Winter 2021 Graduate Courses

(Tentative schedule; subject to change)

Course No. & Name	Professor/Lecturer	Day/Time	Course Description
200I.1 – Mexico from Independence to Revolution	Fernando Perez-Montesinos	W 2:00P-4:50P	This course offers a comprehensive examination of Mexico’s first century after independence (1810-1910). It takes on a number of key developments, including the collapse of the Spanish empire, the wars of independence, the U.S.-Mexican War, the landmark liberal reforms of the mid-nineteenth century, and the impressive capitalist expansion of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using a sample of works by leading scholars, students will acquire three fundamental skills of the historian’s craft as applied to the study of Mexican history. First, they will learn to read historical works critically by means of exploring the way historians use primary and secondary sources to piece together interpretations of the Mexican past (methodology). Second, students will learn to identify and discuss the guiding themes and questions informing such historical interpretations (historiography). Finally, students will learn about the actual events and processes shaping the history of Mexico’s formative century (history).
200I.2-Advanced Historiography: Latin America	Kevin Terraciano	R 11:00A-1:50P	This graduate seminar examines the evolution of Colonial Latin American historiography, focusing especially on the last four decades of scholarship. In general, “colonial” is defined as the period from the late 15th to the early 19th centuries. This course is flexible enough to accommodate the research interests of each student while providing an overview of important works and broad trends in the field. In addition to general readings and discussions, each student will be encouraged to choose a particular topic and to investigate how histories of that topic have changed and evolved over time.
200O – Advanced Historiography: Science/Technology	Ted Porter	W 3:00P-5:50P	History of Science Seminar
M200W – Advanced Historiography: American Indian Peoples	Benjamin Madley	M 2:00P-4:50P	This seminar will introduce students to recent work in Native American history. Readings and discussions will address accommodation, adaptation, assimilation, agency, violence, resistance, and survival while focusing on questions at the heart of recent scholarship analyzing relations between Native Americans and newcomers.
C201H.1 – Topics in Hist.: U.S.	Peter Hudson	T 10:00A-12:50P	This seminar will consider current scholarship on the history and theory of US imperialism and anti-imperialism. While we will focus largely on the manifestations of US imperialism in twentieth century Africa and the Caribbean, students should consider the texts as templates whose approaches can be applied to other regions, including Asia and Latin America. Readings are interdisciplinary in approach and will often move beyond the US historical field into geography, political economy, political theory, legal studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and Black Studies.
201J – Topics in History: Near East	James Gelvin	W 2:00P-4:50P	One of the characteristics of the “New Middle East” is the spread of virulent forms of sectarianism to places in which it had either been muted or non-existent. This course explores the phenomenon of sectarianism, looking at case studies since the nineteenth century (when it was invented) through the present day. Instructor’s permission necessary for non-History Department students.
201M/191R – Japan	William Marotti	T 4:00P-6:50P	This course will explore the changing dynamics and experiences of the American-dominated post-WWII occupation of mainland Japan by Allied forces from 1945-1952, conventionally referred to as the “Occupation.” We will discuss the debates concerning the purpose and goals of the Occupation (particularly “democratization”), and the ways in which such goals and practices shifted in accord with both new international exigencies, such as Cold War and war in Korea, and events within Japan. We will concern ourselves with the experience of both occupiers and occupied, and with the content of historiographical debates over the Occupation as both event and model. Requirements include weekly discussion question posts (for grads: weekly reading responses), a review essay of 10-15 pages, and brief class presentations.
213D – Transnational Histories of Women, Gender, and Sexuality	Katherine Marino	R 2:00P-4:50P	Taking examples from the Americas, the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, and other parts of the world, this course will explore transnational histories of women, gender, and sexuality from the 18th century to the present. The readings will explore a variety of themes–feminisms and other social/political movements; circuits of empire and racial capitalism; migration; reproductive science and technology; family, kinship, and intimacy, among others. The texts will help us probe the historiographical and analytic payoffs of both the transnational and feminist turns. Both historiographical turns have focused on decentering acts and processes that often dominate traditional historical study, challenging conventional narratives, and shedding new light on some central analytical categories. We’ll explore what insights these histories offer in terms of place, periodization, and politics, and regarding knowledge production. We’ll also explore what questions about histories of women, gender, and sexuality benefit from transnational analysis, and what lessons these histories impart for more local or national studies. We will also discuss practical questions about how to pose historical questions, pursue research, and balance multiple national historiographies, and will have an opportunity to speak with some of the authors of the works we read.
214 – Islamic Law in World History	Ghislaine Lydon	R 9:00A-11:50A	This world history seminar focuses on the practice of the law in Muslim societies. It will introduce you to the principles and institutions of Sunni Islamic legal traditions. Then we will read historical research on Islamic legal practice in various parts of the Muslim world, from the early-modern period to more recent times. It is designed as a reading seminar and with a short research component.
246B – Nations, Revolutions, Empires: 19th-Century America in Local & Global Perspectives	Kevin Kim	W 1:00P-3:50P	This graduate course aims to serve several purposes—to introduce graduate students to new and essential scholarship, to hone our methodological approaches, and to survey U.S. history—by interrogating 19th-century America as a terrain of diverse nations, revolutions, and empires. Disrupting the traditional narrative depicting 19th-century America as rising, in linear and triumphalist fashion, from a provincial post-revolutionary republic to a mature industrial empire, this course instead emphasizes how diverse local and global national, revolutionary, and imperial processes impacted Americans—and non-Americans—across the nineteenth century. While not designed to be comprehensive as a history survey, this seminar (intended for history graduate students preparing for general exams as well as non-history students interested in historical approaches) proceeds chronologically and thematically across many of the century’s most important developments. These themes and approaches include war and empire, race and gender, politics and the state, labor and the economy, nature and the environment, and global and transnational history from the early Republic era to the Spanish-American War. Approaching the nineteenth-century United States as a nation among nations—indeed, a nation itself with competing national visions and constituencies—this course aims, most broadly, at challenging how historians and scholars think about nation, revolution, and empire.
282A – Gender & Sexuality in Qing and Modern China	Andrea Goldman	W 6:00P-8:50P	This is the first quarter of a two-quarter research and reading seminar in Chinese language source materials related to gender and sexuality in Qing and Modern China. The weekly source readings will be paired with scholarly writings that make use of or cast light upon the document under evaluation. The major paper assignment for the first quarter of the seminar will analyze a set of primary documents related to late imperial and/or modern Chinese history but need not be focused on the texts read in common. During the second quarter, students will develop a research paper based on their chosen set of primary documents. Knowledge of modern and classical is Chinese required for this course.