History

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. 

This course examines the forms, channels, and strategies behind the distribution of propaganda. It reviews the history of propaganda from antiquity, through the Middle Ages, the invention of mechanized printing, and to the modern state. Particular emphasis is placed on propaganda in modern wartime. 

Piracy, understood broadly as violence or crime at sea, is a present day phenomenon and yet one which has a history spanning centuries and across all the oceans of the world. From pirates to privateers, corsairs to raiders, maritime predators take various names and forms. This course explores the history of pirates and piracy. By examining case studies from the 1400s onwards and by placing pirates into the context of oceanic history and maritime studies, the course seeks to demystify the popular images often associated with pirates.

This course explores the international history of the post-Cold War era. It examines the principal theme in contemporary international relations through a historical lens. The course covers the making of the post-Cold War international system, the causes of continued international wars and interventions, and why geopolitical competition between major powers has re-emerged as a central concern of international relations. 

This course investigates the ties between resorting to criminal justice and the making of postwar international and domestic orders. The story of post-World War Two war crime trials was long told from a Western standpoint in a context where justice was (also) a way of waging the Cold War by proxy. Moreover, until recent years scholarly attention has predominantly focused on a few highly publicized international trials, especially the Nuremberg and the Jerusalem trials, leaving in the shadows the diversity of legal proceedings that took place before national courts of law and failing to account for what was "a continent-spanning, decades-long, ever-evolving project" (Devin O. Pindas). This course departs from these perspectives in at least two ways: First, the course argues that trials for war crimes offer a fascinating window into several geopolitical, political and social processes. As arenas where a diversity of historical and social battles are being waged, they tell us about the crafting of regime changes, evolving power hierarchies, social norms, as well as the dominant social representations of gender at a given point in time. Second, national and international trials are shown to have been transnational in terms of the circulation of legal qualifications, material evidence, defendants, witnesses, and lawyers, as well as the entanglement between multiple legal proceedings. Three questions lie at the center of our investigations: Firstly, how can one account for the evolving conceptions of the role of justice in the management of postwar settlements and regime changes? Secondly, how can one shed light on the ways in which justice has been served – and has been seen to be served – since the end of World War Two? Thirdly, how have international and domestic trials of war criminals impacted the ways in which large scale violence is told by historians and remembered by victims and outsiders? In order to address these issues, this course provides a vision of justice attentive to the plurality of protagonists – legal as well as non legal professionals – that have contributed to its shaping, both within the judicial arena (prosecutors, judges, defense counsels, witnesses, translators, stenographers, etc.) and beyond it (Holocaust survivors, historians and archivists, journalists, political decision-makers, etc.). The assumption here is that a trial takes shape from the moment when the pretrial investigations are started and ends at the moment when the legal narratives are incorporated into ways of retelling and remembering war crimes. The course builds upon a diversity of oral, print and visual sources, including filmed trials and archival documents. Several scholars who have studied and/or taken part in legal proceedings for war crimes are also invited to share their insights with the students.

This course offers an introduction to the historical and cultural aspects of Medieval European Civilization by drawing parallels between modern-day societal, economic, and cultural occurrences and the Medieval past.  The course explores weekly themes that reflect contemporary societal issues that lend themselves to a (historical) comparative analytical approach. Themes include modern misrepresentation of Medieval culture, the ‘White’ Middle Ages, modern reflections on Medieval pandemics, revolts and political order in the Middle Ages, and minorities and persecution in the Middle Ages. The course consists of lectures and tutor groups. Students are evaluated on their participation, presentation, scientific paper, and written exam. Prerequisites include any course in history or sociology or substantial high school knowledge in history.

This course examines the way Japan was, and continues to be, perceived in Europe and North America. The course analyzes a series of historical documents from European and North American sources and investigates how the view of Japan has developed in these countries over time.  Three questions are at the core of this investigation:
- Which images and stereotypes about Japan can be found in these documents?
- How much did these images and stereotypes change with time?
- How much did they stay the same?

In addition, the class entails group presentations about certain key periods in the history of Japan's encounter with Euroamerica.

An annexed territory and the only colony of settlement in the French Empire, Algeria was officially a part of France, and its loss represents not only a dramatic territorial amputation (more than twice the size of metropolitan France) but also a traumatic symbolic and ideological shift. Long repressed, cloistered and today fragmented and manipulated, the painful and sensitive memories of the colonization of Algeria and the subsequent War of Independence have contributed to the construction of a deeply divided society in France. This course examines the multiple relations between Franco-Algerian history, memory, and minority identities as represented in contemporary France (Algerian immigrants and their "French" descendants, Sephardic Jews, Harkis, Pieds-Noirs, mixed-race individuals). Other groups of people living in France participated in the Algerian War, such as conscripts, professional soldiers, porteurs de valise (French who supported the Algerian nationalists), and all claim different and often conflicting histories. The course material consists of scholarly texts (articles from different disciplines), literature (three novels), and a few films. The course examines how these different resources elaborate memorial discourses carrying public claims of Franco-Algerian identity. The different minority stances often contradict the official French (and, incidentally, Algerian) narrative(s) while being in conflict with the State’s interest. Through interdisciplinary critical readings, this class studies in depths the concept of "representation" and its several meanings: the mental representation (memory of a historical trauma), artistic representation (literature, films), historical representation (conventional narratives and non-conventional approaches), and political representation (representativeness). The analysis of diverse forms of discursive practices about the French colonial past in Algeria, leading to contemporary processes of minority identifications and "community" dynamics in France, allows the class to deepen its understanding of current debates about “wars of memory” and “competitive victimhood” in French society, while reflecting upon issues of citizenship and possible ways to think of conflicted identities as a legacy of colonialism and immigration.

In Ireland, as internationally, the period from 1500 to 1800 was characterized by major political, economic, and social change. Recently, historians have placed increasing emphasis on the impact of early modern environmental and demographic transformation at a time of sustained political upheaval and social reorganization. In the three centuries between 1500 and 1800, Ireland was subject to a complex process of evolution from an essentially rural island controlled by diverse Gaelic and Anglo-Norman lordships to an island dominated politically by a colonial elite who effectively differed from the native population in terms of ethnicity, language, religion, and financial status. This course examines the transformation of Ireland in the period 1500 to 1800 from the perspective of migration and environmental change. In particular, the course considers how changes in demography, land ownership, land management, climate change, urbanization, and commerce significantly reconfigured Ireland’s landscape and environment.

This course examines a controversial issue: the history of slavery in France and the United States from the 17th to 21st centuries. It first focuses on the history of two cities at the heart of triangular trade, Bordeaux and Charleston, and the way in which their elites thought and translated into their lifestyles, in their urban spaces and, today, in their museums, this historical fact over time. The course then considers how the American and French slaves, unwilling actors in the history of slavery, for their part, thought and translated their history, but also their emotions, in particular through writing. The autobiographies published between the 18th century and the 19th century are an appreciable complement for the researcher even if they raise the question of the subjectivity of their authors and their status as sources. Finally, the course questions the way in which French and American literature, including that dedicated to youth, thinks about and translates the history of slavery through specific examples. The publication of historical novels relating to these lively questions having always been consciously accompanied by civic and moral objectives and the formative function of literature for youth being undeniable, the course investigates if French and American publications think and translate in the same way this part of our history and, above all, whether they transmit the same values.