Weekly readings, discussions, and writing assignments to develop a global perspective within which to study human events in various regional/cultural milieus, c. 1400 to the present. This course is required for all PhD students, and is taken in the first year of study.

The Trans-Atlantic Enlightenment: Approaches to the Intellectual and Cultural History of the Eighteenth Century

The purpose of this seminar is to introduce graduate students to the key topics, issues, and debates in the 20th- and 21st-century historiography of the Enlightenment in Europe and the Americas. We will do so primarily through extensive reading and discussion of landmark secondary work in this field. We will also pay close attention to the varied approaches and methods by which the history of eighteenth-century thought and culture have been reconstructed and consider the ways these different methods might be put to new uses in future research. No previous knowledge of the period or key texts is assumed, and brief primary sources will also be assigned most weeks in order to make the textual foundations of the secondary literature clearer. Topics for discussion will include, among others, the birth of the intellectual; the idea of the public sphere and commercial development; the history of reading and reception; religious enlightenment and secularism; race, slavery and colonialism; gender politics; the history of the prison and state power; Enlightenment and revolution; and the modern legacy of the Enlightenment project.

Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Transregional Economic History

Topics on Late Imperial and Modern Chinese History

This graduate seminar will introduce the central issues in the fields of late imperial and modern Chinese history ranging from governance, ethnicity, gender, religion, development, revolution, sovereignty, citizenship, and public politics. It also introduces historiographical debates around controversial milestones such as revolution and modernization. Centering on the transition from empire to nation, the seminar aims to prepare students to engage critically and productively with historiography in order to advance their individual research and teaching agendas. To achieve this goal, a series of writing exercises will be assigned throughout the semester. Students are also expected to participate actively during class discussion.

This graduate seminar is designed to address individual interests of students in the histories of migrations and diasporas in the Asia-Pacific.
Students will read representative historical studies to establish a historiographical foundation for their future dissertation research.
Please contact the instructor before registration.

For all Humanities or Social Sciences, reading is a fundamental issue either because historians or literary critics can generally only listen to the dead with the eyes or because anthropologists decipher practices and rituals as “texts” that must be “read”. Whence the necessity to analyze what does it mean go read a text. This Graduate seminar would like to discuss the different theories of reading and to characterize the reading practices in relation with discursive genres and their material embodiment. Focused on early modern period (but not exclusively), associating conceptual analysis and specific textual studies, the seminar will make a large use of the primary materials present in the collections of our library.

The topics of the classes will be (not necessarily in this order) “Poetics of Reception and Reader-Response Theory”; “From New Criticism to New Historicism”; “Bibliography and the Materiality of Texts”, “Textual Mobilities: Attribution, Variants, Migrations” “Scribal Publication and Print Culture”; “Intellectual Techniques of the Renaissance: Arts of Memory and Commonplaces”; “The Stage and the Page: England, Spain, France”; “The Reading Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century: Do Books Make Revolution?”; “Practices as Texts”; “Voices and the Written Word: Transcription and Transmission”; “Texts and Images: Equivalence, Supplement, Substitute?”; “Translations between Hospitality and Violence”, “Is a Score a Text”.

Democracy in America

In this graduate seminar, we will examine the development of formal structures of democratic participation in the United States from the founding of the nation into the contemporary moment. By formal structures of democratic participation, we mean those institutions where citizens, non-citizens, and state meet: elections, party systems, the courts and criminal justice system, but also evolving ideas and practices of constitutionalism, regulation and the administrative state, public policy, and “common people’s” political practices separate from the ballot box. We also mean to think about institutions and practices that exist alongside and within formal structures of democracy, such as associations, conventions, churches, and print culture. The course covers a long chronology in order to expose students to both stark continuities and crucial ruptures across time. We pay close attention to local, state, and national arenas and sovereignties; to contingent moments of democratic reform and rupture; to conflict and contestation over democratic citizenship and the electorate; tools of democratic politics; and to debates among historical actors, democratic theorists, and historians.

Open to junior honors candidates in history. Introduction to the study and analysis of historical phenomena. Emphasis on theoretical approaches to historical knowledge, problems of methodology, and introduction to research design and strategy. Objective of this seminar is the development of honors thesis proposal.

The course will cover the modern evolution of the international monetary system going all the way back to the era when sterling became the leading international currencies. It is arranged thematically and chronologically both. The lessons and readings will introduce students to the principal evolutions of the international monetary system and at the same time, it will give them an understanding of regimes, their mechanics and the geopolitical economies behind systemic shifts. Students need not have an economic background but must be prepared to read about exchange rates (and world politics). Special focus on: The early modern international monetary system. How Amsterdam and London captured the Spanish treasure. Beyond the West (Ottoman Empire, India, China). The Napoleonic wars and the rise of sterling. Hong-Kong: Silver, Opium, and the Recycling of Surpluses. The emergence of the Gold Standard. Bimetallism: The US election of 1796. Sterling and Key Currencies before WWI. The First World War and the origins of dollar supremacy. When the dollar displaced sterling (1920s). The collapse of the international gold standard (1930s). The Bretton Woods System. The rise and rise of the US dollar. Currency competition (Dollar, Euro, Yuan Renminbi). The meaning of cryptocurrencies.

The ancient Greeks imagined a woman’s body ruled by her uterus, while medieval Christians believed in a womb touched by God. Renaissance anatomists hoped to uncover the ‘secrets’ of human generation through dissection, while nascent European states wrote new laws to encourage procreation and manage ‘illegitimate’ offspring. From ancient Greece to enlightenment France, a woman’s womb served as a site for the production of medical knowledge, the focus of religious practice, and the articulation of state power. This course will trace the evolution of medical and cultural theories about women’s reproductive bodies from ca. 450 BCE to 1700, linking these theories to the development of structures of power, notions of difference, and concepts of purity that proved foundational to ‘western’ culture.
Each week we will read a primary source (in translation, if necessary) alongside excerpts from scholarly books and articles. We will begin in classical Greece with Hippocratic writings on women’s diseases, move through the origins of Christian celibacy and female asceticism in late antique and medieval Europe, follow early anatomists as they dissected women’s bodies in Renaissance Italy, explore the origins of state regulation of women’s fertility in early modern England, Germany, and France, and finally, learn how Enlightenment ideals were undergirded by new “scientific” models of anatomical sexual and racial difference.