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.

What is the relationship between the historian and her sources? What methodologies govern a historian's engagement with informers and spies? Can historians write about authoritarian pasts without developing some kind of relationship with the informers, spies and the secret police whose very existence defines the nature of these pasts? Using these questions as its rationale, this class examines the place of the archive (broadly defined) in the work of the historian.

This class is designed to help prepare students for university teaching. The focus of this course is both practical and theoretical. In our interrogation of teaching and learning practices we cover critical scholarship on the academy and the exclusions and limitations of higher education. Students are asked to consider the purposes and challenges of teaching college courses, and to evaluate diverse approaches to university education. Some of our readings are primarily instructional and are designed to offer guidance on some "best practices" for becoming an effective history educator.

Course examines the history of Latin America and the Caribbean since independence, paying particular attention to relations with the United States.

In this course, graduate students gain a grounding in modern European intellectual history, both as a historical topic and as a disciplinary field. Covering the central methodological debates of academic intellectual history and reading the classics of European thought since the Enlightenment, students grapple with the ideas that have shaped European culture and politics over the past two hundred and fifty years, and that still inform theoretical debates today.

The Roman persona, from which the English "person" and its Romance cognates are derived, meant originally a mask. From the early modern period onwards, however, "person"" came to designate as well individual identity and human consciousness. This seminar explores distinct notions of personhood across early modern Europe and its wider world and focuses on their relations to material culture and ideological formations.

This course introduces students to the historiography of China during the Tang dynasty (618-907). The themes covered include politics, state institutions, elite culture, gender relations, civil examination, the development of cities, economic changes, the environment, and the place of the Tang in the medieval world. To consider these issues means that we will occasionally reach back and forward in time beyond the Tang dynasty itself. But the focus is squarely on the Tang. In this process, we will also reflect on the historiographical implications of truncating the history of China into the units of "dynasties."

Inequality was the prevailing ethical norm in all European societies until the age of revolutions. Socio-legal hierarchies were supposed to mirror natural inequalities between peoples and individuals. However, there was no single criterion for determining the justice of these socio-legal hierarchies, nor were they immutable or uncontested. This graduate seminar has two objectives: to map the diverse dimensions of inequality that structured pre-modern European societies and to introduce students to influential trends in the literature on these topics and how they have changed in the course of the past fifty years or so.

This course will be of interest to graduate students invested in or curious about histories of colonialism, gender, and sexuality, and those interested in histories of the marginalized more broadly. In the class, students are introduced to major debates and methods in the historical study of gender & sexuality in South Asia, which in turn serve as meditations on colonialism and on the limits of the archive. The course provides a foundational knowledge both of this history and of the stakes, debates, and contradictions that shape this field.

Explores the "rise" of the warrior culture of Japan, as well as how warriors governed and fought in medieval Japan, before explaining how the samurai status was created and idealized in Japan.

The seminar explores the transformation of the Roman World from the late ancient to the medieval West with a particular focus on Gregory of Tours and his world in the second half of the sixth century. The rich evidence allowd us to study the reconfiguration of the social, religious and political resources of the Roman world in the Frankish kingdoms of the sixth century and their transmission and reception allow us to explore the ongoing social, religious and political experimentation in the most enduring successor-state of the Western Roman empire.

Historians and critics argue that since the 1980s there was a turn towards "cultural history" but it often remains unclear what exactly cultural history entails. Even more recent scholarship pits the cultural and the digital turns against each other while ironically arguing both democratize the voices heard in historical accounts. This course explores classic texts and current methodological problems in U.S. cultural history in a global context.

The rise of the carceral state is one of the more striking features of U.S. contemporary society and increasingly in the world. This course examines the history of incarceration/imprisonment around the globe. It begins with recent studies of ancient and medieval imprisonment, and then examines the rise of the penitentiary in the late eighteenth-century, incarceration's relationship to slavery, and the emergence of mass incarceration.

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.

Fourth in a sequence of core courses in United States history, this course is designed to provide a comprehensive introduction to the literature and problems of American history since World War I.

The focus of this topics course is the history of mental therapeutics - how medical practitioners, laypersons, and researchers have attempted to treat mental illness, through the long twentieth-century, through various means. The readings touch on psychiatric institutions, Freud and psychoanalysis, somatic treatments, the psychopharmacological revolution, anti psychiatry, and neuro-enhancement, amongst others. Exploring the treatment of mental illness in key historical moments in the history of psychiatry, will help us understand its force, then and today.

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.

Step by step, this class approaches the history of science, medicine, and technology through the lens of the "recipe." Craft handbooks, books of secrets, and experimental notes, as well as a fast-growing secondary literature, show how recipes generate and test knowledge of substances, practices, and theories about nature, as well as the social and cultural networks that produce them. Drawing on ancient, medieval, and early modern procedures, as well as historical reconstructions of past recipes and experiments, the class investigates how the genre evolved across such diverse fields as pharmacy, alchemy, mining, cookery, and magic.