Related Courses

The history and memoirs of Holocaust testimony. How victims’ experiences are narrated and assessed by historians. Questions regarding memory and history.

A comprehensive treatment of Greek literature from Homer to the imperial period, with an emphasis on archaic and Hellenistic poetry. The course prepares for the comprehensive oral qualifying examinations. The student is expected to read extensively in the original language, working toward familiarity with the range and variety of the literature.

 

Introduction to techniques of archaeological laboratory analysis, with quantitative data styles and statistics appropriate to each. Topics include dating of artifacts, sourcing of ancient materials, remote sensing, and microscopic and biochemical analysis. Specific techniques covered vary from year to year.

 

Historical roots of contemporary ethnic and racial formations and competing theories of ethnicity, race, and migration. Cultural constructions and social practices of race, ethnicity, and migration in the United States and around the world.

 

An overview of the history of modern Central Asia—modern-day Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China. This course shows Central Asia to be a pivotal participant in some of the major global issues of the 20th and 21st centuries, from environmental degradation and Cold War, to women’s emancipation and postcolonial nation-building, to religion and the rise of mass society. It also includes an overview of the region’s longer history, of the conquests by the Russian and Chinese empires, the rise of Islamic modernist reform movements, the Bolshevik victory, World War II, the perestroika, and the projects of post-Soviet nation-building. Readings in history are supplemented by such primary sources as novels and poetry, films and songs, government decrees, travelogues, courtly chronicles, and the periodical press. All readings and discussions in English.

A careful reading of Karl Marx’s classic critique of capitalism, Capital volume 1, a work of philosophy, political economy, and critical social theory that has had a significant global readership for over 150 years. Selected readings also from Capital volumes 2 and 3.

 

This course proposes a critical examination of the French Enlightenment, with a focus on issues of progress, universalism, empire, and race. We confront these notions with approaches that have emerged in the postcolonial field of studies as well as gender and sexuality studies. Canonical authors are reinterpreted in that light along with lesser-known works. We are assisted by contemporary historians and critics of the Enlightenment, principally Michel Foucault, Lynn Hunt, and Robert Darnton. Readings by Mme. de Graffigny, Mme. de Stael, Mme. de Duras, Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, Raynal and Cugoano. Conducted in French.