History

This course provides a broad introduction to the major themes and trends in Korean and English-language historiography of Korean history from antiquity to the modern era. Students examine various issues, events, and individuals in Korea's political, social, economic and diplomatic history. 

The class presents a historical analysis of economic events and changes. Topics include: modern economic growth; population and natural resources; markets and institutions; technological change and economic growth; the modern firm; globalization; the modern state and economic growth.

This courses analyzes the ways in which culture and science, as particular forms of culture, interacted and mutually shaped one another throughout history. Topics include: science and technology in culture; space as cultural and scientific matter; time as cultural and scientific matter; the cultural impact of the Scientific Revolution; Industrial Revolution, Romanticism, and the concept of nature; the crisis of science and its cultural import; science and culture in a digital environment.

The Great Hunger or An Gorta Mór (1845-52) was the single most transformative event in modern Irish history and proportionally one of the most devastating famines to occur anywhere in the modern era. This famine led to the loss of one million lives and the emigration of two million refugees from a population of eight and a half million. The humanitarian crisis of the late-1840s and early-1850s marks the creation of a global Irish diaspora and a lasting memory of social change. This course explores key debates surrounding the famine and its resonances across Irish and global history, tackling topics including the role of government relief, epidemic disease, mass displacement, and the social revolution which fundamentally reshaped Ireland.

This course analyzes slavery and racism in Chile and Latin America from historical and contemporary perspectives. Topics include: memory and slavery; racism and hopelessness; anti-racist, afro-descendant feminism; abolition in Chile; gradual abolition in the River Plate region; racialized citizenships; strategies for freedom in times of abolition--the U.S.-Mexico border; lawsuits and manumission; the enslaved body, work, and health.

This course begins with the rise of Brian Boru, who became Ireland's most famous high king, to his fall which occurred at the iconic battle of Clontarf in 1014. Students explore how Irish society and kingship changed in the aftermath of Clontarf as a result of inter-provincial warfare and the changing role of the church. The second half of the course examines the causes and implications of the English (or Anglo-Norman) invasion of the late 1160s, perhaps the single most formative development in Irish secular affairs. Students study the interaction of cultures in its aftermath and the Irish opposition to English rule that saw the emergence of England's ongoing Irish problem through later centuries. The course closes with the most serious challenge to English power in medieval Ireland: the Scottish invasion (1315-18) led by Edward Bruce, brother of Robert Bruce king of Scots.