History

This course offers a study of the pre-Hispanic cultures that populated Mexico including means of production, scientific development, and daily life. It analyzes the concept of Mesoamerica, Aridoamerica, and Oasisamerica. Other topics include: languages and linguistic map; systems of production and subsistence; Mesoamerican numbering and calendar; Mesoamerican worldview.

At the center of this course is film as historical sources. The course presents and applies the methods for analyzing audiovisual sources, and it examines how historical events were depicted. Using the example of the history of National Socialism, students examine both documentaries and feature films with regard to their handling of National Socialism and its (audio) visual legacy.

This course examines in depth the extensive structural and economic changes which have characterized Sweden since the mid-18th century and the concept of "The Swedish Model". This takes the form of a chronological analysis of the rapid transition from a typical poor agrarian society to an industrial welfare state. The course considers the following questions: Which were the driving forces behind the development? Why did they occur so late? Which were the production factors so favorable to Sweden? 

This general education course explores the formation, development, and change of the East Asian world. It also analyzes its common characteristics and cultural basis.

History—both the actual physical materials that help historians establish a timeline of events of the past and the imaginings contemporaries have of those events—is a crucial part of feminist and gay rights activism. This course analyzes feminist organizing in the U.K. and gay rights organizing in the U.S. from two perspectives. First, it delves into specific historical moments that have created significant cultural and political reverberations, such the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York and the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp from 1981. Second, it examines how those events and others become parts of the storytelling used by the feminist and gay rights movements as tools to advance their demands in specific national contexts. From this dual articulation, the seminar examines the relationship between the past and the present as well as the stakes that this reciprocity has for advancing or hindering social progress. Students engage in independent and original research as they learn to engage in historical archival research and think about these issues from the perspective of apprentice scholars.