Graduate Level Courses

HIST 5001 is required for and restricted to first-year doctoral students in the History Department. The course is an introduction to the theory and practice of history as an academic discipline. The major goals of the course are (1) to acquaint the incoming cohort of doctoral students with major historiographical approaches; (2) to encourage careful reading, thoughtful discussion, and cogent written analysis of historical scholarship; and (3) to provide some common intellectual denominators for the incoming cohort and to foster habits of collegial engagement.

This MAGIC introductory colloquium is designed to equip first-year MAGIC students with perspectives, skills, and tools that are essential for success in the program and beyond. We will begin with the fundamental question: what is the role of history in today’s society? Then we will discuss the potentials and challenges of doing global, comparative, and international history research by examining a few key concepts, scholarly debates, and methodology. The second half of the colloquium will introduce students to a range of geographical regions and sub-fields through a thematic focus on nuclear energy and its relationship to society. Sub-fields include: histories of security, diplomacy, and international politics; of energy, modernity, and democracy; of capitalism, communism, labor, and consumption; of empire and colonialism; of race, gender, and sexuality; and histories of science, technology, medicine, and the environment. Our readings will include a mix of classic works and promising lines of emerging research, and will showcase, as far as possible, the spatial breath of these subfields, including: the Cold War West and East; the Global North and South; continents and oceans; and the subterreanian and the outer space. Although the temporal scope of the topic is necessarily limited to the twentieth century, we will systematically heed the enduring influence of empire and colonialism as well as transnational networks and Indigeneous responses, all rooted in the deeper history of the pre-nuclear age. The goal of the colloquium is to prepare students to read and think at the graduate level, and will culminate in a proposal for the research project that they will pursue in HIST 5005 in the spring semester.

A graduate-level introduction to key historical problems and perspectives on modern Latin American. It opens exploring revolutionary and non-revolutionary routes out of early modern empires and into the era of nations. It then turns to three case histories: Cuba as it remained a Spanish colony, kept slavery, and attempted liberations into the 1890s, to face U.S. power and a turn to revolution in 1959, rattling the hemisphere; Brazil as it became an independent empire and preserved slavery to 1888-89, to industrialize, generate persistent social marginalities, and face endless political struggles—turning from from military rule to labor radicalism to right-wing populism; and Mexico as it lived endless political and social conflicts, culminating in the 1910 revolution that led to social redistributions and political consolidation in the 1930s—to grapple with unprecedented challenges of urbanization and globalization since. Throughout, we explore power and production, race, ethnicity, and culture—and gender as it shaped everything.

This course explores the historian’s principal research tool—the archive—but it does so largely from the perspective of people who are not historians. We’ll look at how and why archives emerged in different places; how they were used to help create and cement European global empire; how their functions and operations changed in the Age of Revolution; and how people have come to use, preserve, and struggle over them in the modern era. Looking at the archive from outside of the historical profession helps us see them for what they are—as collections of material informed by the agendas of a variety of different actors, most of them not especially concerned with giving us an objective image of the past. From spies to genealogy researchers, archives belong to everyone.

This graduate seminar examines selected aspects of 19th- and 20th-century nationalism, combining theoretical readings with case studies. The case studies are mosly European (simply because that happens to be the instructor’s field), but not exclusively so. The approach is broadly comparative, and issues discussed will include some of the classic ones debated in the field, such as: What connections are there between modernity and nationalism? What is the relationship between civic and ethnic conceptions of nationhood? How did evolving information/communication environments and systems shape the development of nationalisms? Although the geographical focus of most assigned readings is on modern Europe, students are encouraged to write their term papers on any region and time period they are interested in, as long as the theme is connected to nationhood and nationalism. The course can thus be counted toward any regional field, depending on the paper topic and subject to the approval of the student’s advisor.

This course is designed for PhD and MAGIC students with no prior experience in environmental or climate history. It will introduce students to the issues, concerns, debates, and methods of environmental history and one of its liveliest component fields, climate history. The course will be global in scope, with attention to multiple geographic regions, and primarily focused on the last 500 years. It will give special attention to the integration of methods and models from the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, as well as to the pitfalls and possibilities of making the past speak to the present.

This course explores the varied histories of diaspora rooted in Africa. We will consider both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean diasporas as well as the value of the concept of ‘diaspora’ within the continent itself. Critically, our readings compare efforts to situate the study of diasporas within the field of African History as opposed to approaches with a footing in related fields, like European, South Asian, or Latin American history. We will attend to diaspora (and mobility more generally) as both theory and practice. Finally, we explore the wide variety of methods historians can use to reconstruct and rewrite histories of diaspora. This course supplements other offerings in the department, such as HIST 5501, 6002, 6205, 6808, 7605.

China’s Greater Bay Area is a political project to transform the cities of the Pearl River Delta into a megapolis of 86 million people. These cities—including Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Macau, and Hong Kong, among others—have a long tradition of cultural, economic, and social connections. This graduate seminar examines the history and politics of the South China region, and includes topics such as diaspora and migration, urbanization and industrialization, and revolution and politics, among others. Readings include both classic and recent studies in anthropology, geography, history, political science, and sociology, paying particular attention to research methods. Students will write an independent research paper on a topic of their own design.

In 1914 Europe and the world were dominated by empires. From imperial Russia and Japan to republican France and the United States all the great powers that participated in World War I were either empires in name or in fact. From the eve of the Balkan wars in 1911 to the establishment of the Turkish republic in 1923, this course will use empire as its leitmotif to examine not only why and how the war began and changed Europe, but what its impact was on the non-Western peoples who either voluntarily or involuntarily participated in it. Accordingly, the course will involve several members of the Department of History whose expertise will complement the trans-regional character of the course. Like World War I itself, this course is not just a European affair.

This course will explore key readings in the history of early modern Europe and European empires, broadly construed. We will alternate week-to-week between a core reading list for the entire class and specialized readings chosen by each student in consultation with the professor. Key themes to be explored include the development of the modern state, European diplomacy with the non-European world, the age of exploration and empire, the history of slavery, and the history of corporations.

How different will Russian and Soviet history, so long interpreted through narratives of exceptionalism, look when debated in light of transnational and global history? To address this major question for the field and the discipline, this course critically engages key issues and noteworthy works in Russian/Soviet transnational, entangled, international, regional, and world history. Its chronological scope is broad, encompassing the modern period roughly from the Russian empire’s rise as a great power in Europe in the 18th c. to the USSR’s global engagement as a superpower during the Cold War. Geographically, there will be a special emphasis on three key areas where scholarship is particularly important and developed: Russia and Europe, Russia and the Ottoman world, and Russia and China. At the same time, however, the class also includes incursions into treatments of global history from the 19th c. to the global Cold War and targets broadly comparative and global thematic areas such as empire, revolution, modernization/modernity, and political violence.

This course will explore key aspects in the history of the Black Atlantic world and its Diaspora, from about 1450 to the 1960s or through de-colonialization. We will focus on the development and changing relationships between select societies in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Central themes will include the slavery and the philosophical origins of antislavery ideology. The emergence and evolution of colonialism, racism, industrialism, capitalism, imperialism, neo-colonialism and post-colonialism will be explored. We will survey competing political ideologies of racism and white supremacy, nationalism, Marxism (socialism), Negritude, Pan-Africanism and Religion. We will also look at the separate but linked notion of the African diaspora and look at its cultural legacies.

This graduate readings course introduces students to the history of racial capitalism from its roots in Black radical thought to its present use in historical monographs. We will survey literature that centers the role of race, racialization, and racism as fundamental to economic exploitation and projects of capitalist extraction. Readings will constitute recent and classic works that demonstrate through distinct case studies how race shapes the pursuit and accumulation of wealth, how capitalism produces and exploits ethnoracial difference toward greater aims, the relationship between labor migrations and economic development, and how the material and built environment have been shaped by a nexus of race and value. This course will lean heavily toward a focus on North America in the 19th and 20th centuries, however, classroom discussions will consider various contexts for understanding global capitalism in relation to race-making and exploitative forms of othering. Readings will include historical monographs that converge with studies of the state, labor, race and ethnicity, immigration, urban history, and money, finance, and banking.

This graduate historiography course will provide a broad overview of the field of 20th c U.S. urban history, with particular emphasis on transnational and interdisciplinary approaches (cities and the environment; cities and immigration; cities and gender/sexuality). Juxtaposing classic texts with more recent contributions to the literature, we will extract themes and approaches from U.S. urban history that could be applied to urban history more broadly; discuss trends, innovations, and limitations within the field; and develop historically-informed analyses of how urban societies and economies have shaped U.S. history more broadly over the course of the 20th century. We will also have the opportunity to compare how scholars from other disciplines, such as anthropology and political science, have approached “the urban” as a field of study in the United States.

HIST 7050 serves as the second semester of the doctoral program’s required Research Seminar. The seminar is itself field non-specific and is foreseen as the complement to a field-specific seminar that any enrolled student has already taken in the immediately preceding Fall Semester. The goal of the seminar is for enrolled students to bring to completion a research project that they have begun in that fall-semester field-specific seminar. Students should consult with their mentors and with the instructor before the first seminar meeting of the semester. Other students interested in enrolling must receive the permission of the instructor.

The seminar will introduce central concepts and frameworks in historiographies of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and explore developing trends in historical studies of the region. Assigned primary and secondary readings will highlight the historian’s handling of methodological tools, documentary sources, units of analysis, and narrative structures.

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 Cultrl 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 Hist – 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 Cultrl 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