History

This course is a connected and comparative history of Asia before 1750 that introduces the region’s major political, economic, and intellectual contours prior to British colonization. The course focuses on tracing the history of premodern Asia through three types of transregional cultural formation: large empires, trading zones, and religious ecumene. The course explores and discusses how these formations unfolded across Central and Eastern Asia and South and Southeast Asia and uses them as a lens for thinking critically about the scope of Asia as a geographical, political, economic, and cultural category in premodern history.

This course examines people and cultures. Women and men, merchants and monks, Christians and Jews all formed the cultures, classes and statuses which constituted late medieval European society. The study themes of this course focus on the means by which ideas, cultures and expectations were constructed and transmitted, and include topics such as healthcare, civic life, the body, gender and sexuality, religious beliefs and practices, otherness, death, political theory, art and architecture, travel.

This course is an introduction to the political, economic, social, and cultural history of the Middle East from 1800- c.1950. Opening at the beginning of the 19th century it examines the program of reform and state-building of the Ottoman Empire to defend itself against the growing military and economic power of Europe. The course then goes on to address the defeat of the Ottomans in World War I, the post-1919 settlement and the rise of nationalism in the interwar period, and ends with the establishment of Israel in 1948.

The course demonstrates the reasons for the collapse of the communist system in the Soviet Union and its consequences, with a specific focus on Russia and the Baltic states; the geopolitical consequences of the demise of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent reordering of global economic and geopolitical space; the nature of socio-economic changes in the region in the 1990s, and how different social groups responded to them; cultural change, with a focus on identity politics, gender and ethnicity; the political management of ethno-culturally diverse territories, and the renegotiation of national and ethnic identities; and the importance of the region for Europe as a whole, including a focus on Russia and the Baltic states' relations with the new enlarged Europe.

This course provides a conceptual and historical approach of nations, states, and nationalism in Europe from the late 19th century to the present. It examines the transnational dimension of European political frameworks and considers current political issues in the light of European history. The course fosters analytical distance and questions the nation-centered view of the world, familiarizes with the academic debates on nation-building and nationalism, and examines the historical processes and steps that have led to the success of the national category.

This course focuses on the ancient history of the Middle East as a textbook case illustrating the transition from prehistory to history, via the establishment of a centralized power served by a powerful administration, an influential religion, a codified practice of writing, and subtle economic and diplomatic networks. It investigates the unifying factors behind the extension of the geographical contours of this cultural area, what memories classical antiquity retained of this distant East, and the discoveries it made. The course examines this abundant premise, at the crossroads of political, cultural, religious, and artistic sources, to shed light on a few fundamentals with parallels to our own times that should be considered with as much curiosity as caution.

This course examines contacts between and among diverse peoples in many of the places that came to be known as “the Pacific World”: Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, the South Pacific, the Northwest Coast, and elsewhere, focusing mostly on the late 17th to early 19th centuries but reaching back to the first peopling of these territories. It explores the challenges – theoretical, moral, methodological, and beyond – of cultural encounter and makes connections between these early contacts the present day, thinking critically about the legacies of events that are not really in the past at all. 

In most societies, gift-giving acts as a critical form of social currency. Gifts mark special occasions such as birthdays; they cement diplomatic relationships; they act as bribes and charitable offerings. Gifts and gift-exchange can therefore tell historians much about the social, political, and moral norms of past societies. This course examines the fascinating histories of gift-giving in a cross-period and trans-regional context.

This course offers a political history of the environment through the mobilization of the working classes around issues related to common goods, industrial risks, health, and pollution. It also takes a global, long-term approach to these mobilizations. The course is designed as an introduction to research: it first introduces scientific writing through a reading note based on an article, then analyzes primary sources to present findings at a "mini-colloquium," and finally provides an opportunity to write a collective research article.