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| Spring 2010 Seminar Descriptions |
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HIST W4020--The
Greek Invention of History
Instructor: Richard Billows
Day/Time: R 2:10-4
Group(s): A
The classical Greeks invented the discipline of rational,
analytical history writing. This seminar will study the foundational histories
of Herodotos and Thucydides, of Xenophon and Polybios, trying to place these
works in their cultural and intellectual contexts.
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HIST W4051-Madness
in Greek and Roman Medicine and Literature
Instructor: Glenda MacDonald
Day/Time: W
11-12:50
Group(s): A
This course will investigate concepts of madness and
mental illness in the Ancient Greek and Roman World. It will focus on descriptions of madness and
mad people, as recorded in a variety of literary, historical, and medical
sources. The goal is not to trace the
chronological development of these ideas, but rather to acquire an
understanding of some of the more prominent and influential concepts. The class will begin with an examination of
Greek and Roman concepts of the ‘mind', as recorded in both literary and
medical sources. Depictions of mad
people - both real and fictional - will be examined: source material will
include 5th century Greek Tragedy, as well as a variety of historical
texts. Particular attention will also be
given to predominant medical concepts of madness, as found in the Hippocratic
Corpus and in the works of medical authors such as Aretaeus, Galen, Caelius
Aurelianus, and Celsus. The main focus
of this examination will be on concepts of mania, melancholy, and phrenitis,
diseases which were most commonly believed to produce madness.
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HIST W4127-Montaigne
and Skepticism
Instructor: Mark
Lilla
Day/Time: F
11-12:50
Group(s): A
What makes modern thought modern? There is a history to
this question. The conventional version centers on an alleged break
between modern philosophical and scientific "rationalism," on the one
hand, and pre-modern religious "dogma," on the other. In this seminar
we will explore an alternative view of our intellectual history, which sees
modern skepticism as a fresh alternative to both rationalism and dogmatism,
whether in their ancient or modern versions. Rather than survey a
range of modern skeptics we will focus on the pivotal figure in this historical
narrative, Montaigne, and those of his Essays dealing
with the nature, limits, and uses of knowledge. (This seminar was
preceded by one on "Montaigne and the Self" this fall, but that
course is a not a prerequisite for this one.)
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HIST W4130-Early Modern
Globalization: The North Atlantic World and the Dutch Connection
Instructors: Karel
Davids and Marjolein ‘t Hart
Day/Time: W
11-12:50
Group(s): A
This course examines the extent and nature of early
modern globalization, in particular the transatlantic exchanges between Europe
and North America between the late fifteenth and late eighteenth centuries. The
focus on the European side will be on England, France and the Netherlands. After an introduction on the current
historical debate on early modern globalization and Atlantic history, the
course first gives a survey of the expansion of trade networks and the growth
of slavery and the slave trade. The next meetings deal with various constituent
forces of globalization on the European side, notably the rise of
fiscal-military states and the role of religion in power relations, and with
various aspects of exchange in the North Atlantic World, namely the circulation
of knowledge and environmental consequences of the ‘biological expansion of
Europe'. Finally, we will examine the Atlantic connection in European culture,
European economies and political revolutions and discuss its relevance for the
Great Divergence between the ‘West' and the ‘Rest'.
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HIST W4302-From War
to Peace: Britain and France in the 1940s
Instructor:
Isser Woloch
Day/Time: T 11-12:50
Group(s): B
This seminar considers the passage from a devastating war, experienced very
differently in Britain and France, to the prospect of postwar transformation in
both countries. For Britain topics will include the
home front during the war; the Labour Party's landslide victory in 1945;
socialist innovations including the National Health Service. For France topics
will include the fall of France, collaboration and resistance movements;
liberation under de Gaulle's leadership; the postwar Fourth Republic and its
problems.
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HIST W4322-German History,
1740-1914
Instructor: Emma
Winter
Day/Time: T
2:10-4
Group(s): B
The history of the political, cultural, intellectual,
social and economic struggle for mastery in Germany from Frederick the Great to
the outbreak of the First World War.
Subjects covered will include: the Holy Roman Empire; Enlightened
Absolutism; Cultural Pluralism and the Third Germany; The French Revolution and
Napoleon in Germany; Romanticism and the emergence of Nationalism; The German
Confederation; Vormärz Politics and Culture; Art and Religion; The 1848
Revolutions; The processes of State building; The Austro-Prussian Wars;
Bismarck and the Unification of the Second Empire; Richard Wagner and German
Music; Wilhelmine Politics and Culture; The Origins of the First World War.
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HIST BC4327-Consumer
Culture in Modern Europe
Instructor:
Lisa Tiersten
Day/Time: W
9-10:50
Group(s): B
This seminar explores the development of consumer
capitalism in modern Europe from the eighteenth century through the late
twentieth century, primarily in Britain and France. Topics to be covered
include the rise of a market economy and culture, urbanization and the
commercial metropolis, changing attitudes toward shopping and spending, the
construction of modern gender and class identities through consumption, credit
and social trust, and the relationship between consumption and democratic
citizenship. Historical studies will be complemented with readings from social
theory, cultural studies, and fiction.
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HIST W4345-John Stuart
Mill: Life, Work, Legacies
Instructor: Susan
Pedersen
Day/Time: T
9-10:50
Group(s): B
This course is designed for undergraduates who, having
had some introduction to Mill in CC or elsewhere, would like to spend a
semester exploring his life, thought, and impact. This task is particularly interesting today,
for Mill, revered by progressives in his own time for his support for
intellectual liberties, a wider democratic franchise, and women's suffrage, and
for his fierce criticism of military repression in Jamaica, is now often seen
as one of the architects of Victorian imperialism. After spending two weeks learning about Mill's
life, we will turn to Mill's thought, examining his writings in the context of
political debates at the time and exploring his involvement in controversies
over economic policy, the nature of the Victorian state, political reform and
imperial governance. Together, we will
try to understand not only what Mill thought and did, but why he has acted as a
lightning-rod for political controversy in his time and in our own.
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HIST BC4368-History
of the Senses in England and France
Instructor:
Deborah Valenze
Day/Time: R
9-10:50
Group(s): B
Examination of European understandings of human senses
through the production and reception of art, literature, music, food, and
sensual enjoyments in Britain and France. Readings include changing theories
concerning the five senses; efforts to master the passions; the rise of
sensibility and feeling for others; concerts and the patronage of art; the
professionalization of the senses.
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HIST W4376-History
of Commercial Revolutions: From the China Shop in Europe to Wal-Mart in China
Instructor: Victoria
De Grazia
Day/Time: T
4:10-6
Group(s): B,
C, D
This seminar examines commercial revolutions in historical
perspective. It starts with the huge growth of Wal-Mart in the U.S. since the 1970s and its spread to China
over the last decade, and it goes back
to the 17th Century with the arrival of Asian, specially Chinese,
goods in Western Europe, By commercial revolutions we mean big upheavals in
long-distance market relations and big changes in local consumer outlooks and
standards of living upon by the arrival
of new goods and new kinds of distribution. These ruptures have always been a
big, if not fully understood, element of globalization and asymmetrical and
imperial relations. Students, in addition
to reading some fascinating recent historical studies, (N. Lichtenstein, Wal-Mart World, M. Berg, Luxury and
Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain,
S. Mintz, Sugar and Power,G. Hamilton, Commerce and Capitalism in Chinese Societies) will become familiar
with Marxist, classical liberal and other explanations of these changes. Along
with weekly discussion, students will write a research paper and present it at
a mini-conference organized by the students at the end of the term.
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HIST W4404-Native American
History
Instructor: Evan
Haefeli
Day/Time: T
11-12:50
Group(s): A, D
This course introduces students to the forces that
transformed the aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas into
"Indians." The class takes a
very broad approach, moving chronologically and thematically from the dawn of
time to the present. The course aims to
expose students to the diversity of the Native American experience by including
all the inhabitants of the Americas, from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, within
its purview.
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HIST BC4411-Race and
the Making of the United States
Instructor: Elizabeth
Esch
Day/Time: W
2:10-4
Group(s): D
This seminar will consider what role race and racism
plays in U.S. culture, politics, economics and foreign policy. Beginning with
the origins of racial slavery, we will examine how, when and whether the
subsequent development of racial systems - and challenges to them - shaped historical
developments in the United States. African American history will be at the core
of our discussion, though we will examine works that consider Latino, Asian and
American Indian history as well. Through a survey of theories about "race
relations" and discussions about affirmative action, immigration, empire
and rights, this seminar will ponder the question of what a "colorblind"
society might mean and how it could come about.
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AMHS W4435-American
Culture and Politics in the 1930s
Instructor: Casey
Blake
Day/Time: T
11-12:50
Group(s): D
A seminar on cultural and political responses
to the Great Depression in the United States. Students will read works by
historians of the period, as well as examine novels, photographs, films, music,
advertisements, and other works of the period. Topics to be considered include:
the achievements and limitations of the New Deal; the leftward shift of artists
and intellectuals; documentary, social-realist literature, folk music, public
art, and theater; the politics of federal arts programs; and the left-liberal
"little magazines" of the period.
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HIST W4458-Public History
in America
Instructor:
Eric Wakin
Day/Time: R
11-12:50
Group(s): D
In this seminar we will explore some of the ways
historical subjects can be, and have been, engaged outside of the traditional
channels of scholarship. Among the many forms in which history and the
historical memory are presented, we will examine exhibits, film and television
productions, websites, reenactments, memorials and monuments, historical sites,
the spoken word, and institutions. The class will include visits to public
history sites as well as guest speakers and will include critical readings in
history and other fields.
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HIST W4518-Slavery
and Emancipation in the United States
Instructor: Eric
Foner
Day/Time: T
4:10-6
Group(s): D
This seminar will consist of weekly readings and
discussion of works dealing with the history of slavery in the United States,
the anti-slavery movement, the coming of emancipation during the Civil War, and
how Americans tried to deal with the consequences of emancipation. There will also be one 20-page paper for the
semester.
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HIST W4535-20th
Century New York City History
Instructor: Kenneth
Jackson
Day/Time: W
4:10-6
Group(s): D
This course explores critical areas of New York's
economic development in the 20th century, with a view to understanding the
rise, fall and resurgence of this world capital. Discussions also focus on the
social and political significance of these shifts. Assignments include primary
sources, secondary readings, film viewings, trips, and archival research.
Students use original sources as part of their investigation of New York City
industries for a 20-page research paper. An annotated bibliography is also
required. Students are asked to give a weekly update on research progress, and
share information regarding useful archives and websites.
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HIST BC4543-Higher
Learning in America
Instructor: Robert
McCaughey
Day/Time: T
4:10-6
Group(s): D
An examination of the history of American colleges and
universities from the colonies to the present; special emphasis on the evolving
relationship between academic institutions and the political and social orders.
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HIST W4577-A "Civilization
and Its Discontents," U.S. Cultural History, 1890-1945
Instructor:
Hilary Hallett
Day/Time: R
4:10-6
Group(s): D
This class begins during the fabled "Gilded
Age," when the nation's capitalist expansion created the world's largest
economy but splintered Americans' ideals. From the fin-de-siècle through the cataclysms
of World War II, we will explore how Americans defined, contested, and
performed different meanings of American civilization through social reform
movements, artistic expressions, and the everyday habits and customs of
individuals and groups. The class will pay particular attention to how gender, race,
and location--regional, international, and along the class ladder--shaped
perspectives about what constituted American civilization and the national
discourse about what it should become.
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HIST W4659-Crime in
Latin America
Instructor: Pablo
Piccato
Day/Time: M 11-12:50
Group(s): D
This seminar will focus on studies that take a historical
look at crime in the Latin American context and will bring the discussion to
the present. Transnational connections and comparisons will be encouraged,
particularly as we explore the history and contemporary phenomenon of drug
trafficking, incorporating the United States as a factor and a scene for Latin
American crime. Readings, discussions and reports will try to identify
commonalities across Latin American and dig deeper on some specific places and
moments. In order to do this, we will devote part of the semester to the
analysis of primary sources, and will require a research component in the final
paper.
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HIST W4803-Subaltern
Studies and Beyond
Instructor:
Janaki Bakhle
Day/Time: T
2:10-4
Group(s): A, C
This is an advanced undergraduate seminar course that
will retrace the history of the making of the Subaltern Studies problematic,
considered a major intervention in both Indian nationalist history and the
wider discipline of history itself, with a focus on the relationship between
method, archives, and the craft of history writing.
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HIST W4807-Revolutionary
Nationalism in India and Ireland: Is Fundamentalism Inevitable?
Instructor: Janaki
Bakhle
Day/Time: M 2:10-4
Group(s): B, C
This course will survey some of the primary writings of
Indian revolutionary thinkers and Irish revolutionary thinkers in the early
20th century, as well as secondary sources on the subject of international
revolutionary movements to explore the international connections between the
two (Irish and Indian) anti-colonial nationalist struggles but also to examine
the common intellectual resources they drew from. Both sets of revolutionaries were considered
"terrorists" by the colonial government and this course will examine
the politics, the ideology, and the historical trajectory of revolutionary
nationalist thought.
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HIST BC4870-Gender
and Migration: A Global Perspective
Instructor: Jose
Moya
Day/Time: T
2:10-4
Group(s): B,
C, D
Explores reasons, from labor-markets and family structure
to gender ideologies and religion, for different participation of women and men
in migration, both internal and international, during the last two centuries
and throughout the world. Also examines gender differences in socio-economic
integration in host societies and the impact of migration on the gender systems
of countries of origins and reception.
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HIST BC4901-Reacting
to the Past II
Instructor:
Mark Carnes
Day/Time: MW
2:40-3:55
Group(s): B, C
The collision of ideas in two modern Rousseau, Burke and
Revolution in France, 1791; Gandhi, and the making of a nation on the eve of
independence in India, 1945.
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