History

In 1937, anthropologist Tom Harrison, poet Charles Madge and filmmaker Humphrey Jennings began a "scientific experiment" recruiting members of the public, to "systematically" observe the lives of ordinary Britons. The Mass Observation project ran from 1937-1966 and was reanimated in 1981 continuing to today. This course uses the Mass Observation archive – held at the University of Sussex and substantially digitized by Adam Matthew – and its unique collection of diaries, study directives, and social surveys to explore class, gender, emotions, and experience across the second half of the twentieth century to the present. It also offers students first-hand insight into the sources and methods available (life writing, surveys and "directives," social investigations, oral histories) for interrogating constructions of gender, class, sexuality, race and ethnicity, age, ableism, and faith commitments over the last eighty years.  

Since 2022, the departure of French troops from the Sahel has marked the end of large-scale military operations that proved to be strategic failures for France. Among the criticisms leveled at political and military leaders, one recurring accusation is that they acted like a colonial power. To what extent did this “colonial legacy” influence the military intervention in the Sahel? What role did more recent legacies play (decolonization wars, “Françafrique” military cooperation, counterterrorism)? This course investigates these legacies by studying French officers' representations of African societies, Islam and jihad, and racial and ethnic categorizations. The sessions are organized around surveys and presentations by students and discussions with journalists and researchers in history and political science.

The Jewish eastern European encounter was among the most significant in the history of the European diasporic encounter. This course provides a comprehensive introduction to the political, legal, religious, cultural, and social ramifications of this encounter. It offers in-depth analysis of the emergence of Jewish autonomy and of the variegated cultural life of Jewish communities. It reflects on religious diversification including heretic and dissenting challenges to communal hierarchies and on the scope and limits of social, cultural and legal integration, as well as on the dramatic consequences of the partitions of Poland. It offers insights into the trajectories of formerly Polish-Jewish communities in Russia, the Habsburg Empire, and Prussia, as well as the impact of mass emigration. The emergence of very large Jewish communities and the impact of emigration from Eastern Europe in the late 19th century includes a reflection on the echoes of Eastern European Jewish culture in the Americas and in Palestine/Israel. Jewish political mobilization in the 20th c., the impact of antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence, and the catastrophe of the German occupation and the Holocaust are discussed as well as the attempts to rebuild Jewish life after the war and under communism. 

This course explores the Holocaust from different perspectives: the various stages of the Nazi persecution and extermination of Jews; Jewish voices, experiences and agency; and the attitude of the surrounding non-Jewish population towards the Holocaust. Thus, the course introduces what the historian Saul Freidländer called an “integrated history of the Holocaust”, taking into account perpetrators, Jewish victims and the surrounding societies. The geographical focus is on Eastern Europe, where almost all of the Holocaust killings had taken place. The course explores different types of sources and historiographical approaches: every-day life, cultural history, gender history, micro-history. The last sessions of the course explore how different societies coped with the memory of the Holocaust and the difficult past, examining Poland, France, and Israel.

In the period from roughly the late fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, developments took place that would form the basis of the world as we know it today. States took on recognizable forms, merchants looked for new markets within and outside Europe, and the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment resulted in new insights and world views. The Atlantic Revolutions and the Industrial Revolutions from the end of the 18th century would permanently change the world politically and economically. The (Early)modern History course focuses on three, often closely related, thematic areas: political, socio-economic, and cultural and religious developments. The course answers the following questions: how did the French Revolution change the political landscape of Europe? What was the role of Europeans in globalization? How did the Reformation and state formation become entwined?

This course explores different indigenous tribes from Latin America. The course considers how an indigenous group’s history contributes to their current status under the modern nation state. It discusses the role of language and speech throughout history, through analyzing primary sources written in indigenous dialects. The course also explores how the transition from empire to independent nations impacted indigenous populations. 

This course introduces the other side of the Middle Ages, which is still too often overlooked in university curricula. Yet between the 6th and 11th centuries, the Near East—dominated by two rival empires, Byzantium and Islam—constituted the center of the Old World, while the Latin West was merely a periphery. The course studies the evolution of this region beginning in the 6th century, marked by the separation between the Byzantine East and the Latin West following the failure of Justinian’s reconquest, and by the emergence of the Islamic Empire in the 7th century, born of the Arab conquests. It concludes with the turn of the 11th century, when the Near East was completely reshaped by the arrival of the Turks, who, emerging from the steppes of Central Asia and recently converted to Islam, seized power in the Islamic world at the expense of the Arabs and began the conquest of Byzantine Anatolia. The end of the 11th century also marks, with the start of the Crusades, the moment of a problematic reunion between East and West, following five centuries of gradual estrangement and differentiation. Far from limiting itself to political and military aspects, the course addresses social, cultural, and religious dimensions, which are essential to our understanding of the past. In contrast to essentialist approaches, it pays particular attention to political factors in analyzing the religious crises that punctuated the history of this region.

From climate change to mass extinction, the reach of the human species is inescapable across the natural world. At the same time, ranging from our microbiome to our mental health, the natural world is inescapable in our own lives. Despite tremendous technological advances, nature and humanity are inextricably entangled. This survey course explores the many ways that humans and nature have collided, and the many ways our species has understood other species and non-living things. Ranging widely across space and time, students explore how humans created the idea of “nature” as something apart from themselves and the ramifications of that idea, how we might do history from the standpoint of other species, the effects of pre-modern and modern humans on the natural world, and environmental inequalities around how toxic pollution or other environmental harms are differentially borne according to race, class, and gender.

The intellectual challenge and historiographical innovation of this course lie in its subtitle: a transatlantic history. The focus is not so much on describing and understanding the establishment of the plantation slave system and its subsequent dismantling before and after 1848, but rather on observing how the Caribbean world constantly interacted with the French metropolis—and, more broadly, with Europe— in the perception of the Black Other, during the French Revolution and in the abolitionist struggle for freedom, in the development of French capitalism. The course therefore presents an economic, social, political, and cultural history of the back-and-forth across the Atlantic Ocean and over more than two centuries of mutual shaping.

This course offers a comprehensive overview of Europe in the world since 1848. Important topics that are covered are state formation and citizenship, colonialism and the resistance against it in the second half of the 19th century, and the rise of large ideologies (democracy, fascism) around the two world wars. This course discusses how this period was characterized by both war and genocide and important initiatives in the field of international cooperation, in Europe and beyond. Students learn to understand the global Cold War and how it is intertwined with the decolonization process. They study the rise of neoliberalism, the consumer society, and the welfare state in the second half of the 20th century. The more recent period covers globalization, terror, and climate change. This course deals with many topical issues and helps students to think about current events in their historical context.