History

The course critically assesses the paradigms and models underlying the analysis and description of environmental change and explores alternative ways of understanding and narrating environmental change beyond the constraints of the current linear, singular, and homogenizing Nature-to-Culture conceptualizations. The class readings draw from different historical periods and different parts of the world, including Europe, Africa, the Americas and Asia.

Seminar is part of a multi-year collaborative project devoted to reading Arabic documents from the medieval Middle East in Hebrew and Arabic script. Students contribute to a corpus of diplomatic editions, translations and commentaries to be published in the project's collection of texts. We introduce the most common legal and administrative genres: letters, lists, deeds, contracts, decrees and petitions. Our goal is to make this material legible as historical sources by combining philology, diplomatics, attention to the material text, and institutional and social history. Prerequisite: good reading knowledge of classical Arabic.

This graduate seminar focuses on the varied and discrepant historical experiences and representations of urban modernity. Drawing on a wide variety of literature from different disciplines and regions, we critically examine some of the major approaches in the study of modern cities, and engage with the concept of modernity in its different historical locations. A central theme of the seminar is to examine urban modernity as a mode of colonization of everyday life, an examination that will take the class to the history of modern cities across the world and different historical periods.

Reading and research on Africa from the partition to independence are the focus of this course. Topics include the forces that impelled Europe to partition Africa in the 1880s, the impact of Europe on Africa, modernization, resistance, nationalism, and decolonialization. The first nine weeks are devoted to general readings introducing these topics; for the remainder of the term, students work on a research project of their own choosing.

A study of the historical connections linking sex and gender to major social, political, and economic transformations. Comparative approaches are taken either in time or by region, or both. Topics may include family, gender, and the economy; gender, religion, and political movements; gender and the state; and gender and cultural representation.

This course explores special topics in modern South Asian history. The precise topic varies from year to year.

This course provides an introduction to the written sources of Japanese history from 750-1600. Instruction focuses on reading and translating a variety of documentary genres, and court chronicles, although visual sources (e.g. maps, scrolls, and screens) are introduced in class as well. Each week entails a translation of five or six short documents and a library research assignment. Research resources and methods are also emphasized. A substantial research assignment, involving primary source research, is due at the end of the semester. The final week of class is devoted to presentations about the research project.

Selected topics in the institutional and intellectual history of Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. Students attend the meetings of 321 and take part in a special graduate discussion group.

Selected topics in Japanese social and economic history since 1900.

This seminar will examine the major historiographical and methodological issues in Chinese history for the period 1600-1900. We will read and evaluate the most important historians and consider the issues that seem especially provocative or interesting.

This course examines classical Chinese texts and their commentary traditions, with commentary selections and additional readings from the earliest periods through the early twentieth century.

Topics in Chinese social and cultural history, 1600-1900, ranging from material culture, popular religion, and education to the history of science.

Reading and research on the transition of ancient into medieval society, religion, and culture are the focus of the course.

Selected problems in the social, administrative, and legal history of Western Europe in the Middle Ages, primarily during the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries.

An introduction to hands-on work with medieval Arabic documentary sources in their original manuscript form. Between 100,000 and 200,000 such documents have survived, making this an exciting new area of research with plenty of discoveries still to be made. Students learn how to handle the existing repertory of editions, documentary hands, Middle Arabic, transcription, digital resources and original manuscripts, including Geniza texts currently on loan to Firestone from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. The syllabus varies according to the interests of the students and the instructor.

This course will take a new approach to the "Age of Democratic Revolutions," looking at the French, American and Haitian Revolutions through the prism of biography, and notions of selfhood. It will explore how individuals attempted to construct and reconstruct their lives during his period of unprecedented tumult. It will also examine how we can recapture those lives,and how individual biographies can illuminate the period's larger events.

A survey of the main themes (social, political, and intellectual) in the development of France since the last years of Louis XIV, followed by intensive study of the Revolution. A reading knowledge of French is required.

Topics in French history from the Napoleonic era to the present. Political volatility, imperial grandeur, artistic creativity: how do these facets of modern French life fit together and mutually interact? Topics will vary from year to year.

Study of a topic involving both ancient Greece and ancient Rome, such as imperialism or slavery, from a comparative perspective.

Readings and research in the culture, society, economy, and politics of the Soviet empire and successor states are the focus of this course. This course explores the possible approaches and strategies as well as the availability and the use of sources, with an eye to the formulation or further refining of a topic and preparation for fieldwork.

An introduction to the reading of Arabic texts written by medieval Jews in the Hebrew script, especially documents from the Cairo Geniza.

This course is designed to introduce fundamental themes and debates about ancient and medieval Japanese history, and how conceptualizations of Japan have changed from the third century CE through 1600. Approximately two books, or a comparable number of articles, are required each week, and wherever possible, a brief passage of Japanese scholarship will be presented as well. Reading knowledge of modern Japanese is desirable.

During the twentieth century, Marxism became a powerful social and political force in countries across the world. This international success, however, was by no means preordained. Tailored to the conditions of a rapidly industrializing Western Europe, Marxist ideas were not easily applied elsewhere. This course examines how theorists sought to revise and adapt Marxist theory to fit the requirements of their time and place. The course pays attention to the way in which intellectuals from a range of countries challenged some of the core principles of Marxism, proposing new ideas about the role of the nation, religion, and race.

Course examines significant themes in the evolution of African American life and culture since about 1619 and ending with the signing of the Emanicipation Proclamation. Some attention will be paid to historiographical issues and to pedagogical approaches.

This readings course focuses on the central problems engaged by recent scholarship on the American West, with particular attention given to how this regional history intersects with the larger thematic concerns of North American history. Readings address topics ranging from the 16th to 21st centuries, including environmental history, Native American history, race, gender, urban history and popular culture.