar – Special Topics: Health, Labor, and Capitalism

The fields of history of medicine and history of capitalism have long remained separate despite the many crosscurrents that unite these disciplines. Only in recent years have economic historians and medical historians started to attend to the dimensions of health and disease as they informed the economic and social underpinnings of structural health disparities. Drawing upon new literatures in the history of medicine and the history of labor/capitalism, this course will examine key concepts that merge ideas about health, labor, and capitalism, including, but not limited to: health and the plantationocene, environmental health activism and toxic exposures, insurance regimes and corporate health surveillance, the financialization of healthcare, public health philanthropy and the politics of global health aid, paid research subjects and clinical trials, and healthcare in carceral settings.

M 3:30PM – 5:25PM | 5255 Mosse Humanities | Instructor: Dana Landress