History

The course deals with the long nineteenth century in Britain and the twentieth century in the United States. It defines and explores the concept of "radicalism" in these two contexts, and illustrates this with reference to the main radical groups and political parties, their principal actions, and their political legacy.

This course locates marriage as a key historical arena where politics and economics intersect. It examines how men and women imagine their nation through marriage and understand their rights and duties in 20th-century Egypt. It demonstrates how marriage is a lens that reflects and critiques larger socioeconomic and political issues. This course provides a history of marriage and nationalism in modern Egypt, rather than just a legal, political, or women’s history. It also contributes to our historical understanding of the marriage crisis, which continues to dominate public debates.

The city and language course introduces students to French history, culture, and language through team-taught instruction. In the “City as Public Forum” sessions, students are introduced to French history and culture through a series of lectures and site visits. Students discover some of the fascinating ways the core principles of social justice were tested in theory and practice on the streets of Paris in the past and explore how they evolved into the pillars of French society today. The course focuses on just how an ideal society should be forged, where all are free individuals and members of a cohesive community at the same time. Trying to make individuals believe—as religions do—in the primacy of the collective, and in its concomitant goal of protecting human rights, is at the core of social justice in France. From 52 B.C.E to today, France has been an exemplar of how—and how not—to construct a just society. To render these values visible, and therefore legible, to all by adding a physical dimension—whether constructive or destructive—to the usual means of establishing laws or setting policies, is what distinguishes the history of France's capital city of Paris. Those who control Paris—be they monarchs, revolutionaries, or presidents, past and present—believe that erecting all kinds of physical structures will render their values concrete and immutable. The ideal French society did not always necessarily mean a democratic or inclusive one. Since the French Revolution, however, institutionalizing the concept of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” has been France's greatest universal achievement and a source of constant upheaval, eliciting a unique form of secular activism that has led to targeting buildings and monuments that no longer reflect the collective's values. Students discuss how the diverse social actors, who constitute “the French,” continue to thrust their bodies and minds into the physical spaces of the public sphere in the pursuit of social justice. In the “Unlocking French” sessions, students learn targeted language skills through situational communication, so they have the opportunity to use everything they learn as they go about their daily activities.

This course offers a broad survey of the evolution of travel and tourism, delving into its historical foundations and contemporary complexities. Students examine the history of travel and exploration and its impact on cultural exchange, empire-building, economic development, and global connectivity. Students trace the historical roots of the booming travel and tourism industry, and are introduced to contemporary issues related to travel consumerism, sustainability, and the influence of technology and social media. Students develop an understanding of the multifaceted nature of travel and tourism within the broader historical and contemporary context of societal, cultural, and environmental dynamics.

The course provides:

• Sources, methods and tools for the study of Greek history 
• Themes and prominent figures of Greek history through the analysis of selected and translated sources pertaining to the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic periods (approximately 20 hours).
• Specific topic: Demetrius the Besieger and the creation of the Hellenistic state (approximately 20 hours).

The program includes the knowledge, acquired through the students' independent study, of the key events in Greek history, from its origins to the first century BC, focusing on the evidence for the reconstruction of these events. By the end of the course, students are broadly familiar with the development of Greek history, using the basic interpretive categories towards critical analysis of issues pertaining to the Greek world and working from historical and documentary sources read in the original and in translation. Students have a good knowledge of the main themes, events, and phenomena of Greek history in a broader context, possess precise spatio-temporal coordinates and know the main tools of information, research, and updating. They also read works by historians in at least one language other than Italian and are able to speak in the appropriate technical terminology.

This course on the British 19th century focuses on London and beyond. London is the neuralgic center of 19th-century England, and a key subject of study for Anglicists - making it an ideal location for a multidisciplinary, civilizational, artistic, historical, and literary approach. Complementary insights highlight the specificity of the capital in the 19th century. But London is also an invitation to travel, both spatially (the foreigners who visit London, but also, conversely, the Empire/Commonwealth elsewhere, and the orientalism they generate) and temporally: today, London is a figure, it lends itself to all the "neo" crazes, and Victorian London seems resolutely modern.

Through visits to ten of London’s most important institutions, this course examines the development of how institutions curate culture from Renaissance "cabinets of curiosities" to the modern "white cube" gallery space. The course equips students with the historical, theoretical, and practical knowledge necessary for studying culture through institutional collections. Students analyze the techniques and practices museums use to collect, organize, and display their objects; consider the messages these institutions send through their architecture, patronage, and methods of display; and they delve into some of the most important issues affecting cultural institutions today like decolonization, repatriation, and social impact. Aside from the introductory class, the course takes place off campus, with seminar groups visiting a different institution in each meeting. 

This course examines human experience as a source of truth, knowledge, and belief about war. Representations of human experiences of war play a significant role in human culture and society, often defining social memories and collective understandings of war. As such, this course examines how human experience is transmitted and interpreted via historical sources as well as cultural objects such as films, novels, and video games. It also engages students with key social, political, and moral arguments about the representation of war experience in the media, museums, monuments, and commemoration rituals. 

The Cold War is never dead. It’s not even the Cold War, to paraphrase Faulkner. We are told that we are about to enter Cold War 2.0, or that we might already be living in it. We are often confronted in the media with Cold War parallels: the language of liberty, rivalry and other Cold War neologisms are everywhere on the rise. Not least, Cold War historians themselves are among the most vocal in reminding the public of the contemporary relevance of their expertise. On the face of it, this makes the historical category of analysis we call “the Cold War” a rather flexible one. What is being analogized here? Why can we not see the present day as something new under the sun, and therefore call it something new? And ultimately, what politics is this historical thinking answering to? And of course, the very fact of that plasticity calls into question not just the current usage of the historical term in its second reincarnation, but in its first incarnation as well. What, ultimately, was the Cold War? Can it be both the old traditional era, as well as the new one at the same time? Should it demarcate the whole of the history of the second half of the 20th century? Or should it be used as a rather more discreet term delimited to the bilateral relationship between two nations, as the term was initially used?

This course will concern itself mostly with those analytical questions. In other words, rather than reviewing a history of crises and high political stakes we unquestioningly term the Cold War, the course, while delivering the bare bones of this history, will concern itself with the analytical category itself. Historians are a fractious bunch, but historians of the Cold War have been especially quarrelsome. What were their arguments with one another about? Can we read history politically? How about culturally? Does using the “Cold War” as the encompassing historical category it has become illuminate more than it obscures? And what ultimately was the Cold War?

This course provides a synthetic study of the history, politics, and political economy of modern Ukraine. Students study history up to independence in 1991, the formation of post-Soviet Ukraine in the 1990s and 2000s, and the attempts to reform it via the Orange Revolution and Maidan Revolution/Revolution of Dignity in 2013-14. Students look at the reasons for the election of a comedian Volodymyr Zelensky as President in 2019. Particular attention is paid to the theme of national identity, and to the complex historical interrelationship between Ukraine and Russia. Students also explore Russia’s motives for invasion in 2014 and 2022 and Ukraine’s will to resist.