History

This course is a workshop. Students work together to write a press article on subjects or events related to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries using the resources offered by RetroNews (newspapers, magazines) and Gallica (newspapers, magazines, and journals), two online sites belonging to the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF). Students gather and work on a corpus of articles to shed light on a specific historical subject or event, based on published historical research, while analyzing the political and social representations and discourse of the press of the period. Some student articles are then submitted to the RetroNews editorial team for publication.

This course reflects on the history of the relationship between state, society, and Islam in the Ottoman and Turkish context from the 1750s to the 2020s. The course explores in detail such themes as Muslim reformism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; Islam in the age of Ottoman reform; modernist and fundamentalist Islamism; pan-Islamism and Ottoman caliphate politics; the Young Turks and Islam; Islam in the secular republic; the question of female emancipation and Islam; plural Islam: Alevism and Sunnism; political Islam in the context of the Cold War; the seizure of power by political Islam and the Islamo-fascist dictatorship in power in Turkey since 2002.

This course offers an introduction to the history of the Middle Ages. The course focuses on the history of Europe between 400 and 1500, as well as regions in the Byzantine and Islamic world.  Material evidence (written, visual, architectural) of how people of all social standings lived, worked, and interacted is examined. While predominantly focused on European developments, the course also considers other regional trajectories, notably of Byzantium and the Islamic world, exploring the Middle Ages as a period of connectivity, transformation, and innovation.

This course is designed specifically for international students. It focuses on the history of France and its Presidents.

In literary uchronies, fictional scenarios are created that are based on an alternative course of history. They can therefore be understood as thought experiments that seek an answer to the question of what would have happened if history had taken a different path at one point: What if the Second World War had taken a different course? What if the turning point hadn't happened? What if the First World War had never ended or had never happened at all? The lecture approaches this phenomenon from different perspectives, tracing the history of concepts and genres as well as identifying thematic focuses of concrete literary uchronies. The distinction from Uchronia in historical science will also play an important role. In this way the course shows that literary uchronia is not just a (sometimes quite amusing) game of the imagination, but in most cases also a challenging and intensive examination of the past as well as the present.

This course examines environmental history worldwide. Through selected topics, it explores how human society and technology have shaped the environment through centuries, emphasizing the major changes of the past hundred years. As part of the methodology, Barbados will be examined as a microcosm of the global concern with human impact in the environment. 

During the Viking Age, Northmen streamed out of Scandinavia, travelling far and wide across and around Europe, and to Constantinople and the Caspian Sea in the east. A vast amount of diverse source material, written and archaeological, bears witness to the Scandinavian expansion and conveys a multitude of roles in which they engaged, e.g. terrifying raiders, peaceful traders, or mercenaries.

The objective of this course is to examine the geographical expansion of vikings, and their interrelations with different cultures, and how this comes across in the source material. At the end of the course students are expected to have a thorough overview of the main events of the period, and a good idea on the relevant geographies and cultures, as well as a grasp on comparing different viking communities in different regions.

This course provides an overview of notable historical dates, events, trends, and individuals in China, Korea, and Japan from approximately the 3rd century BCE until the early 17th century.

The German-speaking region was essential for the development of modern antisemitism. While many forms of early Christian and medieval persecution of Jews existed all over Europe, the Protestant reformation in Central Europe, contributed greatly to the proliferation and adaptation of medieval anti-Jewish sentiments into the early modern era. During the Enlightenment and the romantic period, the first major steps towards modernizing anti-Jewish sentiments happened. The class will address important social (middle-class), political (parties), intellectual (race theory) as well as cultural (visual culture) dimensions of the modern antisemitism, primarily during the 19th and early 20th century. Since the 18th century, Jewish Activists and intellectuals engaged in fighting antisemitism which the class will also address. The specific form of Nazi antisemitism will be discussed in its relation to the comprehensive discriminatory policy of the Nazi regime and, later on, the extermination policy during the Holocaust. With the almost complete annihilation of European Jewry, the history of modern antisemitism did not end, but, instead, it caused further fundamental changes in its structure. The final meetings will be devoted to these changes after 1945 and in the contemporary German-speaking world. While the class will insist on studying the specifically German-speaking forms of anti-Judaism and antisemitism, it will also place the ‘German case’ into the wider European context.