Graduate Level Courses

This is the second required course in for the MA in Global, International, and Comparative History and is open only to students enrolled in this program. This is a methods and research seminar for first-year MA students. Students will explore how historians frame their research questions, analyze primary sources, and place their work into conversation with other historians. Over the course of the semester, students will identify a research project that will form the basis of their capstone paper in their second year. Course assignments include weekly reflection papers and a final prospectus. For the first five weeks, students will read and discuss common texts. The remainder of the semester will be devoted to identifying and exploring relevant primary sources, analyzing a body of historiography around those sources, and reading and critiquing each other’s emerging work.

This course focuses on the formulation and implementation of grand strategy. It begins with an examination of leading strategic thinkers. It then focuses on the components of imperial power and on the political, economic, and strategic issues entailed in its management and allocation. We will next study in comparative perspective the grand strategies of past great powers. The class will end with an examination of grand strategy for the twenty-first century. 5 slots are reserved for HIST graduate students, 5 for GOVT grad students; and 5 for SFS Master’s students.

This class is intended for PhD and M.A. students with, or (more commonly) without, a background in environmental history. Students will be able to use the class as preparation for a PhD field or as a way to develop a research project. In the first month, the class will examine recent works of global- and national-scale environmental history; in the second, works pertaining to the world regions of interest to enrolled students; in the third, we will workshop research papers under construction by class members and by other students.

This course is a graduate-level introduction to the historiography and methods of the field of early African history. We will read both classic texts and theory while also exploring newer scholarship on gender, political complexity, health & healing, subsistence, Bantu Expansions, slavery, and the expansion of global capitalism. Students will also gain an understanding of oral historical, archaeological and comparative historical linguistic methods.

The course examines the relationship between the institution of monarchy and the process of political and social modernization in Germany and Austria from the 18th through the 19th centuries up to the outbreak of World War I. This will involve the examination of various historiographical issues involved in the process.

This course explores the role of gender as an analytical tool within history. We will cover gender theory, the construction of gender identity (both within a binary model and outside of it), sexuality, power, politics, and culture. Because studying gender does not follow the normal chronological historical periodization, the course will be divided more by topics than periods. All readings are in English and expertise in the geographical fields field is not expected. The first half of the course focuses on early modern Europe, while later weeks look at the Atlantic world more generally. Depending on the class makeup, the final weeks might move beyond that chronology and geography to explore gender within other areas.

Conflict (resolution) in Northern Ireland explores the communal cultures underpinning nationalist and unionist politics during the ‘Troubles’; examines the dynamics of political violence and terrorism in modern Ireland; and evaluates the international influences on the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, from the political mediation of the United States to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The course will investigate contemporary terrorist campaigns and political agreements in the Middle East, Europe, North Africa, and Latin America, offering an international assessment of the Northern Ireland Peace Process. Emerging from my European Union-funded ‘Peace Process: layers of meaning’ project, students will have access to unique heritage interviews on the Troubles, opening the study of conflict (resolution) in Northern Ireland to new sources of inquiry. Students on this course, finally, will have the opportunity to engage with policy makers in Dublin, Belfast, and London.

Capitalism made the modern world as empires and nations rose and fell. Together they shaped diverse communities while men and women pressed to gain viable lives. From the 16th century, New Spain made silver to become an engine of commercial capitalism—sustained by Mesoamerican, Catholic, maize-making communities. Later, Boston became a periphery of early capitalism, building ships, trading slaves, making rum—sustained by Puritan wheat-growing families. After 1810, revolution in New Spain broke the silver flows that fueled Asian trades, opening the world to British cottons made of fiber raised by enslaved hands in the US South. A new industrial capitalism began in the Anglo-American world, sustained by slaves who forged lives and religious cultures to resist as they could. In Mexico, silver revived, stimulating new industries fed by free families entrenched on the land. Then in 1873, the US joined England on a global gold standard, breaking the power of silver as capital. The US rose to global hegemony, Mexico faced dependence, and both saw social transformations that privileged the powerful while growing numbers searched for viable lives and sustaining religious cultures—pursuits that continue as globalizing capital again remakes North America and the world.

This course will examine key texts in feminist theory and how they have shaped the historical study of gender and sexuality in the Middle East and beyond. We will focus on the topics, questions, sources and methods of various theoretical and analytical frameworks, including Marxist feminism, postcolonial and decolonial feminism, transnational feminism, intersectionality, queer theory, ecofeminism, and Islamic feminism. Students may write their final research paper on any region and time period as long as they apply feminist theory and methods.

The course is tailored to the research interests of current doctoral and master’s students, offering an overview of key topics in Ottoman history, including their sources, approaches, methodologies, and historiography. Topics covered will include Ottoman governance and provincial administration, as well as economic, social, diplomatic, environmental, and cultural history.

Image as History: Iconography/Photography/Film: This course examines images in three ways: historical, conceptual, and methodological. To begin, we shall read recent historical work that grounds argumentation in a close analysis of images, including religious icons, paintings, prints, photographs, and films, and we shall be especially concerned with examining the role of images over time in relation to state power and in shaping modern understandings of self. In addition, we shall read scholarship written by anthropologists, sociologists, art historians, and media theorists that will help us develop a set of conceptual and methodological tools for analyzing images, carefully considering the status of different types of visual sources for historical research. Although we shall concentrate on 20th-century image-making, there is no geographic or temporal focus to this course.

This is a course about the historiography of U.S. political history: the ways in which historians – as well as other scholars and thoughtful writers — have understood contests, particularly since the Civil War, to control political debate and make government policy and social change. Because politics is, at root, a struggle for power in the public sphere, our reading and discussion will not be limited to parties, government, and legislation. We will also examine the rise and achievements of mass movements and competing ideologies.

Once regarded as something of an intellectual backwater, or at least the refuge of the amateur enthusiast, the field of Civil War history is currently in ferment, fostering new journals, new professional societies, and new questions, and influencing fields outside Civil War history in important new ways. Many reasons account for the resurgence, but one of the most important is wider recognition (both inside and outside the field) of Civil War history’s inextricability from the world histories of slavery and emancipation. We will focus on identifying the present state of key historiographical conversations: what do the driving questions seem to be right now, how did those questions grow from prior work and how do the answers change what we thought we knew about slavery, the Civil War and emancipation? Students will work toward the goal of gaining command over the current state of the field, which is to say gaining fluency in the central questions and themes occupying the field right now, and identifying important questions and directions that cry out for further investigation.

The Comps Prep Seminar gives second year PhD students the space and the opportunity for community building to be prepared for the comprehensive exams at the end of the second year. In consultation with the seminar instructor, their Comps committees, and each other, students will finalize their reading lists, work on their research readiness proposals and historiographical essays, and formulate and practice answering oral exam questions. In class, we’ll focus on reading tips for historians, thinking in terms of important themes and connections, writing and revising tips, and cheering each other on as you navigate this important milestone in your professional development, not on your own but as a cohort.

HIST 5001 – History Core Colloquium – Anna von der Goltz
HIST 5004 – MAGIC Core Colloq – Toshihiro Higuchi
HIST 5501 – LA Origins & Transformations – Erick Langer
HIST 6002 – Thinking About Archives – Gregory Afinogenov
HIST 6117 – Nationalism – Aviel Roshwald
HIST 6129 – Environmental History – Dagomar Degroot
HIST 6206 – Methods and Histories of African Diasporas – Kathryn de Luna
HIST 6383 – Pearl River Delta to GBA – Denise Ho
HIST 6409 – Empires at War 1911-1923 – James Shedel
HIST 6411 – Europe Early Modern World – Elizabeth Cross
HIST 6708 – Russia/USSR and the World – Michael David-Fox
HIST 6808 – Black Atlantic – Maurice Jackson
HIST 6817 – History of Racial Capitalism – Mike Amezcua
HIST 6818 – 20th c. US Urban History – Crystal Luo
HIST 7050 – Res Sem:Omnibus – Alison Games
HIST 7605 – Historiography of MENA – Osama Abi-Mershed and Gabor Agoston

HIST 5005 – Global & International History (MAGIC Research Seminar) – Meredith McKittrick
HIST 6121 – Why We Fight Over the Past – Thomas Zimmer
HIST 6126 – Liberal Democracy in Crisis – Thomas Zimmer
HIST 6309 – Theory from the Global South – Ananya Chakravarti
HIST 6316 – Historical Memory of WWII in Asia – Emily Matson
HIST 6402 – Divided Germany – Anna von der Goltz
HIST 6410 – The British Empire – Darragh Gannon
HIST 6510 – Revolutions: Cuba/Mexico/Central America – John Tutino
HIST 6612 – Late Ottoman Economy – Mustafa Aksakal
HIST 6703 – Russian Visual Culture – Christopher Stolarski
HIST 6811 – U.S. since the 1960s – Joseph McCartin
HIST 6816 – Civil War, Abolition, & After – Chandra Manning
HIST 7605 – Historiography of MENA – Osama Abi-Mershed

HIST 5001 – History Core Colloquium – Katherine Benton-Cohen
HIST 5004 – MAGIC Core Colloq – Ananya Chakravarti
HIST 5501 – LA Origins & Transformations – John Tutino
HIST 5501 – LA Origins & Transformations – Erick Langer
HIST 6128 – The 90s: Birth of the Present – Thomas Zimmer
HIST 6129 – Env Hist: Climate & Conflict – John McNeill
HIST 6310 – Topics in Modern Korean Hist – Christine J Kim
HIST 6315 – Chinese History: Chinese Politics – Denise Ho
HIST 6400 – Monarchy & Modernity – James Shedel
HIST 6403 – Magic: A Historian’s Problem – David Collins
HIST 6509 – Latinx Social Movements – Mireya Loza
HIST 6602 – Social Cultural Hist ME & N Afr – Osama Abi-Mershed
HIST 6611 – Feminist Theory and Methods – Nefertiti Takla
HIST 6706 – Fascism, Communism, and War – Michael David-Fox
HIST 6709 – Russia as an Empire 1550-1950 – Gregory Afinogenov
HIST 6804 – Readings in African-American History – Maurice Jackson
HIST 6814 – Workers & American Capitalism – Leon Fink
HIST 6815 – Conservatism and the Far Right – Thomas Zimmer

HIST 5005 – Global & International History – Alison Games
HIST 6117 – Nationalism – Aviel Roshwald
HIST 6124 – Ways of Knowing – Gregory Afinogenov
HIST 6125 – Emotions/Hist in the Age of AI – Ananya Chakravarti
HIST 6126 – Liberal Democracy in Crisis – Thomas Zimmer
HIST 6127 – History of the 21st Century – Thomas Zimmer
HIST 6308 – China: Empire, Nation, Ethnicity – James Millward
HIST 6314 – Manchuria and Modern East Asia – Emily Matson
HIST 6409 – Empires at War 1911–1923 – James Shedel
HIST 6506 – Ecology/Power/Culture/Mexico – John Tutino
HIST 6608 – Approaching Ottoman History – Gabor Agoston
HIST 6710 – Varieties of Dissent in Eastern Europe – Christopher Stolarski
HIST 6800 – US as World Power – Toshihiro Higuchi
HIST 6812 – Great Books in US History? – Michael Kazin
HIST 6813 – Race & Inequality Modern America – Mike Amezcua

HIST 5001 – History Core Colloquium – Katherine Benton-Cohen
HIST 5004 – MAGIC Core Colloquium – James Millward
HIST 5501 – LA Origins & Transformations – John Tutino
HIST 5501 – LA Origins & Transformations – Erick Langer
HIST 6002 – Thinking About Archives – Adam Rothman
HIST 6104 – Pacific Empires – Toshihiro Higuchi
HIST 6105 – Environmental History – Timothy Newfield & Dagomar Degroot
HIST 6120 – State, Society and Self – Ananya Chakravarti
HIST 6121 – Why We Fight Over the Past – Thomas Zimmer
HIST 6123 – Asia in DC – Christine J Kim
HIST 6313 – Life and Legacy of Mao Zedong – Emily Matson
HIST 6400 – Monarchy & Modernity – James Shedel
HIST 6404 – Material Culture – Susan Pinkard
HIST 6601 – Ottoman 1st WW and Aftermath – Mustafa Aksakal
HIST 6602 – Social Cultural Hist ME & N Afr – Osama Abi-Mershed
HIST 6704 – Approaches to Rus/Soviet Hist – Michael David-Fox
HIST 6805 – Slavery, Civil War, Emancipation – Chandra Manning