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.

Explores key historical developments across the world since about 1500 through comparative perspectives. Emphases include the rise and fall of empires, revolutions, industrialization, state making, and nationalism.

A graduate-level introduction to key historical problems and perspectives on modern Latin America. 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 is also listed as LASP 7501-02. This course is designed to introduce students to the study of the History in the Latin American Studies Master’s Program and for students in the Ph.D. program in the History Department. It is designed to be interdisciplinary and provide students a good overview of recent production on historical topics on Latin America. The theme of the course is on the making of the nation-states in Latin America. This topic is especially important not just because this is the theme that has warranted a great deal of attention over the past decade or so. It also incorporates new perspectives such as Gramscian and postmodern analysis, resistance studies, and the old modernization paradigm. Arguably, this topic remains on the cutting edge of the field and is the subject of many of the newest and most innovative works in Latin American History broadly defined. Since it is impossible to cover Latin American History as a whole, students will receive an intensive preparation on a topic that should be of interest to those who will work in other disciplines as well. In addition to gaining a profound understanding of nation-state formation in Latin America and subaltern participation in this formation, the course is designed to expose students to historical thinking in ways that can be used in other disciplines as well. The course emphasizes the construction of arguments, the use of evidence, and evaluating the types and validity of evidence used for arguments.

Were the 90s really the “last good decade”? A period of wonderful mediocrity before it all got too much, too complicated? An era when the promise of peace and prosperity still seemed real – before we entered the crisis-ridden twenty-first century? There is a lot of 90s nostalgia out there right now, both politically and culturally. And a lot of interest from historians as well, who have begun to assign the era to history. The underlying assumption of many people who focus on the 90s seems to be that this decade gave birth to our present. Are they right? This course explores the 90s as history – the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11. The focus is on the United States and Western Europe. We start with what observers at the time briefly thought was the “the end of history,” the “West’s” triumph in the Cold War – and the anxious search for a “new world order” and ways to make sense of the post-Cold War world. We then investigate the key intellectual currents as well as the defining political, social, and (pop-) cultural developments and transformations of the 1990s – including the emergence of a new form of rightwing populism; a distinct “culture wars” politics; the hegemonic status of neoliberalism across the political spectrum; a specific form of (anti-)feminism and gender politics; a certain proud mediocrity, perhaps, in film, music, and literature; and the rise of the internet. Ultimately, we want to assess the relationship between our present and the 90s and reflect on the difficult task of “historicizing” that which is barely past yet. And we might even find an answer to the question of what all this 90s nostalgia is really about.

This class is intended for PhD and M.A. students. It is focused on the environmental history of human conflict. That includes both the influence of environments upon warfare and the influence of warfare, preparation for war, and anxiety about war, upon environments (the terms war and warfare may be interpreted broadly). Students will be able to use the class as preparation for a PhD field or as a way to develop a research project. Students will read approximately one book, or its equivalent, per week. They will help lead discussion once per semester. They will complete a semester project, the nature of which is negotiable. Plausible examples include writing a research paper on the model of journal articles; writing a historiographical survey; writing an anthology of book reviews; writing a detailed dissertation prospectus; preparing a digital product, perhaps a series of maps, infographics, or things as yet unimagined. PhD students who have completed their coursework are welcome to sit in on weekly discussions.

This course provides an introduction to some of the current issues in modern Korean history through selected readings. Moving chronologically through the 19th- and 20th centuries, it will cover major topics and issues as well as an historiographical examination of major scholarship.

This graduate seminar focuses on the ways in which Chinese history has played a role in Chinese politics, from the commemoration of figures like Sun Yat-sen to the memory of the Cultural Revolution. We will study the making of official history through monuments and museums, and examine how unofficial history persists in popular culture and grassroots projects. Featuring primary sources and interdisciplinary readings, this seminar will culminate in an independent research paper.

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 seminar explores “magic” as a historical practice and a historically perceived phenomenon, and as the object of scholarly attention. Its geographical and chronological scope is intentionally broad, ranging from the Ancient Near East to the modern Americas. It covers big themes in the history of magic, such as witch trials and European encounters with non-European traditions of magic. It also examines the changing set of insights and ground rules that professional historians have adopted regarding what counts as “magic,” how it should be analyzed, and how can it be (and has it been) distinguished from religion and science. The historical study of magic crosses geographic fields, topical specialties, and methodologies; the seminar’s approach will therefore be eclectic and interdisciplinary.

This course will examine the long durée of Latinx social movements with an emphasis on the 20th century and into the present. The late 1960s ushered in a new period of mobilizations to organize around race, ethnicity, citizenship, class, gender, and sexuality. In this course we will look at how various Latinx communities throughout the US articulated their struggles, protest, and change in this broader context. We will take a comparative and relational approach to the study of this history. Topics will include immigrant mobilizations, transnational organizing, agrarian and farmworker movements, political representation, feminisms and reproductive rights, environmental justice, labor, cultural and social transformation truck, education, and urban social movements. Great attention will be paid to the broader legacies of the struggles and what they mean for contemporary social movements and organizing.

The course examines recent trends in social and cultural histories of the modern Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Its first aim is to introduce and discuss the central questions, concepts, and methods in social and cultural studies, especially as they pertain to notions of function, structure, and ideology. Its second purpose is to assess the application and use of these methodological tools in empirical and interdisciplinary studies of the modern MENA. To this end, the second half of the semester will be dedicated to critical readings of recent works in MENA history with a focus on leading relevant themes such as class and mobility; social movements and change; social life and identity; gender, family, and kinship; representation, ideology, and mentality; textuality and orality; new media and communication.

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.

From the origins of communism and fascism the midst of total war to their titanic clash on the Eastern Front in WWII, war was at the center of the relationship between Germany and Russia, the Soviet Union and the Weimar Republic, and Stalinism and Nazism. In fact, the new Soviet state was deeply affected by the formative period of “war communism” in 1918-1920 and Bolshevism itself evolved into a kind of ersatz or political warfare, while militarized masculinity and a quest for external domination were fundamental to the development of fascism. But while mature Stalinism undertook compromises yet was too entrenched to be reshaped by the existential crisis of 1941-45, Operation Barbarossa triggered a radical new phase of the Nazi revolution marked by euphoria, genocide, and racial colonization. How did the experiences and legacies of WWI and WWII shape this most consequential relationship of the “age of extremes”? To answer this question involves pursuing key questions in military history but also much more. It requires an investigation of how war and the expectation of it generated profound changes in ideology and politics, helping to reconfigure the social, cultural, and gender orders of Russia/USSR and Germany. Course readings include consideration of such topics as occupation policies and political systems; everyday life in armies and partisan movements; artists and intellectuals at war; the Gulag and the Holocaust in the context of unprecedented military and political violence; rape and sexual crimes in memoirs and diaries; and war in myth and memory politics. These examinations, taken together, provide vantage points from which to reconsider older and newer debates over totalitarianism, the Nazism-Stalinism comparison, and left-right entanglements.

Covering the four centuries from the reign of Ivan IV to the Stalin era, this graduate seminar will introduce students to the historiographical study of Russia and the Soviet Union as imperial structures. We will discuss the multiethnic peripheries of the Russian Empire and the USSR through thematic lenses like religion, trade, and scientific discourse, as represented in both recent and classic scholarship. Students in non-Russian fields are especially welcome, as the course will have a strong comparative and transnational component; among our central points of discussion will be the relationship between Russian imperialism and other forms of imperial rule, and the extent to which this changed over time.

The study and historiography of African American history and its interaction with American and world society, as a whole, will be the mission of this class. History, politics, culture (music, literature, theater, art, poetry and the aesthetics) will be our guide. Political and philosophical debates about the nature of the Black struggle for equality will be issues that we explore. Each week we will have a central theme (slavery, anti-slavery, emancipation, labor, civil rights, women’s equality, urban studies, decolonization and foreign affairs, race/racism, Blacks in the Americas) will be topics of concern. Where relevant and possible we will be joined by subject specialists in the GU history department.

Workers and American Capitalism: From the Gilded Age to the Gig Economy – This course aims to introduce students to the most important recent works and discussions within the field of U.S. labor history. Set within a framework of changing political economy, the readings move from a focus on capitalist power in the era of Gilded Age factories to the attempted class compromise of the ‘New Deal’ order to the consequences of globalization and declined labor union power in the post-1970s era of Neoliberalism. The course is also attuned to the ‘crossover’ of labor history with related works in African-American, American women’s history, gender and sexuality, Latino/Mexican-American, Native American, as well as the history of social movements. Finally, the course is designed to stimulate subsequent primary research in the field. With this goal in mind (spelled out below), the major writing assignment for the term will focus on the student’s interpretation of a major primary source—at once emphasizing the process of documentary ‘discovery’, historiographical context, and construction of an argument or interpretation.

“I thought I understood the American Right. Trump proved me wrong,” historian Rick Perlstein, one of the leading chroniclers of American conservatism, wrote in the New York Times shortly after the 2016 presidential election. Perlstein alluded to the fact that the established story of modern conservatism – what most historians and the broader public thought they knew and understood about the Right – could hardly have led to our present and Trump’s rise. Historians have begun to rethink the history of the Right. And at the center of that re-conceptualization stands the relationship between mainstream conservatism and the Far Right. According to the established story, in which rightwing extremism had been ostracized from modern conservatism since the 1950s, Trumpism had to be an aberration – a departure from the venerable tradition of principled conservatism. But since 2016, a counter-narrative has become a lot more popular: This was what modern conservatism, at its core, had always been – a political project animated by white grievance, in which rightwing extremism had played a key role at all times. In this course, we will examine the history of the Right since the middle decades of the twentieth century up until today and focus on the relationship between modern conservatism and rightwing extremism. We will discuss conservatism in the American political tradition; modern conservatism as a political project and the role of the Republican Party; the conservative and reactionary intellectual sphere; conservative grassroots activism and rightwing media; and the extremist milieu and culture, including militant white nationalist groups. We will also explore the Right’s transnational connections, its sympathy for and flirtations with foreign autocratic regimes like Franco Spain, Apartheid South Africa, and Victor Orbán’s Hungary today. Ultimately, our goal is to situate Trumpism in the longer-term context of the Right’s history and reflect on the promise and pitfalls of revising the history of conservatism in the age of Trump.