Spring 2024 Graduate Courses

(Tentative schedule; subject to change)

Course No. & Name	Professor/Lecturer	Day/Time	Course Description
HIST 200J : Advanced Historiography: Near East (Ottoman + Some Early Modern Middle East)	C. H. Koh	W 3-5:50	This is a reading-intensive course designed for graduate students interested to learn about historiographic trends in Anglo-American scholarship on the Middle East (mainly Ottoman Empire), circa fifteenth to early twentieth centuries. (mainly early modern period, with some reference to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries)
C200M: Topics in Historiography: Japan	K. Hirano	TBD	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 C187R. S/U or letter grading.
HIST 200Q:Comparative Studies in Structures of Oppression: Slavery, The Holocaust, Genocide, and the Caste System	V. Lal	W 2-4:50	This is a course intended for graduate students as it is reading‐intensive. The course will engage with some aspects of the literature on slavery, the holocaust, genocide, and the caste system, partly in an attempt to understand the nature of oppression, the evil that men are capable of doing to others, and the manner in which systems of oppression are upheld. We will also consider in what respects the study of history may be usefully complemented by a study of ethics and philosophy. There will be readings from, among others, Orlando Patterson, Hannah Arendt, Hegel, Saidiya Hartman, Zygmunt Bauman, Omer Bartov, Robert Jay Lifton, B. R. Ambedkar, and others.
HIST M200W: New Directions in Native American History: Contact, Conflict, and Survival	B. Madley	M 2-4:50	This seminar is intended for any student interested in deepening their understanding of Native American history. It will involve the close reading of seven books, making a presentation, writing a book review, and writing a historiography or research paper. Our discussions will reference themes of accommodation, adaptation, assimilation, agency, violence, resistance, and survival while focusing on five questions at the heart of recent scholarship analyzing relations between Native Americans and newcomers. First, were relations inherently full of conflict or could human agency create other outcomes? Second, were the primary drivers behind most conflicts ideological or material? Can we separate the two? Third, how did differing ideas about gender, labor, law, land, and religion shape interactions? Fourth, to what extent did interactions and conflicts with newcomers strengthen tribal identities, complicate them, or transform them? Finally, how do historical interactions between Native Americans and newcomers echo into the present?
HIST 201B: Persecution and Defiance: Religious Minorities in the Roman World 200-700 CE	G. Woolf	W 9-11:50	This course will look at the treatment of Christians, Jews, Manichaeans, heretic and pagan minorities in the later Roman empire, roughly from the second century to the seventh CE. We will consider this through case studies and documents focused on Roman lands, but we will glance at similar phenomena in Gothic and Vandal territory, in Arabia and in the Persian Empire. This is the age of the rise of monotheisms and empires across much of western Asia and modern Europe. Most contained minority populations identified and identifying themselves in religious terms. It is an age documented through accounts of martyrdom and edicts of persecution and (occasionally) of toleration. It has been the focus of important new research by scholars such as Kate Cooper, Garth Fowden, Candida Moss, Eric Rebillard and Brent Shaw. This seminar is sponsored by the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, which will bring in a number of guest speakers. Sessions with guest speakers will be open to faculty and other interested graduate students. Other classes will be restricted to those enrolled in the course.
HIST 201D: Social philosophy and early modern political theory.	P. Stacey	R 3-5:50	This seminar explores the intellectual life of classical theories of societas in early modern political thought. Our work begins in the texts of ancient Roman philosophy – in the works of Cicero and, even more importantly, in the moral treatises of Seneca – and then moves to the revival of interest in their ideas about human society in post-classical Europe among humanist and scholastic thinkers. Seneca conceptualizes human beings as animals naturally inclined to treat one another as socii. Seneca likes exploiting a dual meaning in this Latin term. We are, he thinks, allies in a military sense, bound together by our common rational nature to help protect one another against physical aggression. But we are also partners engaged in a joint venture, a commercial enterprise in which it makes sense to share the world’s resources, originally placed in our common ownership, in relations of giving and receiving. For Seneca, this network of exchange binds us together, giving us good reasons – and a moral obligation – to cultivate the virtues of generosity and gratitude. These philosophical claims became a major source of philosophical inspiration for Renaissance and early modern thinkers from Petrarch onwards. By the early sixteenth century, Seneca’s doctrines about the social effects of gratitude and liberality upon political life had become sufficiently prominent in Italian Renaissance thinking to preoccupy Machiavelli. In England, Seneca’s account of how human society originally held things in common ownership is an important source of Thomas More’s communism in Utopia. Philosophical interest in Seneca’s work proved enduring: from the pages of Hobbes to those of David Hume, Seneca’s emphasis on the indispensability of gratitude to successful human relations continued to command considerable reverence. This seminar is designed to excavate the history of this current of thought in European intellectual life.
HIST C201H: Asian American Culture, Cuisine, and Economy	V. Matsumoto	R 2-4:50	This joint undergraduate and graduate seminar will examine aspects of Asian American history through foodways (ideas and practices relating to food), considering issues of gender, generation, the adaptation of ethnic culture, ceremony and memory, and restaurant work and entrepreneurship, particularly in immigrant and refugee communities. Students will synthesize and discuss a wide range of primary and secondary sources, including scholarly essays, memoirs, fiction, and poetry. The first two essay assignments will provide an introduction to analyzing primary sources; for the final research paper, students will utilize both primary material and scholarly literature.”
HIST 201L Topics in History: China	A. Goldman	T 1-3:50	Seminar, three hours. Graduate course involving reading, lecturing, and discussion of selected topics. May be repeated for credit. When concurrently scheduled with course 191, undergraduates must obtain consent of instructor to enroll. S/U or letter grading.
HIST C201N: Topics in History: Africa	G. Lydon	M 3-5:50	Seminar, three hours. Designed for graduate students. Reading and discussion of selected topics. May be repeated for credit. May be concurrently scheduled with course C191J. S/U or letter grading.
HIST 246C: Introduction to U.S. History: 20th Century	T. Higbie	TBD	Seminar, three hours. Graduate survey of significant literature dealing with U.S. history from the Colonial period to the present. Each course may be taken independently for credit.
HIST 266B: Seminar: Colonial Latin American History	K. Terraciano	R 1-3:50	Seminar, three hours. Requisite: course 266A. Letter grading.