History

This course examines the cultural production of the 1960s in the United States, a period of enormous socio-cultural and political change. Topics include: New Journalism; the Civil Rights Movement; politicization of rock and roll; student protests; the Summer of Love; Vietnam; rioting in Chicago 1968; Hunter Thompson and the Hell's Angels; Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

This course exposes students to public and scientific debates pertaining to colonial past, and the gender studies, research methods, and writing of contemporary history. It explores these concepts through several lenses over three parts of the course: historical approaches to the colonial past, the use of gender studies, and the new history of colonial wars. Each theme includes an introduction to the field of research, discussions and presentations based on readings, and scientific articles and archives.

This course examines all aspects of Black people’s history; it even attempts to trace the origins of the Black race, leading to the present distribution of the Black race in the world, the causes for migration and routes along which they traveled, Blacks in South America, in the Caribbean and in other parts of the world, the Blacks and Africa in the 19th and 20th Centuries and the Black Renaissance.

This course is a survey of the history of the Jewish People with an emphasis on the modern period and the development of the State of Israel. Course topics include an introduction to the national memory: the TANAKH (Hebrew Scriptures or “OLD TESTAMENT”), First Temple Period, Second Temple Period, Jewish existence in the Byzantine and Islamic worlds, the European Middle Ages, Russian Jewry, antisemitism, the American experience, and Herzl and Zionism.

This course provides a historical and political introduction to modern Afghanistan. While it covers a historical timeline spanning from the late 19th century through 2021, it does not provide an exhaustive historical catalogue of events, but rather a genealogy of the political processes and factors that are pertinent to the evaluation of the processes of state-building and nation-building in Afghanistan through today. Covering the country's modern political history from its genesis during The Great Game and the birth of Afghan nationalism in the early 20th century, up to the occupations by the USSR and United States and their political consequences, the course attempts to identify the most salient patterns and trends about the country's political elites and institutions, as well as the interventions of foreign powers, all of which have affected the transformations of the state in Afghanistan.

This course examines Postcolonial Studies in dialogue with local voices of critique across fields and disciplines to reexamine (post)colonial experiences of Hong Kong and their legacy and imprints expressed in cultural, literary, cinematic, historical texts. By unpacking the anomality of the case of Hong Kong and organizing local critical scholarship on cultural production, this course also seeks to “reconfigure postcolonial discourse as a critical mode of imagination in a world altered now by global capitalism”.

This course examines the political, cultural, and economic situation of the Jewish community in the 19th and 20th centuries.  Students analyze various forms of Jewish cultural and political identity. Students develop a better understanding of the context that led to the Holocaust and its dramatic consequences. Lastly, students familiarize themselves with the most important Jewish political writers.