History

This course offers an introduction to encounters between civilizations, cultures, and societies in world history, based on examples drawn from the medieval, early modern, and modern periods. It seeks to develop understanding of patterns in world history and an introduction to approaches within the field of global history. It introduces specific case-studies, from the Arab conquest of the Muslim Spain and Chinese exploration of the Indian Ocean, through colonial encounters in Africa, America, and India, to the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Students discuss the meeting of civilizations, cultures, and societies in world history, covering examples from the medieval period up to the modern day. They develop a global perspective, form professional and informed attitudes, and consider the methodology of global history. 

This course is an exploration of scholarly and popular perspectives pertaining to rite and ritual, life-cycle, and annual cycle including funerals, wakes, and weddings. This course advances and deepens students' understanding of time, temporality, and periodicity in vernacular culture and everyday life in general. Topics include celebration and festival, rites, and rituals as well as traditions around wakes, patterns, and pilgrimages. The contexts of these traditions in contemporary society is examined throughout the course.

This course introduces post-World War II Japanese history, with a focus on foreign policy and the domestic factors affecting it. The course examines Japan’s relations with Asia and the United States as well as issues such as the debate over the revision of Japan’s constitution; Japan’s security; the “history problem;” Japan’s official development assistance, and Japan’s “Soft Power” strategy. 

This course examines the Sino-American relations in the last several hundred years with special focus on their shared values and experiences and emphasize both diplomatic and people-people relations from cultural and international history perspectives.

This course is concerned with the history of Europe during a crucial phase of its development in all its aspects: political, religious, economic, social, and cultural.

This course examines how the Silk Roads linked and transformed regions and societies through trade, diplomacy, religion, and conquest. It explores how societies interacted across vast distances; the emergence and interaction of the religious traditions of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, and Christianity; the journeys of people, objects, and ideas; and the roles of nomadic conquest and imperialist competition. 

This course examines traditional Chinese history. It will give a brief account of the rise and fall of Chinese dynasties and the political crises that are cataclysmic to the empires. It covers the period from ancient to late Imperial China. The main theme will focus on the characteristic portrayals of Chinese emperors as well as the political influences of eunuchs, empresses, and their family members, etc.

The course introduces students to selected topics in the legal application of medical scientific expertise. Students learn about the historical development and application of forensic investigation techniques such as toxicology, psychiatry, crime scene investigation, and DNA profiling, and how they were presented to the public in various media (e.g. detective fiction, newspaper reports, forensic television dramas). Students consider who make claims to forensic truth and what tools and techniques they use to arrive at that conclusion.

This course examines multiple interactions/connections/confrontations between popular culture products and acts of political and social protest/resistance in the historical and contemporary English-speaking world. It demonstrates how the political and cultural worlds collide/intersect as they study the uses, meanings, symbolic language, motives, and activations of popular culture works in the context of collective acts of protest. The course not only looks at the obvious tension between popular culture and protest, when the former is defined solely along the lines of the "mainstream," but the overlooked and fertile infusion of the two, as in the connections between the abolitionist movement and slave narratives, between the Harlem Renaissance, Jazz, Civil Rights and the Black Arts Movement, between working class activism and realist writing, between modernist experimentation and feminism, between carnivalization and the LGBT movement, between the Windrush Generation, Reggae, Black British poetry, etc. It also explores the activation and sometimes adaptation of popular culture within contexts of collective acts of protest for greater rights/influence/power for marginalized groups organized around gender, sexuality, ethnicity/race, class, generation/age, etc. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this course draws on concepts and theories from history, literary studies, political communication (among potentially other options), applied to the study of the connections between popular culture actors and their works and sites of collective action. The course firsts gives a general introduction to the core concepts and theories of the course, followed by modules organized around various genres of cultural production, including (but not exclusively) music (e.g. slave songs, Jazz, Reggae, Hip Hop), theatre (e.g. musical theatre, Vaudeville, literature (e.g. slave narratives, Harlem Renaissance, performance poetry, post-colonial texts, graphic novels), visual arts (e.g. Black Arts Movement, protest graffiti), physical monuments (e.g. Confederate statues, imperial figures). The course thus examines the ways that popular culture is mobilized to advance the collective causes of marginalized and disadvantaged groups in their historical and contemporary struggle for liberation and equality, and how "high" as well as "popular" literature play a role in this.

This courses uses ten topics to explore how the global economy emerged in the past and how global trade and global empires changed the world. The first part of the course traces the connection between European colonial empires and the making of the global economy until the Industrial Revolution, and how the rise of the West impacted other world regions. The second part of the course discusses globalization and deglobalization and the shifts of global economic power in the modern age. This is modern economic history in a global context and focuses mainly on non-European regions.