History

This course explores human rights as embedded in specific historical circumstances, and looks at their codification in international law as the product of heated political debates. The first part of the course examines the topic from a historical perspective. Students trace the genealogy of the concept paying particular attention to its continuity or discontinuity with respect to the notion of natural law, and focus on the birth of the “human rights regime.” The second part of the course involves the examination of specific case studies. In the third and final part of the course students look at critical readings of human rights as possibly an instrument for “Western hegemony,” or as inadequate in other ways.

This course introduces the background, theory and method of historical anthropology, and its application in historical research. Course topics include culture and tradition, structure and interpretation, meaning and metaphor, state and power, time, space, memory and imagination, and modernity and world system.

This course introduces the history of Korean Americans from the early 20th-century to the present. Students explore how major social, political, and economic forces in the United States, Korea, and around the world—such as immigration law, the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the U.S. civil rights movement, feminism, and religion—impact the ways in which Korean Americans develop their identities and communities. Using a variety of sources, including oral histories, autobiographies, photographs, music, and film, the course investigates how Korean Americans have and continue to negotiate the intersections of race, class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and sexuality. 

This course examines 20th century Australia from the time of Federation to the Apology in 2008. 20th century Australia was a period of vision and revisioning, a time of grand schemes and grand failures, and of intense questioning around notions of identity, place, race, and nation. This course examines the events that Australians lived through and the issues that preoccupied them, their cultural lives and the myths, legends, visions, and prejudices through which Australians imagined themselves and others. Major topics include: Federation, World War One, the Depression, World War Two, immigration, the Petrov Affair, Vietnam, the Dismissal, Mabo, the Tampa, and the Apology. These events become sites for analyzing concepts of nation, the politics of race, ideologies of domesticity and the family, social movements, the impact of modernity, the cinema, the experience of the cities and the bush, and importantly, Australia's place in the region and the world.

Power of great empires was always based on their economy. Sustainable economic growth is therefore crucial for keeping the political influence as well as for ensuring the prosperity for its inhabitants. Economic power and prosperity of the past empires were often threatened by similar economic policy failures as we know today: fiscal crises, inflation, extensive regulation, or institutional mismanagement. Course lectures provide an overview of the economic policy and institutional failures that led to economic decay of the selected past European powers. Lessons from history are compared with the current situation in Central Europe. Students widen and apply acquired knowledge to current economic issues. This course combines application of basic Institutional Economics and International Political Economy.