History

This course examines ideas, concepts, traditions, and authors that shaped critical thinking in Latin America during the twentieth century, in close relation to the socio-political and economic processes of the region.

This course examines Anglo-American relations from 1939-1991 and analyses the nature of the special relationship from historical and political perspectives. Set within the rich historiography of this subject, the course considers how US and UK governments responded to major events in world history from 1939 to 1991. Throughout, particular reference are made to Anglo-American relations in the political, diplomatic, economic, defense, and intelligence arenas and to the importance of personalities in strengthening and weakening the alliance. Students reflect on UK and US social, cultural, and political values in the context of international relations, and develop an understanding of ethical and political issues arising from modes of representation.

This course focuses on French cities in the modern era. It explores in greater depth how, in concrete terms, French towns revealed the workings of modern France. Themes such as demography, society, economy, and cultural life, are covered.

This course examines how environmental challenges have been, and continue to be, shaped by empire. These impacts affect how Earth's history, the biosphere, and the climate are known, and extend to both extractive technologies and financial relationships that enable extraction. But the effects of empire run deeper, to the very way the environment is understood. Using London as a launchpad for field trips and firsthand encounters, this course challenges students to rethink how ideas of the planet’s past, present, and future are shaped by empire. Students examine how empire has shaped, and continues to shape, environmental knowledge; explore sites and spaces of empire, such as where the material markers of scientific knowledge persist in advancing ways of knowing and relating to the environment today; investigate how contemporary modes of extraction maintain links to the legacies of empire, such as in and through financial activities; are provided with concrete analytical skills for situating contemporary challenges in historical context; and are encouraged to engage critically and thoughtfully with how environmental thought, and baselines for assessing environmental impacts, have been influenced by the data collected through empire.

This course explores the history of medieval Europe from the 5th to 15th centuries. Topics include: the Middle Ages in European history; from disintegration of the ancient world to Germanic invasions; barbarian Europe; the Byzantine Empire and origins of Islamic civilization; the Carolingian Empire; second invasions and the Holy Roman Empire; feudal society and expansions from the 11th to 13th centuries; universalist aspirations-- papacy and empire; from feudal monarchies to sovereign states; from the crisis of medieval society to the origins of the modern world.

This course provides a broad overview of psychiatric practice in Britain from the beginning of state-regulated asylums through to the advent of current policies of pharmaceutical treatment and community care. Using a mixture of secondary sources and primary texts, students examine how the diagnosis and treatment of madness has been shaped through the rich interaction of social, scientific, political, economic, and cultural factors. Students evaluate approaches to the concept of "madness" from historical, psychiatric, psychoanalytical, sociological, and legal perspectives, and demonstrate how techniques from each disciplinary approach can be applied to a study of identity and human behavior.

This course helps students to understand the historical processes of the Renaissance and the Reformation, and based on lectures, readings, and classroom discussions, clarify the impacts of the Renaissance and Reformation on the formation of modern European civilization, especially the relationship between the Renaissance and the secularization of Europe, Protestantism and capitalism, and the Reformation and the rise of modern nation-states.

This course examines the history of imperial and colonial archaeology in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and the ways in which archaeological extraction often went hand-in-hand with the European and North American imperial or colonial ventures. It covers the artefacts that arrived in museums as a result of these ventures and what that says about our current “encyclopedic” style of museum that purports to share knowledge of the world yet is also a testament to western intervention in Indigenous societies at home and in other parts of the world. 

This course reads against the grain of those dominant narratives of colonialism as world-making by focusing on the pirate as an interruptive force, who derails the movement of peoples, goods, ideas, and laws across the maritime routes linking the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Important tools in the course are the reading practices of postcolonial theory, which will teach us to extract and assess this alternative history of the post/colonial pirate. The course also teaches students to nuance standard maritime historiographies through literary reading practices, as well as evaluate the metaphoric application of piracy to contemporary, interruptive, economic practices.