History

This course examines French films from the birth of cinema in 1895 to the more recent creations celebrated at the Cannes Festival. The course studies selected avant-garde and popular films and explores how film narratives can reflect historical and social conditions in France during a given time. The following periods are discussed: Early cinema (the Lumière brothers, Alice Guy, Méliès); the Golden Age of French classical cinema (Renoir); the “New Wave” (Varda, Godard); the “Cinéma du Look” (Besson); “Heritage Cinema” (Claire Denis); and the challenges of Globalization (Sciamma). The course also covers several film genres, from the birth of the fantastique to the influence of the film noir on New Wave cinema. Students explore the cross-cultural interactions between French cinema and foreign films and how French cinema as an art form has had a deep impact on international cinema. Films and readings are supplemented by site visits. Most of the films chosen for this class were shot in Paris and reveal the city's different faces, going from the romanticized version in Agnès Varda's film or Claire Denis' grittier version.

This course focuses on how Europe was defined through war, military occupations, civil conflicts, and peace agreements in the 19th and 20th centuries. Drawing on examples of various conflicts, students discuss several major questions: How did international and civil conflicts shape European culture and politics? Why was the 20th century so violent? How did Europe become divided into “right” and “left,” and “East” and “West”? How are these conflicts and political extremes remembered or forgotten today?

This interdisciplinary course explores the place of the supernatural in American history and culture from the beginnings of English settlement in North America through the current era. It explores the ways in which the “original sins” of American history, such as the enslavement of African-Americans and the dispossession of Native Americans, have been understood through the figures of ghosts, monsters, and spirits, and how the recurrence of such figures over centuries reflects the novelist William Faulkner’s claim that “the past is never dead; it’s not even past.” 

The course covers the political and social history of Rome down to Augustus, together with the material culture, monuments, art, literature and thought of the Romans during this period. Lectures cover topics such as early Rome, the conquest of Italy and the Mediterranean, Roman myth and religion, the city of Rome, Roman poetry and drama, the fall of the republic and the Augustan revolution.

This course examines the evolution of the historiography of the Cold War, with its recent transformations, to then analyze the nature of today's international relations marked by the “return of competition between the super powers,” an expression created by the Pentagon in 2016. The Chinese and Russian analyses of the evolution of the world that we have long called "Post-Cold War" is also studied.

This course offers an exploration of the origins, functions, and effects of political institutions in historical perspective, paying particular attention to their dynamics (that is, how different institutions appeared and how they changed over time). The course utilizes critical reading and discussion of research papers that apply theoretical insights and empirical tools to engage in major debates about the nature and consequences of political institutions. The course integrates material from a variety of disciplines including political science, international relations, political philosophy, economics, and history. The course examines what types of political institutions form, why they form, what they do, and how they evolve. Students discuss a series of debates related to the rise and consolidation of states in historical perspective, and review current (and some classic) works on the subject. These debates include why nation-states came to dominate over other state forms (such as empires or city-states), which role elites played in state formation, in which ways the functions of the state began to take shape, or how state capacity was built and sustained in different places and times. 

The course provides an overview of the last 200,000 years of human history with a focus on diet and health and deals with different aspects of the relationship between mankind and the environment. The concept of transition is discussed with reference to osteological, archaeological, and historical source material on the Neolithic revolution, urbanization, and industrialization. To understand the population growth from a few individuals to 7 billion people in less than 200,000 years, the course employs an interdisciplinary perspective interweaving biological, social, and economic developments and climate change.