History

This course explores the social, cultural, and political history of the global Cold War through the lens of forced migrations and humanitarian aid. While traditional Cold War narratives perpetuate images of refugees fleeing from Eastern Europe to the West, the course challenges this clear-cut dichotomy. It expands the geographical range of forced displacement to include emergencies in the Global South by paying attention to entanglements across and within different regions. It studies major organizations like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees across other agents, such as non-governmental organizations, regional, and national institutions. It takes into consideration refugees' agencies, trajectories, and cultural production. It then situates refugees within local communities, stressing the challenges and the opportunities of integration. Sessions are organized through a combination of lectures, discussions of primary and secondary sources, and students' presentations.

This course offers a wide-ranging survey of European history from the late 18th century to the present. It provides a basic grounding in - and a self-contained survey of - Modern European History, and it demonstrates how European society has evolved as a result of the interplay of major economic, social, political, and cultural developments of the period c.1780 to the present. A course with such a wide chronological and geographical span has to be rigorously selective, and in consequence the lecturers confine their attentions to those general developments that had a far-reaching influence on a major part of the European population.
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This course provides a general overview of secularism in the world. Reading texts, scientific articles, press articles, and historical documents, it reviews case studies with a comparative approach from political science, history, sociology, philosophy, and theology. Topics include the regime of separation of the Churches and the State in France, the secular state, the American civil religion, the Italian concordat, the Danish case, Turkey, the Mexican separation, and the Belgian derogatory regime. 

This course examines gendered and sexual attitudes and behaviors in Scotland during the period c.1800-1918. Traditionally perceived as an era of change from a time of repression to a more liberated modernity, recent historiography points to diversity, ambiguity, and continuity as well as change.

This course contextualizes Supreme Court decisions by revisiting major societal shifts through the prism of American fiction, from the 19th Century to the present. The course begins with a brief introduction on mimesis and literature’s potential to relate and reflect historical events and, more simply, facts. It then focuses on numerous works of fiction contextualizing and referring to the following topics chronologically following the Supreme Court’s decisions: slavery (Dredd Scott v. Sandford), segregation (Plessy v. Ferguson), the New Deal, interracial marriage and race relations in the United States (Loving V. Virginia), the Pentagon Papers and the freedom of the press (New York Times v. United States), the limits of free speech (Texas v. Johnson), culture and political wars in the contemporary United States (Bush v. Gore/Citizens United v. FEC), same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges), and Covid-19 and mask mandates (Lucas Wall, et al. v. Transportation Security Administration). 

This American Studies course is a critical and intersectional examination of the United States' ever-evolving, if often paradoxical, racial politics. Beginning with the colonization of North America to present day the course interrogates the politics of difference through several key themes including overlapping definitions and representation of ethnicity, race, and racism and its continuous impact on modern American identity, politics, its legal system, society, arts, culture, and economy.

This course offers a study of the Second World War from a worldwide perspective. It explores these themes in two parts, in unfamiliar places and across unusual timescales. The first part begins with the question of what makes (and unmakes) a war a "world war" and reviews the conflict's development from its origins to its ending, well beyond the familiar 1939-1945 chronology. In the second part, it explores themes both familiar and unfamiliar from a global viewpoint, from the war's multinational forces to its ecology, economy, and popular memory.

The initial focus is on the emergence of the industrial core and its relationship with the wider world. By 1914 the USA was the world industrial leader, with industrial output equal to that of France, Germany, and Britain combined. Accordingly the case of US economic development is considered in some detail. Global economic history is not just a history of the industrial core, though, and accordingly Chinese and Japanese economic history are also studied in some detail. In the 20th century, elements of the world economy disintegrated during the 1920s and 1930s, most especially the networks of trade and the international monetary system. This led to widespread depression, including in the USA, and students seek to understand what went wrong. The course concludes with a discussion of a second era of global economic expansion since 1945.

The Roman empire was one of the longest-lasting in global history. Its enduring impact can be seen, heard and felt today, from language and architecture to film and video. This course examines Rome’s rise and fall, and asks how it successfully ruled over so many peoples for so long, in comparison with other world empires. It considers who made up empire emperors, ‘barbarians’, slaves and ordinary people. It also uncovers the background to early Christianity, Roman legacies inherited through European colonialism, and the numerous references to Rome in both high and popular culture today.

This course introduces exchange students to concepts, theories, and perspectives regarding migration, minorities, and multicultural aspects in Swedish history. The focus of the course is on people moving to, from, and within Sweden, and on relations between the majority and minorities, such as the Sami people.