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 subterranean 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 methodological and theoretical insights from the disciplines of Anthropology and Linguistics with an eye toward assessing their value for historians’ research. We will read work in those two disciplines as well as examples of scholarship by historians that draws heavily from them. The course syllabus will be amended to include readings in the regions, time periods, and general themes of interest to students who enroll in the class but possible thematic categories and methods include belief systems; medicine and health; inequality and capitalism; kinship, friendship, and belonging; conceptual analysis; cognitive metaphor; contextualizing meaning-making, and so on. The course is intended to check the box for PhD students for Methods and/or for Theory.

What is knowledge? What is a scholar? What is the university? This course showcases different approaches to the history of knowing, from scientific knowledge to the study of literature and art, covering the seventeenth century to the present. It will give you the tools to understand many of today’s conflicts and anxieties about the gatekeeping of knowledge and the value of intellectual institutions. It will count as a methodological course for the PhD program. Multiple options are available for connecting assignments to your own region and time period.

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.

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.

This seminar introduces graduate students to recent books that offer new conceptualizations on the making of race and inequality in modern America, roughly focusing on the long 20th century. Discussions and assignments will consider the expansion of this field of study through multiple vectors of race and racialization, immigration, histories of capitalism, political history, urban history, carceral studies, technology and the environment.

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.

HIST 5005 – Global & Intrnl History – Ananya Chakravarti
HIST 5105 – Foundations of Grand Strategy – John McNeill & Charles Kupchan
HIST 6130 – Global Environmental History – John McNeill
HIST 6205 – Early Africa – Kate de Luna
HIST 6400 – Monarchy and Modernity in Central Europe – James Shedel
HIST 6407 – Gender in the Early Modern World – Amy Leonard
HIST 6412 – Conflict Resolution in N. Ireland – Darragh Gannon
HIST 6511 – Capital&CommunityMex/N.America – John Tutino
HIST 6611 – Feminist Theory and Methods – Nefertiti Takla
HIST 6613 – Topics in Ottoman History – Gabor Agoston
HIST 6705 – Image as History – Christopher Stolarski
HIST 6801 – Interpreting US Political History – Michael Kazin
HIST 6805 – Slavery and Emancipation – Chandra Manning
HIST 7900 – Comps Prep Seminar – Chandra Manning

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