This course explores the history and conceptual underpinnings of modern law in the West. What exactly is law? What is its relationship with politics and religion? Where do our notions of constitutionalism come from? How have we come to think in terms of rights? Using a historical and comparative approach, we will examine legal thought and culture in the European West from the Greek concept of nomos to the main categories of law developed in Roman antiquity, concepts of constitutionalism and rights crafted in medieval Europe, the development of the two main legal traditions of Europe (Common Law and Civil Law), and the emergence of intellectual property, human rights discourse and modern international law. The course will blend intellectual, political and social history. We will study concepts and intellectual categories such as crime, proof, punishment and the public/private distinction alongside illustrative cases that either exemplified the law or pushed it forward, foundational documents such as Magna Carta, and political developments such as the Peace of Westphalia, credited with the birth of modern state sovereignty and modern international law. Together, these subjects form core foundations of how we think and do law today.

This course explores significant political and social developments that shaped the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in the United States, an era of declining faith in political institutions, ideological and partisan polarization, and accelerating inequality. The course will consider a variety of perspectives, developments, and movements across the political spectrum as well as others that defy easy ideological or partisan categorization. Topics will include the evolution of the post-1960s civil rights movement and the rise of mass incarceration; the rise and transformation of the religious right and the emergence of the populist right from the 1970s through the Tea Party and MAGA movements; the evolution of liberalism and the Democratic Party and its relationship to the left; the AIDS crisis and the LGBTQ movement; 9/11 and the war on terror; the financialization of the global economy and the causes and effects of the mortgage crisis of 2008; and bipartisan paths toward the emergence of “neoliberalism” and the concept of the "free market" as ways of reordering not just social and political commitments but perhaps even society itself.

This course introduces students to major themes in U.S. legal history from 1877 to the present. Topics include (but are not limited to) citizenship and immigration, federalism, public regulation of economic activity, lawyers and the legal profession, criminalization, social welfare provision, and rights-claiming. Prominent through-lines include the relationship between law and politics; the struggles of marginalized groups for recognition and inclusion; and shifting, competing understandings of liberty, equality, and justice. Judicial decisions figure prominently in this course, but so, too, do other sources of law, including statutes, administrative decisions, and provisions of the U.S. Constitution. Students will leave this course with a better grasp of how the U.S. legal system operates and how it has channeled power, resources, and opportunity over time. *This course fulfills a core requirement for the Legal Studies and History Minor.*

Many Americans widely accept the notion that the United States is a nation of immigrants despite the fact that immigration and border control has been a central feature of this nation’s past. This course explores the United States’ development of immigration and border enforcement during the twentieth century through an intersectional lens. It roots the structures of modern immigration and border enforcement in Native dispossession and histories of slavery, and interrogates how Asian, Black, and Latinx immigration has shaped and expanded immigration controls on, within, and beyond US territorial borders. In addition to historicizing the rise and expansion of major institutions of immigration control such as the US Border Patrol and Bureau of Naturalization, we explore how immigration controls were enforced on the ground and impacted the lives of everyday people.

This course will examine the growth and development of American schools, from the birth of the republic into the present. By 1850, the United States sent a greater fraction of its children to school than any other nation on earth. Why? What did young people learn there? And, most of all, how did these institutions both reflect and shape our evolving conceptions of "America" itself? In an irreducibly diverse society, the answers were never simple. Americans have always defined their nation in a myriad of contrasting and often contradictory ways. So they have also clashed vehemently over their schools, which remain our central public vehicle for deliberating and disseminating the values that we wish to transmit to our young. Our course will pay close attention to these education-related debates, especially in the realms of race, class, and religion. When immigrants came here from other shores, would they have to relinquish their old cultures and languages? When African-Americans won their freedom from bondage, what status would they assume? And as different religious denominations fanned out across the country, how would they balance the uncompromising demands of faith with the pluralistic imperatives of democracy? All of these questions came into relief at school, where the answers changed dramatically over time. Early American teachers blithely assumed that newcomers would abandon their old-world habits and tongues; today, "multicultural education" seeks to preserve or even to celebrate these distinctive patterns. Post-emancipation white philanthropists designed vocational curricula for freed African-Americans, imagining blacks as loyal serfs; but blacks themselves demanded a more academic education, which would set them on the road to equality. Protestants and Catholics both used the public schools to teach their faith systems until the early 1960s, when the courts barred them from doing so; but religious controversies continue to hound the schools, especially on matters like evolution and sex education. How should our public schools address such dilemmas? How can the schools provide a "common" educaiton, as Horace Mann called it, melding us into an integrated whole while still respecting our inevitable differences?

This course provides with a historical introduction to America's racial and ethnic groupings by examining the social, spatial and historical forces that have defined these groups. Weekly lectures and readings trace American racial formations, identities and experiences from the age of Columbus to the present day. Following the work of historians and geographers who emphasize the importance of space and place in constructions of racial and ethnic identity, most of the class readings chart the evolution of such identities within specific regions or communities. Early readings illuminate the origins of categories such as "white," black, "Native American" and "Asian" by exploring the colonial encounters in which these identities first took shape; while later readings trace how these identities have been maintained and/or changed over time. Less a product of racial attitudes than of economic and political interests, early American conceptions of race first took shape amidst contests over land and labor that pitted European immigrants against the indigenous peoples of North America, and ultimately led to the development of racial slavery. Colonial legal distinctions between Christians and Heathens were supplanted by legislation that defined people by race and ethnicity. Over time these distinctions were reinforced by a variety of other forces. Distinctive from place to place, America's racial and ethnic groupings have been shaped and reshaped by regional economies such as the slave South, political initiatives such as Indian Removal and Chinese Exclusion Acts, a changing national immigration policy, and sexual and social intermixture and assimilation. Course readings will examine the links between race, region, labor, law, immigration, politics, sexuality and the construction and character of racialized spaces and places in America.

Sexuality has a history that is both geographically and culturally specific. For this reason, this course aims to destabilize familiar sexual categories and identities by exploring how it was (and is) to be queer in different parts of the world. We will historicize sexual orientation as a category anchored in Western medical and legal discourses; we will link the history of sexuality with that of capitalism, colonialism, and racism; and we will evaluate the idea of “Gay Imperialism” and how it is resisted around the world. The course is not comprehensive either chronologically or geographically. Instead, it considers some key topics in the history of queer sexualities; it provides a general historiographical background; and it introduces a toolbox for doing critical queer history with a global perspective. Finally, we will address how contemporary LBGTQ+ issues around the world can be put into historical perspective, and why queer history is essential for achieving the goals of social justice.

This course looks at the intertwined history of science, labor and capital since the fifteenth century. Starting with the surge of patents for labor-saving devices in fifteenth century Italy and coming all the way down to the contemporary neoliberal university, the culture of science and the cultures of labor and capital have always remained in intense conversation. The first half of the course will focus on the early relations between science, labor and capital. We will discuss patterns of employment for scientists, the relationship between manual work and intellectual work, the scientific aspects of commercial capitalism as well as the debates on the transition to capitalism. The second half of the course will focus on the period from the nineteenth century to the present. We will talk about colonialism and science, the social ascendance of the scientist in relation to the technician, as well as the political economy of contemporary science and of the contemporary university. This is a seminar course and will require regular participation. Some knowledge of the existing literature on capitalism, especially the writings of Ellen Wood and E.P Thompson, are recommended but not required.

This course covers the history of biology in the 19th and 20th centuries, giving equal consideration to three dominant themes: evolutionary biology, classical genetics, and molecular biology. The course is intended for students with some background in the history of science as well as in biology, although no specific knowledge of either subject in required. We will have three main goals: first, to delineate the content of the leading biological theories and experimental practices of the past two centuries; second, to situate these theories and practices in their historical context, noting the complex interplay between them and the dominant social, political, and economic trends; and, third, to critically evaluate various methodological approaches to the history of science.

Racial, colonial, and other political formations have encumbered Black existence since at least the fifteenth-century. Black experiences of and reflections on these matters have been the subject of existential writings and artistic expressions ranging from the blues to reggae, fiction and non-fiction. Reading some of these texts alongside canonical texts in European existential philosophy, this class will examine how issues of freedom self, alienation, finitude, absurdity, race, and gender shape and are shaped by the global Black experience. Since Black aliveness is literally critical to Black existential philosophy, we shall also engage questions of Black flourishing amidst the potential for pessimism and nihilism.