Fall 2025 Graduate Courses

(Tentative schedule; subject to change)

Course No. & Name	Professor/Lecturer	Day/Time	Course Description
HIST 200F: Topics in Historiography: World History	Prof. S. Aslanian	Thrs, 3pm-5:50pm	Seminar, three hours. Designed for graduate students. Proseminar on historiography involving close reading and critical discussion of secondary scholarship and primary sources on selected topics. Reading, discussion, and analytical writing culminating in one or several historiographical essays. May be repeated for credit. May be concurrently scheduled with course C187O. S/U or letter grading.
HIST 200J: Advanced Historiography: Near East: Historiography of Modern Middle East I	Prof. J. Gelvin	W, 2pm-4:50pm	Overview of most important trends in historiography of modern Middle East. Topics range from social and cultural history; to studies of space, gender, and narrativity; to contributions of Foucault, Gramsci, and Said. Part one of two-part study. Part two not required, but completion of both parts fulfills Middle East field historiography requirement.
HIST 200O: Advanced Historiography: Science/ Technology: Decolonial Historiography of Science and Medicine	Prof. E. O’Brien	Thrs, 1pm-3:50pm	In this historiography course we will consider a rich selection of literature on science and medicine beyond western Europe and the United States, with particular emphasis on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. Topics will include histories of race, heredity and blood; histories of nature and environment; Indigenous scientific ontologies and epistemologies; imperial and transnational knowledge networks, and the increasing entanglement of hegemony, modernization, and colonization with scientific claims-making. We will read canonical and new texts to explore a range of decolonial methodologies.
HIST C200R: New Perspectives on Israel-Palestine: Narratives, Negotiation and Mediation	Prof. D.N. Myers	Thrs, 9am-11:50am	Examination of how history of Israel and Palestine has been narrated, with particular emphasis on dual lenses through which Israelis and Palestinians have observed their relationship and resulting conflict. Analysis of largely unsuccessful efforts to achieve negotiated solution to this conflict; understanding causes of these repeated failures; and investigation of new ways of thinking about this conflict and its future, based on new approaches that have been advanced in recent years. Students examine their own ideas with experts on this topic, and with people who have participated in negotiations in various rounds of Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
HIST C201C: Topics in History: Medieval Los Angeles	Prof. J. Kreiner	W, 2pm-4:50pm	The city of Los Angeles is saturated with memories of the Middle Ages. The evidence is all around us: there are clues throughout the city’s architecture, cinema, museums, and beyond that point to the prominence of medieval history in this modern metropolis. In this capstone seminar, we will track the reception of medieval history across Los Angeles to better understand that interplay between past and present. We will ask how the city’s sense of the period was shaped by contemporary interests and perspectives; and conversely how medieval history has shaped the profile of the city. In the process you’ll will become familiar with the rich archives of the UCLA Library Special Collections and other archives and museum collections around the city; and you’ll develop an original research project that contributes to the young field of medievalism — by illuminating what the Middle Ages has meant to Los Angeles.
HIST C201P – Topics in History: History of Religions: Muslim Saints and Social History	Prof. N. Green	W, 2pm-4:50pm	Stories of Muslim saints began being written down in the eleventh century in what is now Iraq and Iran and in the following centuries such writings spread as far as India, Indonesia, Africa, the Mediterranean and Inner Asia. Through detailing the interactions of Muslim holy men (and sometimes women) with people of all backgrounds, including non-Muslims, these hagiographical writings in such languages as Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Swahili and Malay open fascinating windows on social history in various world regions. From sultans and soldiers to poets, tribespeople, villagers, the poor and members of other religions, the stories of the saints allow us to access the concerns, conceptions, and operations of social life. Requiring no background in Islamic history, this seminar uses translated texts in English to uncover the beliefs and lifeways of ordinary people from Asia, Africa and the Middle East in the medieval and modern periods.
HIST 203A – Social Theory and Comparative History	Prof. C. Koh and Prof. M. Zhang	M, 1pm-3:50pm	This seminar considers the synchronicities and structural parallels across early modern Eurasia, with a focus on the Qing and Ottoman empires as two case studies. We focus on three broad areas: Imperial Ideology (Empires of Thought), Imperial Operations (Empires in Practice), and Society, Materiality, and Knowledge (Empires of Things). Early modern empires confronted many similar problems: the ideological and administrative problems of managing diversity, the informational and fiscal problems caused by distance, the centrifugal and centripetal tensions of power, and the delineation and co-optation of status groups, to name a few. The many different solutions that had developed in different regions also shared some striking similarities in their underlying logic. In jointly exploring such differences and commonalities across early modern Eurasia, we aim to devise fresh methodological approaches to tackle old comparative questions in new ways. The course is offered in conjunction with the 2025-26 Core Program at the UCLA 17th- and 18th-century Studies. Students will be well prepared with the relevant historiographies after taking this course and are encouraged to attend the conferences.
HIST 204A: Departmental Seminar: Approaches, Methods, Debates, Practices (required for first year students)	Prof. K. Terraciano	T, 2pm-4:50pm	Required of all first-year departmental graduate students. 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. Introduction to sampling of scholarship produced by department faculty members with whom students may work.
HIST 213A – History of Women, Men, Sexuality	Prof. K. Marino	W, 2pm-4:50pm	Seminar, three hours. Readings include historiography and theory, as well as classic and new historical studies drawn widely from U.S., European, Latin American, Middle Eastern, and Asian history to have diversity of interests and perspectives represented and discussed. S/U or letter grading.
HIST M218 – Paleography of Latin and Vernacular Manuscripts, 900 to 1500	Prof. M. Fisher	Thrs, 2pm-4:50pm	Lecture, three hours; discussion, two hours. Introduction to history of Latin and vernacular manuscript book from 900 to 1500 to (1) train students to make informed judgments with regard to place and date of origin, (2) provide training in accurate reading and transcription of later medieval scripts, and (3) examine manuscript book as witness to changing society that produced it. Focus on relationship between Latin manuscripts and vernacular manuscripts with regard to their respective presentation of written texts. S/U or letter grading.
HIST M299 – Interdisciplinary American Studies	Prof. U. McMillan	T, 12pm-2:50pm	Discussion, four hours. Readings, discussion, and papers on common theme, team-taught by faculty members from different departments. Topics vary according to participating faculty. May be repeated for credit with consent of instructors. S/U or letter grading.