Fall 2020 Graduate Courses

(Tentative schedule; subject to change)

Course No. & Name	Professor/Lecturer	Day/Time	Course Description
200T – Advanced Historiography: Southeast Asia: Critical Debates in Modern Indonesian History	Geoffrey Robinson	F 11:00A-1:50P	Exploration of major debates in modern Indonesian history, through critical examination of several works considered classics as well as less well-known and more recent scholarship. Focus on late colonial and early post-colonial periods and assumes basic knowledge of Indonesian history.
201I.1-Brazil Research Seminar	William Summerhill	M 2:00P-4:50P	Graduate research course on the history of Brazil, open to graduate students working on other regions of Latin America, and those working on Brazil in other disciplines/departments.
201I.2-Animals in the Atlantic World	Robin L. Derby	T 1:00P-3:50P	Animals have long formed important partnerships with people, as forms of technology and extensions of the laboring body, as vehicles of colonial expansion and terror, and as intimate domestic companions. Animals are located at the center of human society but often remain unacknowledged in the historical record; doing so effectively requires an interdisciplinary methodology that incorporates insights and approaches from the humanities, science, ethnography, and visual studies. This course brings animals squarely into the frame of social history. We will explore a range of human-animal forms of entanglement in the Atlantic world in both rural and urban contexts from the early modern period to the present, including hunting, domestication, and breeding; and animals as vermin, prey, partners and portentous signs. We will also consider animals in light of changing notions of the boundary between nature and culture, the politics of representation, as conveyors of the sacred and the demonic, and the question of the animal as it has emerged in contemporary philosophy.
C201K – Topics in History: India: History of Modern Afghanistan: Islam, Modernism & Transnationalism	Nile Green	W 2:00P-4:50P	Aimed at students with no previous knowledge of Afghanistan. Examination of key moments in modern Afghan history (circa 1880 to 1980). Focus on tensions between attempts to create a stable Afghan nation-state on one hand and factors that destabilized the nation-building project on the other hand. While paying due attention to political and institutional developments, study also looks at religious and cultural developments in the period. Survey of a century that saw a remote mountain region become increasingly integrated into global affairs, with particular attention to Afghan interactions with the surrounding world, with special attention to interactions with wider world culminating in Afghan communist coup and Soviet invasion of 1979. Students also taught skills of seminar work involving weekly readings, in-class discussions, and preparation of a final paper on a primary source selected according to student’s own interests.
201M- Modern Japan: History, Pedagogy, Theory	William Marotti	T 4:00P-6:50P	The purpose of this class is to supplement the readings of the undergraduate course, Modern Japan (172C: M 4:00-6:50PM), with sufficient readings and discussions to explore broadly the major issues involved in the making of a “modern” “Japan.” These include 1) understanding how people went from not knowing what “Japan” or an “emperor” was to being willing to sacrifice their very lives for both of those things. 2) discovering how many of our basic assumptions about the modern world are products of history, and examining the process by which they become naturalized, even invisible, even as they radically change our perceptions of the world and ourselves. We will also discuss the pedagogical choices involved, from the methodological to the historiographical and practical. The readings can also become the skeleton of a history field exam reading list. ALL STUDENTS are strongly encouraged to “attend” BOTH the undergraduate lecture AND the graduate seminar. Weekly response papers required
C201N – Topics in History: Africa: Africa and Indian Ocean	Hollian Wint	R 2:00P-4:50P	Study of Indian Ocean as academic field and expanding space of geo-political interest. Seeking to interrogate boundaries both of national (and nationalist) histories and of Areas Studies, Indian Ocean scholars have long drawn inspiration from thalassological approaches to Mediterranean and Atlantic. Yet Indian Ocean as historical space defies easy definition or periodization and as analytical space continues to be dominated by certain regions, actors, and narratives. While Africa and Africans have largely remained on periphery of Indian Ocean studies, Indian Ocean has long been at heart of East African history and historiography. Study seeks to situate both Africans and African history within Indian Ocean studies and Indian Ocean within study of Africa. Reading classical texts from these overlapping scholarships alongside newer Indian Ocean scholarly literature, as well as diverse primary sources, students analyze possibilities, politics, and limitations of Oceanic unit of analysis.
C201Q-Colonialism and the Conquest of Knowledge	Vinay Lal	T 4:00P-6:50P	This seminar revolves around colonialism’s conquest of knowledge and the myriad ways in which the intellectual systems of the West were deployed in the task of colonization. We are interested in probing the categories through which the colonized world was encompassed into the Enlightenment vision of universal knowledge. While some works provide us with fresh insights into the political and cultural dynamics of colonial encounters, others delineate the exhibitionary regimen of colonialism and the colonizer’s profound impulse towards the naming and thus appropriation of all that comes within his grasp. The works chosen for this seminar range over a considerable terrain, drawn as they are from studies of colonization in India, Egypt, the Americas, Australia, and Africa, but also with respect to the “disciplines” that were implicated in the process of colonization—history, anthropology, cartography, geography, literary studies, among others.
C201W/C191O: Genocide in World History: Case Studies and Historical Methods	Benjamin Madley	M 2:00P-4:50P	The systematic mass murder of specific populations is a recurring phenomenon in world history. In this seminar you will examine genocide through readings, discussions, writing a book review, delivering a presentation, and creating a historiography or research paper. We will first consider definitions before addressing how to write an essay about genocide. During the following weeks, we will examine genocides in the United States and its colonial antecedents, California, the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Our discussions of these cases will reference genocidal intent, motives, ideologies, legal frameworks, killing processes, resistance, survival, post-genocidal justice, and memory as well as genocide detection, prevention, and intervention. We will also address six questions at the heart of genocide studies. First, what is genocide? Second, why does it happen? Third, why do people participate? Fourth, why does it take distinctive forms? Fifth, how and why do genocides end? And, finally, how does one write genocide history?
204A Departmental Seminar: Approaches, Methods, Debates, Practices	Carla Pestana	F 2:00P-4:50P	Introduction to range of important methodological approaches and theoretical debates about writing of history that are influential across fields, geographical contexts, and temporal periods to stimulate conversation and connection across fields, inviting students to think collectively and expansively about study and praxis of history.
214: The Genesis of East Asia	Richard Von Glahn	W 2:00P-4:50P	During the period from 200 BCE to 1200 CE East Asia acquired its definitive modern boundaries, encompassing three unified states (China, Korea, and Japan) that shared a common cultural, linguistic, and historical heritage. Only recently, though, have scholars begun to move beyond the histories of separate nation-states to consider the long-term process of political, economic, social, and cultural interaction among these three countries (and with Central Asia and India as well) that generated this distinctive East Asian civilization. This course will examine recent scholarship on the formation of East Asia from the different perspectives of national history, East Asian civilization, and world history.