From soup chefs and grammarians to zombies and supervillains, Nazis are ubiquitous in pop culture, most frequently serving as representations of pure evil. This course introduces students to key ideas/concepts of National Socialist ideology and examines the use and misuse of National Socialism across the 20th and 21st centuries. Through an analysis of depictions of Nazis within cultural and historical contexts, the course considers the reasons for, and the impact of compartmentalizing and oversimplifying Nazis and National Socialism, and investigates what these pop culture representations obscure. This course is taught in English.
This class surveys the political, social, and cultural foundations of East Asian civilization from earliest times to around 1600. From the rise of states and empires to the Ways of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, we will explore the flowering of Chinese cultural norms across Asia as well as consider the unique expressions of these norms throughout China, Korea, and Japan.
This class focuses on the modern transformations of China, Japan, and Korea from roughly 1800 to the present, considering the relationships between these three countries and the wider world. With many describing the 21st century as the “Asian century,” students will gain a greater understanding of key topics that have shaped modern Asian experiences, such as war and memory, reform and revolution, and empire and decolonization.
This course surveys European women's gendered experiences of war, revolution, and terrorism from the French Revolution to the present. Adopting gender analysis as its methodological framework, it focuses on the changing constructions of femininity and masculinity in relation to major global upheavals and theories of violence in the modern world The course examines the impact of such developments on the lives of European women of different socioeconomic, regional, and racial backgrounds. Topics covered include the Russian Revolutions, World Wars I and II, global terrorism of the 1970s, and contemporary European feminist politics of immigration and the veil.
This course explores the social, political, and cultural history of the French Revolution from its origins in the eighteenth century to the fall of Napoleon's Empire. It highlights revolutionary debates over how to constitutionally and practically realize the Enlightenment principles of human rights, individual liberty, and social equality in the context of France and the French Empire. Topics include radical republicanism, popular violence and the Terror, the Haitian Revolution, women's revolutionary roles, gender and the reconfigured family, counterrevolution and the Church, the citizens' army, and the Napoleonic Empire. Not open for credit to students who have received credit for HIST 308.
An introduction to the field of environmental history, which asks how the natural world has shaped the course of human civilization, and how humans, in turn, have shaped the natural world, over time.
This second offering in a two-course sequence addresses the modern Middle East, and emphasizes the region's place in global politics and the world economy. Among the topics considered are European imperialism and local responses, nineteenth-century reform movements, the rise of the nation-state, the impact of Arab nationalism, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Islamic political movements, gender relations in the region, the importance of oil, the Iraq conflict, terrorism and the peace process.
The Arab-Israeli conflict has long dominated the politics of the Middle East and been seen as central to U.S. foreign policy in the region. This seminar considers the history of this conflict and the politicized historiographical debates that accompany it. Topics addressed include Zionism, Palestinian and Arab nationalism, the birth of the Arab refugee crisis, the effects of the 1967 and 1973 wars on the region, the use of terrorism, the two intifadas, and the Oslo peace process. Primary texts, secondary sources, and scholarly articles from a variety of perspectives will be used to investigate how people within and outside the region debate and fight over these issues.
A seminar dealing with important political, social, and intellectual movements in American history.
This course explores watershed changes in the strategies used to produce and circulate new knowledge in the early modern world (c. 1500 to 1800),
pursuing a global and interdisciplinary approach to understanding the diverse tools, embodied practices,socio political configurations, social and economic networks that contributed to the rise of modern science. Topics to be addressed may include natural magic, secrets and recipes; natural history collecting, empire and observation; human anatomy,medicine and the Galenic body; drug trials and experimentation; mechanical philosophy, androids, and the transfer of knowledge.
An exploration of the conservation and wilderness preservation movements, and their impacts on peoples, landscapes, and animal populations, with a focus on North America and Africa. The class will examine the historiography of these interrelated phenomena, including their connections with colonialism, urban growth, anti-colonial resistance, local and indigenous agency, tourism, and landscape ecology. Case studies will might include the Kruger National Park in South Africa, and various U.S. national parks. Attention will also be given to recent work on private and public/private conservation. Students will develop research projects in an area of their interest.
This course examines the first circumnavigation of the globe during the 16th century and considers how the two maritime empires of the time, Spain and Portugal, spawned not only the opening of new routes of commerce and the development of cartography but also the very idea of globalization.
A course concerned with analyzing how international and global integration shape local development. After reflecting on this integration during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its impact on nation-state formation and economic development, students analyze the construction of the post-World War II international system around the Bretton-Woods institutions. Attention is also given to how international norms pertaining to human rights and democracy apply to diverse countries during the current period of globalization, and to how transnational linkages shape economic and cultural transformations. The course concludes with discussion of living abroadincluding topics such as language acquisition and personal transformation. Required core course for IGS majors.
This course examines the implications of West and Central Africa's relations with and influences on the wider Atlantic world from the late 15th century, focusing on political formation, trade and socioeconomic change, and cultural interactions in Atlantic Africa. The course also considers topics such as diaspora, colonialism, decolonization, transnational social movements, democratization, development, migration, popular culture, tourism, and the global ramifications of West and Central Africa's integration into the Atlantic world.
This course introduces students to the diverse peoples, societies, and cultural practices associated with the Middle East North Africa (MENA). Course content is grounded in written and visual sources from anthropology but also draws on historical research, investigative journalism, documentary film, and popular media. Using these materials, the class explores several topics that have been of enduring interest to anthropologists of–and from–the region: religious practices and daily life, gender identities and sexualities, political power and resistance, and the formation of diasporic communities. Coverage of these topics also considers the conditions of knowledge production about the region and its political, social and cultural implications.
This course examines urban Africa as sites of culture, politics and economics from the pre-colonial period to recent times. It interrogates African urbanism as a product of local, transnational and global processes. The themes of the course include social formation, ethnicity, urban politics, citizenship, social movements, popular culture, religion, informal and illicit economy, technological adaptation and social change. The course draws on the interdisciplinary literature in African and global urban studies.
One of the defining features of life in the 21st century is the speed and intensity with which people, capital, commodities, ideas, and information mov—or flow—across the globe. These global flows however, impact people and communities in profoundly unequal ways. This course explores these uneven impacts from an anthropological perspective, by looking at how people in different parts of the world experience and live with “globalization.” Drawing primarily on ethnographic readings, this class asks: how do global flows shape our daily lives—not only economically and politically, but socially and culturally as well? How do they change both our sense of who we are and our experience of the world?
This course examines themes of Italian culture and society (such as art, architecture, music, food, folklore, migration) through texts from various media. Taught in Italian.
This course examines circumstances that facilitate or hinder the political, social, and economic incorporation of immigrants. In addition to reviewing early twentieth-century sociological theories of immigration, the course analyzes contemporary research on immigration from the standpoint of political science and related disciplines. While focused primarily on explaining patterns by which immigrants are incorporated in the United States and Europe, it also compares cases from Latin America, Eurasia, the Middle East, and other regions in relation to shared or dissimilar immigration policies, levels of economic development, and demographic compositions.
This course examines circumstances that facilitate or hinder the political, social, and economic incorporation of immigrants. In addition to reviewing early twentieth-century sociological theories of immigration, the course analyzes contemporary research on immigration from the standpoint of political science and related disciplines. While focused primarily on explaining patterns by which immigrants are incorporated in the United States and Europe, it also compares cases from Latin America, Eurasia, the Middle East, and other regions in relation to shared or dissimilar immigration policies, levels of economic development, and demographic compositions.