History

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 imagining of history is such a prominent trend in popular culture that students need to be equipped to deconstruct representations of the past and to interrogate their own working assumptions about history imbibed from film and literature. This course explores three examples of how historical events and themes have been imagined in the world outside of professional historical scholarship. Students will examine how these subjects have been "brought to life" in film and literature. Students also have the opportunity to consider wider questions and problems which link together the three subjects addressed in the course. This is not a course designed to test the accuracy, in a narrow sense, of "historical fiction" in literature and film. Students rather examine the ways in which the past has been presented, interpreted, and re-interpreted in various genres; to uncover the assumptions or agendas that shaped creative decisions and the responses of audiences to genuinely popular representations of the past; and to reflect critically upon the qualities that make for a great work of historical imagination or reconstruction, qualities which cannot easily be replicated by the conventional methods of historical inquiry.

This course introduces students to world history through material culture. The main objects and configurations of material culture, from the body as commodity to cowries as money, are analyzed in this course. Food, drinks, drugs, fabrics, dress, houses, furniture, interior decoration, urban planning, and gardens structure a diversified program. The circulation of objects around the world, in some cases under different materials and forms, opens the way to consider cultural exchange between different civilizations, meaning forms of transfer, contamination, adaptation, and refusal.

This course is divided into two parts. In part one, it provides an overview of Latin American history from pre-Columbian America to today. In part two, it discusses the politics of the region including construction of the state, globalization, international markets, political institutions, and elections.

This course examines the history of France from the Old Regime to the present day through a constitutional lens to provide a better understanding of current political events.

This course explores the intersection of politics and culture in early medieval Europe through the strange fate of the Carolingian kingdom of Lotharingia. The slow-motion collapse of this kingdom, linked to an extraordinary marriage scandal, is uniquely well-documented, through secret treaties, letters both confidential and public, the minutes of staged show trials, records of tense summit meetings, learned legal advice, and rich and often spiteful contemporary narratives. Drawing on these sources, students explore key themes in early medieval European history, including the contested meaning of empire, dynastic rulership, the evolution of queenship, the use of the written word, legal pluralism, the impact of the Vikings, and the changing role of the papacy.

This course offers a comparative and connected history of the British and French imperial experiences, from the mid-eighteenth century until the end of the twentieth century. The British and French empires are usually considered as arch-rivals. By contrast, the course emphasizes Anglo-French collaboration as a key mechanism of Western expansion overseas, and examines how the two empires often influenced each other. Special attention is paid to ideas about race and cultural difference and how they shaped British and French colonial societies. The traditional view that the British favored indirect rule and the French assimilation is tested and its limits highlighted. The course provides the opportunity to engage with recent scholarship on European colonialism, key contemporary texts about imperial expansion, and visual sources.

This course begins by taking a brief historical perspective in an attempt to see how all the fundamental questions of Brexit and the future of the relationship between the various nations of Great Britain came to such prominence in the last decade. It looks back to the formations of separate national identities across the British Isles, how the relations between them evolved, and how the various "unions" came about: by conquest, by assimilation, or by unification. The main focus of the course then moves onto the more contemporary debates, from the post-second world war period up to the present day.

This course examines the collapse of communist system in East Central Europe and the post-1989 struggle for democracy in the region. The Polish case is examined closely as the example of this process. The course examines the process of transition from communism to democracy in East Central Europe and the global significance of the 1989 revolutions. It provides analysis of the core issues that shaped the region's politics: regime change, creation of civil society, economic reforms, and the changing nature of the post-communist system.