Graduate

An overview of theories, methods, and philosophies concerning the nature and production of history. Topics vary with instructor.

This team-taught seminar introduces graduate students to the "how" of historical research. Designed to offer concrete, practical skills toward accomplishing an intensive research project, this course covers topic development, efficient reading strategies, research methods, and interpretive approaches. The seminar features professors from the Department of History, who expose students to the "hidden curriculum" of research-intensive scholarly work. Students also train in habits of note-taking, research planning, and inclusive discussion as well as facilitation techniques.

Having already prepared a bibliography and research prospectus in a graduate research seminar, students will undertake further research on their projects, write a 25–30 page research paper, and present their work to their fellow students.

Because world history surfaces in curriculums at all educational levels, this seminar interrogates its value. Why do historians advocate world (and transnational) history? How do historians actually practice it? What are the pitfalls? Can global perspectives apply to localized subjects?

Focuses on the histories and theories of decolonization in the mid-to-late 20th century, particularly, interactions among anticolonial movements, how Cold War era antagonisms inflected the process of decolonization, and efforts to forge Afro-Asian unity and/or a nonalignment movement.

Provides graduate students with an introduction to the key interpretations and controversies in the global history of the 1900-1930 period, one marked by a world war, a reconfiguration of empires and the emergence of anti-colonial nationalisms, an accelerated pace of social change in many places in the world, and several revolutions and popular uprisings with significant global impact.

Introduction to theories and methods employed in gendered historical research. Readings are drawn from a range of chronological, national, and thematic fields and explore the intersection of gender analysis with such historical problems as the body and sexuality, modernity, national identity, and production/consumption.

Graduate reading course focusing on both classic and contemporary approaches to social and cultural history. Readings induce: Bakhtin, Benjamin, Foucault, Auerbach, and Berlin, and a variety of more recent studies in social, cultural, and intellectual history. Course not limited to graduate students in History.

Research seminar introducing theories and methods of the comparative histories of race, ethnicity, colonialism, and nationalism.

Graduate seminar exploring the history of Canada-United States-Mexico borderlands. Approaches and arguments compare nation-state centered histories with narratives that construct the North American borderlands as places wrought from a multiplicity of overlapping indigenous, imperial, national, transnational, and global forces.

Examines the histories and historiography concerning diaspora. This area of study includes populations from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Students study the histories of diasporic populations, and the questions, theory, and methods that scholars use to approach the subject.

Introduces the study of empire (as opposed to nations, regions, or continents) as an approach to world history and to recent historiographical trends in the history of empires.

Critically examines how digital processes are changing scholarly practice and pedagogy in the humanities. Students experiment with how digital media can impact research and communication for textual scholars, museum professionals, archivists, librarians, public historians and educators.

Cross Listed Courses

Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

Explores diaspora as a category of experience, imagination, and analysis. Tracks the field's interdisciplinary influences and how it has generated a new vocabulary and new tools to uncover fixed and bounded ideas of time, place, and actors in many inquiries. Course aims to rearrange geographies, chronologies, and agencies by avoiding simplistic narratives about globalization and the end of the nation-state by facilitating transnational, cross-regional, long-historical, intercultural, or intersectional approaches to discover new interpretative possibilities.

Introduction to major themes and controversies in the interpretation of U.S. history. Readings cover both chronological eras and topical subjects, often in a comparative context: colonial and early national periods.

Introduction to major themes and controversies in the interpretation of U.S. history. Readings cover both chronological eras and topical subjects, often in a comparative context: 19th century.

First quarter of a two-quarter introduction to research in early American history (1550-1820). Readings include both historiographically definitive texts as well as recent scholarship reflecting the field's developments. Students complete analyses of historical sources, brief critical essays, and a significant research project. HIS 211A is not a prerequisite to HIS 211B.

Second quarter of a two-quarter introduction to research in early American history (1550-1820). Readings include both historiographically definitive texts as well as recent scholarship reflecting the field's developments. Students complete analyses of historical sources, brief critical essays, and a significant research project. HIS 211A is not a prerequisite to HIS 211B.

A reading-intensive graduate seminar in United States history that examines citizenship and its exclusions, grounded in race, gender, sexuality, age, and disability. This seminar also explores how forms of belonging intersected with evolving understandings of nationalism and sovereignty.

A reading-intensive graduate seminar in United States history examining citizenship and its exclusions, grounded in race, gender, sexuality, age, and disability. The course also explores how forms of belonging intersected with evolving understandings of nationalism and sovereignty.

Concerns the history and historiography of California from indigenous dominion to the present. Considers the distinctive ways in which California has led the nation and globe in economic, political, and social change, while remaining a multiethnic borderland.

Addresses topics in history of working people, the labor movement broadly defined, and political-economic change in the U.S. Topics include race, ethnic and gender dynamics, and U.S. labor and working-class history in global context.

Explores the emergence of the welfare/regulatory state in the United States from the 1870s to World War I, examining different schools of historical thought about this period.

Introduces key issues and debates in United States immigration and ethnic history. Topics include causes of immigration; constructions of race, gender and ethnicity; assimilation; transnationalism; and forces shaping immigration policy.

Research in the history of religions in the United States. Addresses topics, such as the rise of evangelicalism; class, race, and religious diversity; gender and power; modernity; and civil religion through analyses of visual and literary texts, iconography, ritual, theology, and praxis.

Overview of key historical texts focusing on the Native American experience, with particular focus on scholarship that seeks to decolonize Western methodologies and research practices. Readings explore such topics as decolonization, indigenous identity, sovereignty, repatriation efforts, gender and sexuality, and historical memory. The format consists of discussions of readings. Students give oral presentations on the readings, and write book reviews and a final historiographical paper.

Explores the economic, social, and cultural history of early America in terms of its Atlantic connections and intersection with the cultures of early modern Europe, Africa, and Latin America. Builds upon previous work in early America and early modern Europe, challenging students both to work comparatively and to break out of traditional geographic models.

Compares the history of the colonial and 19th-century Americans through a world-history perspective. Focuses on the interrelated themes of indigenous histories, slavery and other forms of servitude, commodity production, and the meaning of equality and freedom in new nations.

Explores the history of sexuality covering diverse time periods, peoples, and regions. Examines methods and theories used in the study of sexuality. Readings draw from the Americas, Middle East, Africa, Europe, and Austro-Asia, as well as topics in queer and LGBTQ2 studies.

Reading-intensive graduate seminar with emphasis on theoretical and historiographical questions regarding the field of Spanish colonialism in the Americas. Students encouraged to engage in discussions of comparative colonialisms.

Explores the relationship between colonialism and gender. Examines the construction of gender categories (in conjunction with race) in the context of colonial conquest and rule; contested definitions of motherhood, domesticity, and citizenship; and regulation of sexuality.

Introduces students to important debates in labor studies in Asia. Studies the relationship between labor, capitalism, and imperialism. Also interrogates the relevance or irrelevance of Asia as a concept from the standpoint of labor.

Survey of the major works on and historiographical controversies about Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) China.

Reading seminar on the history of Chinese gender, focusing on the Qing dynasty (1644 to 1911) to the present. Topics include marriage and family, sexuality, work, the gendered language of politics, and major reform movements.

A survey of major Western-language works and historiographical controversies in Chinese history from 1900 to the present. Weekly readings emphasize particular social and political movements as well as long-term changes in urban and rural society.

An overview of the scholarly literature on the People's Republic of China. Readings include works by historians as well as by social scientists. Students consider what kinds of questions historians have and can ask.

An introduction for graduate students to the use of major research tools and sources in Chinese history since 1600, with a focus on 20th-century materials. Students complete a series of bibliographical exercises and prepare a research prospectus.

Building on the research and bibliographic skills developed in course 228A, students develop a research topic and write a paper of 20-30 pages using primary sources as appropriate in English, Chinese, and/or Japanese.

A graduate course intended to give students a fundamental understanding of the major themes in the study of modern Japanese history. Central themes include modernity and modernization, colonialism, postwar recovery, gender, race, and nationalism.

Examines how Japanese history has been forged across, outside, and beyond the boundaries of the modern nation-state of Japan. Considers how Japan has transformed the world. Students debate how the world made Japan and how Japan re-made the world.

Examines—through primary and secondary sources—constructions of gender (masculine, feminine, and transgender) in Japanese society over the past several centuries, focusing on the modern era.

Introduces major themes and problems in recent historiographical trends in environmental history and the history of technology. Examines the role of environment and technology in the making of Europe and European societies' engagement with the world.

The history of empire has emerged as one of the most influential and fastest growing areas of inquiry within the field of modern European history. This course introduces students to recent debates and trends in imperial, colonial, and postcolonial history.

Focuses on the histories and theories of republicanism and liberalism by investigating the tension between universal ideologies and discriminatory practices. Focuses on France and the United States, but Algeria, Syria, and Turkey will also be covered.

Examines the significance of religion and secularism in the modern period. How did modernity and the concept of the secular transform various religions and how, in turn, did these religions help to create modernity.

For several centuries, the shtetl functioned as the center of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Alternately mythologized and pathologized, the shtetl continues to exist as an imaginary space that defines and distorts the historical image of Eastern European Jewish life. Students cannot receive credit for this course and HIS 196M.

Explores the making of space, place, and geography in a body of recent historical work. Explores key theoretical work interrogating the significance of space as a critical element of social theory and historical consideration. Proceeds through three thematic units: questions of colonial economy in South Asia; spaces of empires and its end in the Eastern Mediterranean; and histories of infrastructure.

Explores the history and historiography of the modern Middle East through recent historical scholarship. Examines the new theoretical approaches that frame inquiries into the region's history and how contemporary historians are reinterpreting familiar questions and themes.

Focuses on the histories of science and medicine in the Global South. While these fields have historically been dominated by scholarship focusing on Europe and North America, in recent years, work produced by scholars of the Global South has begun to reshape these fields. This seminar critically considers the body of historical scholarship with an eye toward the following questions: Are there common themes that define this body of historiography? What do works that fall within this genre have to teach us about other bodies of cultural, political and economic historical work? How is it productive to think with the Global South as a category of analysis?

A multidisciplinary history of the body from late antiquity to the present. Topics include: medical and religious constructions; the raced, gendered, and sexualized body; adornment and performance markers; power and control through the body; body parts; and the body's permeability.

Devoted to professionalism and socialization of history graduate students. Includes formal and informal meetings with faculty and other graduate students. Topics include TAships, designing course syllabi, pedagogy, teaching technologies, and teaching in different venues.

Devoted to professionalism and socialization of history graduate students. Topics include discussion of researching grants; effective CV writing; successful grant applications and publication proposals; and conference paper and panel proposals. Required for first-year graduate students; however, open to all history graduate students as needed.

Devoted to professionalism and socialization of history graduate students. Includes formal and informal meetings with faculty and other graduate students. Topics include researching position; preparing a CV and the job-application letter; preparing for an interview; practice interview; preparing a job talk and/or teaching presentation; and practice job talk.

Independent study course in which history graduate student reads selected texts to fulfill foreign language requirement. Student meets with instructor to discuss readings, deepening his knowledge of the foreign language. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.

Independent study course designed to help students prepare for qualifying exams. Students meet on regular basis with one or more members of qualifying examination committee to monitor preparation for exam. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.

Independent study focusing on selected texts or authors in history or historical theory. Students meet on regular basis with instructor to discuss readings and deepen their knowledge of a particular author or historical theory. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Independent study focusing on selected texts or authors in history or historical theory. Students meet on regular basis with instructor to discuss readings. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Acquaints students with the department's thematic research clusters in their field to coordinate training in historical research. Students meet on a regular basis with a faculty member of a particular cluster to discuss most important readings in the field. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.

Acquaints students with the department's thematic research clusters in their field to coordinate training in historical research. Students meet on a regular basis with a faculty member of this cluster to discuss most important readings in their field. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.

Independent study designed to help history graduate students prepare to teach in an area of history outside their specialization. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.

Independent study designed to foster departmental and cross-disciplinary participation in campus talks, colloquia, conferences, and events. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.

Critically examines the formation of political elites in East Asia. Compares literati in Ming and Qing China; samurai in Tokugawa, Japan; and yangban in Joeson, Korea. Each group occupied specific roles and functions in their state and society but differed in scale and character. Students cannot receive credit for this course and HIS 194M.

Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Required course for all first-year graduate students in the History Department. Course helps students situate themselves within the field of history by developing a research agenda in relation to the historiography on their geographical and thematic areas of interest, prepares students to embark on research during the summer after the first year, and equips them with a tentative reading list to guide their preparation for the Qualifying Exam. Course content varies according to the interests and needs of students. Students complete the course with a primary or secondary adviser.

Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.