History

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.

This course provides an overview of what has changed (and what has not) in British society and culture since the early nineteenth century. It does not attempt to be comprehensive, but rather uses historical debates to provide a context to questions which remain highly pertinent in Britain today.  Why does Britain, uniquely in Europe, still have a monarchy?  Why is social class still such an important aspect of how the British see themselves? Why have statues of nineteenth-century imperial figures become a source of such violent controversy since the emergence of the BLM? In what ways has ‘Brexit’ revealed Britain’s difficulty to confront its national decline over the last hundred years?  How might movements for racial and social justice in contemporary Britain work within a specific British radical paradigm?  All these questions can only be answered if we address the last two centuries of British history, confronting the longer-term patterns of continuity and change which are still playing out in a nation which struggles to confront both its past and its present. Specific topics covered include: aristocracy and monarchy since 1800; nineteenth and twentieth century movements for social change; advocates and critics of the British empire; explanations for British ‘decline’ in the twentieth century; gender and sexuality, 1800-1914; youth and popular culture since the 1930s.

This course explores the making of contemporary Europe diachronically and in a global context through four parts. It considers the plurality of “Europes” that emerged in the postwar period, including the institutional evolution of the European Communities and European Union, their challenges and their achievements. It situates the development of regional cooperation agreements within the global context of World War, decolonization, Cold War, economic crises, globalization, the Soviet collapse, and the turmoil of the early 21st century. It evaluates the the roles that different actors – including multilateral organizations and multinational corporations – played in shaping European governance. It equips students to apply this knowledge to their own analyses of contemporary political debates, through readings, discussions, and a capstone podcast project. 

This course teaches the materials, theories and methods of the comparison of classical civilizations in the Two Rivers region, ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the ancient Middle East, medieval Europe, Central America, South Asia, etc.Focusing on the frontier discussions of interdisciplinary research in the disciplines of paleography, history, literature, philosophy, etc. of classical civilizations, the study of cross-cultural primary materials, and the analysis of civilization comparison cases, this course introduces and discusses the frontiers of comparative research on classical civilizations. 

This course examines how the sky has shaped cultures from across the world and in different times. Students explore how sky watching has provided answers to fundamental questions, such as the origins of life and the world, how society should be organized, and how lives should be led. Topics include perspectives from Indigenous, European and Asian cosmologies, practices of prediction including astrology and meteorology, and implications of technology that is now reshaping the sky.