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HIST 609 Seminar in World History
R 0330-0600p Bentley, Jerry
CONTENT: This reading seminar provides an introduction to world history as a field of historical research and scholarship. Members of the seminar will read and discuss literature on the most important methods, themes, and theories of global historical analysis. Topics addressed in the seminar include the historiography of world history, methodology of comparative history, modernization analysis, world-system analysis, cross-cultural trade, migrations and diasporas, imperialism, biological and ecological exchanges, and other processes of cross-cultural interaction. HIST 609 is prerequisite to HIST 610.
REQUIREMENTS: Intensive reading, intelligent discussion, and incisive book analyses.
REQUIRED TEXTS: None
HIST 611C European History: Medieval
R 0130-0400p Jolly, Karen
CONTENT: This course is an introduction to medieval studies focused on both historical methods and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of medieval European cultures. We will address the topic of what is “the text” both from a material standpoint of the text as artifact—using paleography, codicology, and archaeology—and in a theoretical framework, the text as a representation of the medieval past in post-modern and post-colonial discourse.
REQUIREMENTS: Students are expected to participate in weekly discussion of the readings, write a series of reviews, and produce a final project analyzing a primary source in its manuscript context(s).
REQUIRED TEXTS: Howell and Prevenier, From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods; Clemens and Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies; other books and articles assigned weekly
HIST 614E European History: Modern
T 0230-0500p Matteson, Kieko
CONTENT: This course examines the history of Europe in a global context from the conquest and colonization of the New World to the present. Emphasizing scientific exploration, economic exploitation, and environmental change, the course will investigate Europe's evolving relationship with Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific by homing in on several case studies: pandemics and first contact, slavery and cash-crop agriculture, forestry and state formation, industrial capitalism and ecological despoliation, world war and decolonization, and the rise of corporate globalization.
REQUIREMENTS: To be announced.
REQUIRED TEXTS: To be announced.
HIST 634C American History: Republic to 1877
M 0330-0600p McGlone, Robert
CONTENT: Memoirs and autobiographies face two ways: inward in representing the meaning of their authors' lives, and outward in mirroring the times in which they are written. This research seminar will consider personal narratives both as acts of self-creation and as products of particular historical moments. We will assess how memory anchors us in particular times, to specific generations, and how it reflects their social codes and cultural transformations.
REQUIREMENTS: Students will be asked to write a research paper or to produce a chapter of a thesis or dissertation relying in part on perspectives opened by memoirs and other personal narratives or using such narratives as a window on a historical subject. Initial class meetings will introduce recent scholarly discussion of the construction of memoirs -- notably of their purposes, rhetorical strategies, and truth claims. Later, students will be asked to report on their research findings and to present their conclusions to the class orally as well as in writing.
REQUIRED TEXTS: Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians, & Autobiography; Paul John Eakins, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves; Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography.
HIST 639B U.S. History: Social/Cultural/Intellectual
W 0330-0530p Rapson, Dick
CONTENT: Most graduate students focus on historical fragments and confront large-scale interpretations with skepticism. The whole is often seen through the lenses of gender, class, and ethnicity. These seminars return us to the sources of those debates: the bold attempts to see things whole, to look for large patterns, to see the shape of the forest rather than zero in on each separate tree.
Each student will have a chance to read one of the great, influential “big picture” histories and to reflect upon the enterprise. Though the emphasis will be on America, we will also perforce take in models from Western history writ large and from world history. This will be done during both the Fall and Spring semesters.
Additionally, in each semester, five of our seminars will be held jointly with the graduate seminar in Social Psychology as we all try to stretch ourselves beyond the conventional disciplinary barriers. These joint seminars have brought great excitement to our Wednesdays.
The Fall seminar is the first half of a two-semester sequence; students can effectively take either semester separately, or else they can take both semesters in any order. Students will be encouraged freely to stake out positions on a variety of important and controversial matters in a series of what are usually lively conversations.
In the Fall semester, students will do more individualized reading than in the Spring, where each person’s research interests will be given scope. The Fall seminar attends to the large debates that have shaped writing about America. The Spring class devotes some time to the teaching enterprise, to the academic career, to the issues that excite the Academy, and to the use of films and fiction in shedding light on the past.
REQUIREMENTS: In addition to reading and lots of discussion, students in the Fall terms will make brief oral presentations. In the Spring term, the focus is expanded to take on innovative research design.
REQUIRED TEXTS: Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past; most of the reading and writing both semesters will be a matter of your choice, flexibly assigned, and based on your own interests and our conversations about them.
HIST 650 Comparative Asia
F 0230-0500p Totani, Yuma
CONTENT: This reading seminar in the comparative history of modern Asia will introduce graduate students to themes, particularly in social, cultural, and intellectual history, which lend themselves to comparison across the region.
REQUIREMENTS: Weekly discussions; writing assignments (book reviews; research papers); oral presentations.
REQUIRED TEXTS: Course reader
HIST 657 Historiography of Southeast Asia
T 0230-0500p Andaya, Leonard
CONTENT: The aim of the course is to explore the issues that have dominated historical writing on Southeast Asia up to the present day. Such topics as the meaning and the contestability of the region, the colonial legacy, and interaction of indigenous and Western historiographic traditions will be studied. It is hoped that the course will stimulate students to adopt creative approaches to the study of Southeast Asian history.
REQUIREMENTS: Attendance and participation at all seminars. At least six short 2-3 page critiques on the readings to be distributed or sent to the other members of the class by e-mail attachment at least one day before class meeting. The critique can be written about a book or books, or on at least two articles. Students should briefly explain the argument of the work(s), and then comment critically on any aspect of such work(s). At least two of the six critiques must be on a book. A fifteen-page essay, font 12, double-spaced, on some historiographical issue or historical problem in Southeast Asia. Topics must be chosen in consultation with the instructor.
REQUIRED TEXTS: Wolters, History, Culture and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives
HIST 665C Sem. in Japanese Hist.: Early Modern
W 0230-0500p McNally, Mark
CONTENT: History 665C focuses on Japan’s early modern or Tokugawa/Edo period (1603-1867). We will survey the important themes of this very crucial era in Japanese history, as well as the main interpretations produced by scholars working primarily in the United States. The course will emphasize four significant sub-fields within Tokugawa history. In the area of social history, we will study the phenomenon of peasant protests, the structure of rural societies, the characteristics of the main social groups of early modern Japan, and the status system. For political history, we will study Japanese foreign relations, as well as the events and intrigues leading to the Meiji Restoration. In the area of cultural history, we will look at gender relations, travel, social/leisure activities, and the educational system. Finally, for intellectual history, we will study developments in Confucianism and Kokugaku. In addition to secondary readings, we will read selections of primary sources in translation. Depending on student interest, we will also read and translate (as a class) primary documents in Japanese from the Edo period.
REQUIREMENTS: Five 5-pg papers (reading) or one 25-pg paper (research).
REQUIRED TEXTS: Howell, Geographies of Identity; Ikegami, Bonds of Civility; McNally, Proving the Way; Toby, State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan; Platt, Burning and Building; Walthall, The Weak Body of a Useless Woman; Nenzi, Excursions of Identity; Course Reader
HIST 675B Sem. in Pacific Hist.: South Pacific
M 0230-0500p Chappell, David
CONTENT: This seminar will examine Pacific Islands history from earliest human settlement to the present, covering historiography and important themes and episodes in precolonial Oceania as well as European contact, colonization and decolonization.
REQUIREMENTS: 12 oral presentations on weekly readings and ten written book reviews, or else a 20-25 page research paper, with half as many weekly readings and reviews. Active oral participation and regular and timely attendance is expected.
REQUIRED TEXTS: Kirch, On the Road of the Winds; O’Brien, The Pacific Muse; Thomas, Entangled Objects; Hanlon, Remaking Micronesia