Exploration of intellectual, social, and cultural developments in Jewish civilization from the rise of Islam in the seventh century to the assault on established conceptions of faith and religious authority in 17th century Europe, that is, from the age of Mohammed to that of Spinoza. Particular attention will be paid to the interaction of Jewish culture with those of Christianity and Islam.

A study of the major events, issues, and personalities in Afro-American history from Reconstruction to the present. The course will also examine the different slave experiences and the methods of black resistance and rebellion in the various slave systems.

America has often been depicted in the Middle East either as a benevolent superpower or an ill-meaning enemy – in other words, foe or friend, Satan or saint. In America, too, stereotypes of the Middle East abound as home to the uber-wealthy, tyrants, and fanatics. This course will explore the relationship between the United States and the Middle East by moving beyond such facile depictions. We will read works of history and political analysis to shape our understanding of this relationship and to explore cross-cultural perspectives. Our goal is to understand why a century of interaction has sometimes done little to bring peace and greater understanding between these two intertwined communities. By reading a range of historical accounts, we will consider the origins of this cultural and diplomatic encounter. The readings will shed light on the extent of America’s involvement in the Middle East in the twentieth century. We will consider the impact of oil diplomacy on U.S.-Middle East relations, as well as the role of ideology and culture, in an effort to comprehend the antagonism that exists on a state-to-state level in some contexts. Most importantly, we will grapple with the ways in which international politics disrupts the lives of citizens trapped in the throes of political turmoil.

Research seminar on selected topics in US history.
Students in this course will enhance their research and writing skills while working on an article or chapter-length research paper in consultation with the instructor and their primary advisor. Course readings will be selected from the fields of United States and African American History, but students are not limited to these fields for their research projects.

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”.