History

This course explores the emergence of Zionism and the Israeli state from the late 19th century until today by looking at some of the foundational movements and moments in Israeli history. Themes include expressions of alienation and discrimination, the perceived ethnic gap, and schisms in Israeli society, including Jewish-Arab tensions. The course explores the broad range of influences that have shaped Israeli society and politics: European, Ottoman, Middle Eastern, Jewish, and Palestinian.

This course focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: it looks at the roots and history of the question contextualizing it into regional and international political developments. The course covers the most important events that characterized the conflict providing a solid historic background for analyzing contemporary developments. Moreover, the course analyzes the role of international and regional actors into the making of the conflict while also highlighting the impact of the Palestinian issue into the Arab world. The first class provides the theoretical tools for a critical analysis of the conflict, the different actors, and their political role. This approach challenges the traditional mainstream paradigms around the Arab-Israeli crisis. The following classes are also informed by this critical approach: the analysis of important events such as the Suez crisis, the 1967 and 1973 Wars, the emergence of Palestinian resistance, the impact of the Cold War, and the role of international players explore the political dynamics behind the mere facts. Regional events impacted by the Arab-Israeli conflict such as the Black September and the Lebanese civil war are discussed in
order to highlight the influence and relevance of the Palestinian question on regional politics. Having built a historical background and critical understanding of the conflict, the last part of the course focuses on contemporary events and the emergence of new actors, new diplomatic strategies, as well as the popular mobilization that is characterizing current political developments. Finally, the course discusses possible solutions.

This course offers a broad understanding of present-day Spanish society -- Spanish national culture, regional identity, group consciousness -- through the study of Spanish contemporary history of the last century, as well as current events, as presented in the media, cinema, and the press.

This course provides an intensive overview of contemporary Mexican history and politics, covering the period between the Mexican Revolution and the transition to electoral democracy, Themes covered include: current economic situation, social movements, minorities, migration and transnationalization, and US-Mexico relations. The course reader includes both historical and sociological articles and is supplemented with readings from daily and weekly periodicals.

The course treats in considerable detail a wide variety of historical subjects, including the East African and Indian Ocean trade. Topics include trade and politics in the Zambesi valley, the Trans-Saharan trade, the Sudanic states and the Moroccan invasion, developments in the Mahgreb during Ottoman rule, religion and conflict in Ethiopia, the inter-lacustrine cluster of States: Iwo, Bacwezi, Bunyoro and Buganda, the Luba and Lunda states, Pre-European trade and society in Southern Africa: Sana and Khoikhoi, the Nguni and Sotho chiefdoms, Dutch settlement, Boer dispersion and Khoisan resistance, the roots of the “native problem,” prelude to the Mfecane and the Great Trek.

The course invites students on an exciting literary and historical journey through the grand shifts of Europe in the twentieth century: from Great Britain’s crumbling class systems at the turn of the centuries to the French trenches of World War I and from there to the reactionary roaring twenties, the rise of fascism and Hitler’s claim to power in 1933, resulting in the horrors of the Holocaust. The course culminates at the shallows of the Cold War period, with its absurdities and the shadows of the past still lingering. The chosen texts for this class provide a trident of literary historical accounts: autobiographical, fictional, and historiographical. The course begins with a cultural, political, and physical view of fast-changing early-century Europe. It then moves to World War I and how that changed landscapes for civilians, soldiers, and the insider-outsider American expatriate community, most famously of Paris. During discussions of WWII and the Shoa, the focus is on the histories that have remained and the histories that have been lost since the war. This is discussed through the lens of those who documented (in the form of diaries), those who retold the stories as second-generation survivors, and those who didn’t have access to the stories of the horrors of the war, and therefore had to fill in the blanks themselves. The last chapter of the class discussion is devoted to the aftermath of Nazi terrors and the contradictions of living under Cold War conditions. During the seminars, students are encouraged to engage with the texts from a critical point of view: for example, what does a feminist reading of WWI literature look like? How do we de-colonialize our understanding of the Roaring Twenties? What histories have still gone untold in our existing Holocaust-literature canon? The class comes with a day-long academic field trip (specifics to be announced) that gives students the chance to experience some of the topics discussed in class.