Spring 2024
This course examines classical Chinese texts and their commentary traditions, with commentary selections and additional readings from the earliest periods through the early twentieth century. Readings are selected from the three ritual classics (so-called San Li), historical writings, and excavated manuscripts relating to ritual, broadly construed. Secondary readings selected from the theory of ritual and the use of ritual texts and commentaries in Chinese intellectual, social, and cultural history.
This course examines historical research and scholarship about the role of empires in creating or remaking global hierarchies and the role that racial and other practices and categories of difference played in shaping the history of empires. The period we cover arcs from the clustered formation of Mughal, Ottoman, Qing, and Atlantic and Indian Ocean empires starting in the fifteenth century to the mid 20th century.
The littoral of the Great Sea has long been viewed as a major place of contact, conflict and exchange for groups belonging to the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This course approaches the encounters of different religions and ethnicities in such a manner as to introduce students not only to the classic historiography on the subject, but also to the main controversies and debates now current in scholarship. Our analysis and evaluation of the connections that developed between individuals and communities will focus on the High Middle Ages.
This course explores readings in the history of Latin America, covering both South America and the Caribbean from the Colonial period to modern day. Topics include African slavery in Latin America, abolitionism, politics in Latin America, labor history, and U.S.-Latin American relations.
Reading and research seminar on thirteenth-century France.
How should we think about the history of language and communication, especially in light of the digital revolution of our own time? This course considers the different themes, approaches, and conclusions of recent scholars of history and related fields. Reading and discussion of one or two books each week. All readings in English. No prior knowledge required.
This class critically approaches the idea of a trans-regionally or globally constituted early modern age. It does so by reading methodological interventions as well as studies that advocate, exemplify, complicate, or challenge the global approach. The course engages with the idea of pre-modern and non-European cosmopolitanisms as well as exchanges between South Asia on the one hand and other world regions on the other. It reflects on the use of terms like "encounter", "circulation", "flow", and "network" in this historiography with the aim of exploring the roots, stakes, possibilities, and limits of the idea of an early modern world.
This seminar explores the history of Britain and its empire after 1700 from the broader and necessary perspectives of global history. Topics include the complexities and tensions of British and Irish unions, industrial, urban and cultural revolutions, citizenship and constitutions, warfare, empire, ideologies and race, and the shifting nature of imperial linkages and decline.
This course is intended to guide U.S. history PhD students through the research and writing of a scholarly paper. During the semester, each student writes one article-length research paper that might serve as the basis for a later publication. Along the way we discuss the historian's craft: how to go about initial research, create an argument, and write engaging narratives. Chiefly, students work closely with each other as well as with the instructor, offering comments and suggestions from the selection of a topic to revising the final draft.
This readings course focuses on the central problems engaged by recent scholarship on Indigenous and Western American history. The seminar explores topics including borders, migration, slavery, and politics from the 17th-20th centuries.
A comprehensive introduction to the literature and problems of American history from the Era of Good Feelings through Reconstruction.
This course offers an historical survey through the medicine and science of the brain - from psychoanalysis (and a little before) to modern neuroimaging. It pays particular attention to the ways in which the mind and brain sciences have played a role in "making up people" (Hacking). Amongst others, it examines the birth of the asylum; the psyche in the secularizing politics of 19th c. France; how a discourse of nerves fed into a discourse on modernity; the role of the laboratory in the formation of 19th c. psychological sciences; the origins and reception of psychoanalysis; and the various cultures of contemporary neuroscience.
The seminar introduces graduate students to central problems, themes, concepts and methodologies in the history of science and neighboring fields. We explore past and recent developments including the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, Actor-Network Theory, the study of practice and experimentation, the role of quantification, the concept of paradigms, gender, sexuality and the body, environmental history of science, the global history of science, and the role of labor and industry, amongst others.
The course introduces some major works in the history of computing, digital media, and information technologies, with particular attention to transformative and methodologically important texts, often at loggerheads with one another. Students are likewise introduced to some major current works in the history of technology and media studies. The course along the way provides an outline of the development of computing from the late nineteenth century. Authors include Kelty, Kline, Medina, Seaver, Haigh, Chun, Brunton, Mahoney, Nakamura, Nooney, Turner, Philip, Lécuyer, Rankin, Hicks, Diaz, among others.