History

This course examines key moments of the long-twentieth century of the Western civilization from the Great War to the Financial Crisis of 2008 and the Brexit. Challenging the dichotomy of ‘West’ and ‘East’, it pays attention to the way in which different civilizations interconnected themselves. 

This course surveys the internal development and external relations of East Asia since 1800. Topics include interaction with the West, internal rebellions and reforms, the importance of certain key figures, the changing roles of women, protests, and current social issues. By the end of the course, students should have a firm understanding of changes in East Asia over the past two centuries and be able to assess these historical factors that shaped the current societies.

The course surveys Japan’s international relations with China, Korea, and Europe between the 15th to 17th century. First, the course looks at the development of diplomacy and trade in East Asia, focusing on the “sea-closing policy” of China during the 14-16th centuries; the activity of Japanese diplomatic and trade missions to China, and the collapse of the tribute system. Then it investigates the relations with Europe during the 16th century, examining the new quality of foreign relations during the Edo Period; the development and role of the port cities Hirado and Nagasaki, and the trade with the Europeans and the Chinese. 
 

This course is about Berlin, and the story of its tumultuous and epoch defining twentieth century. This history is examined through various lenses: the biographies of individuals; the words of writers who bore witness to the vertiginous social, political, and physical changes the city underwent; and buildings and monuments whose physical construction, destruction and reconstruction reflected the ideological turmoil and conflict of twentieth century Berlin. Famous Berliners covered include the murdered Communist leader Rosa Luxemburg, the artist Käthe Kollwitz, the actress Marlene Dietrich, the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, the adopted Berliner David Bowie, and the famous East German dissident musician Wolf Biermann. The contextualized stories of these individuals offer a unique perspectives politically, artistically, and socially into the tumult and struggle that marked their times in the city. These figures occupy a range of different positions as Berliners, as radicals, as artists of resistance to or collaboration with Nazism, and Communism, as drifters and exiles whose stories reflect Berlin's unique position in the twentieth century as no man's land, frontier, a city adrift in the sands of Central Europe. In a similar way, the course examines the words of writers who bore witness to the extremism and societal upheaval that marked twentieth century Berlin. From the witnessing of Roth and Isherwood to life in Weimar and Nazi Berlin, to the social and political commentary by Christa Wolf and Peter Schneider on the moral struggles of life lived on different sides of the Berlin Wall, the course assesses their writings in their historical contexts. Finally, the course covers the story of places in Berlin whose physical building, destruction, and rebuilding can be situated in the wider systems of ideology, power, and social relations that so cataclysmically defined the physical landscape of Berlin after 1933. In this, the focus is on the story of Potsdamer Platz, the Palace of the People and as an opposite postscript to Berlin's twentieth century, the Holocaust Memorial in Mitte. Structured largely chronologically, the course works with films and novels whilst building on a clear historiographical base provided in class seminars. The teaching is augmented by physical excursions into Berlin to trace the stories encountered and class discussions form the basis for a seminar paper that students are required to submit at the end of the course. This history course approaches the story of Berlin through the reflections and refractions of individual humans' lives who struggled upon the immense stage of a city at the very symbolic and literal heart of the catastrophes of the twentieth century.

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.