Department website: http://history.jhu.edu/
The Department of History offers students the opportunity to work intensively in the classroom and with individual faculty to discover the richness and complexity of history. Undergraduates begin with general courses, but progress quickly to courses that explore topics in depth and provide experience in researching, analyzing, and writing about the past. Graduate students work independently and with faculty advisors on reading and research in their fields of interest, while departmental seminars bring them together to discuss their research, forging a collegial intellectual culture. The department emphasizes European history, United States history, and the histories of Africa, Latin America, and East Asia. Faculty and students participate in a variety of interdisciplinary programs, including Africana Studies, East Asian Studies, Latin American Studies, Judaic Studies, Museums and Society, the Program for the Study of Women, Gender & Sexuality, and International Studies.
Facilities
In addition to the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at the university, students in the Department of History can use the collections of the Peabody Institute Library, the Enoch Pratt Free Library, and the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore, and of the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and other specialized libraries in nearby Washington, D.C. There is provision for regular transportation to and from the Library of Congress. Also within easy distance are the holdings of specialized historical libraries and archives in Annapolis, Richmond, Williamsburg, Charlottesville, Wilmington, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Trenton, Princeton, Newark, and New York.
Graduate Programs
The graduate program prepares professionally motivated students for careers as research scholars and college and university teachers. Hence it is designed for candidates who want to proceed directly to the Ph.D. degree, who have developed historical interests, and who are prepared to work independently. Within the areas of European history, American history, and the histories of Africa, Latin America, and China, the department emphasizes social/economic and intellectual/cultural history. Although diplomatic and political history are not emphasized, attention is given to the social, economic, and cultural bases of politics.
The program is organized around seminars rather than courses, credits, or grades. AS.100.781 The Seminar-AS.100.782 The Seminar and satellite seminars in European, American, and Comparative World History bring together students, faculty, and invited scholars from outside the university to discuss their research work. These departmental seminars create a lively intellectual community in which graduate students quickly become contributing members. The combination of flexibility, independence, and scholarly collegiality offered by the Hopkins program gives it a distinctive character.
Students select four fields (one major and three minor) and make their own arrangements with professors for a study program leading to comprehensive examinations at the end of the second year. Those arrangements may include taking a seminar in the field. One, and exceptionally two, minor field may be taken outside the Department of History. Students have maximum flexibility in the construction of individual plans of study, as well as the opportunity to work closely with several professors.
Admission and Financial Aid
In judging applications, the department puts particularly heavy emphasis on the quality of the student’s historical interests and prior research experience. Each applicant must submit a sample of written work. Ordinarily no candidate for admission is accepted whose record does not indicate an ability to read at least one foreign language.
The department accepts only those students who plan to work in the specific fields of the faculty, and each student is admitted only with the approval of a particular professor. Applicants should indicate the proposed field of specialization at the time of application. With the concurrence of a new faculty advisor, students may, of course, later change their major professor.
The department normally provides full fellowship support for all admitted students including both tuition and a stipend. Students are encouraged to apply for external support if eligible.
For current course information and registration go to https://sis.jhu.edu/classes/
Courses
- Cross Listed Courses
- Agora Institute
- Center for Africana Studies
- Classics
- Comparative Thought and Literature
- East Asian Studies
- English
- European and Eurasian Studies
- Film and Media Studies
- First Year Seminars
- History
- History of Art
- History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
- Interdepartmental
- Islamic Studies
- Medicine, Science and the Humanities
- Modern Languages and Literatures
- Near Eastern Studies
- Political Science
- Program in Museums and Society
- Sociology
- Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality
This course explores selected topics in the political, economic, social, and intellectual history of Western Europe in the wider world in the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the fourteenth century. Special emphasis will be given to understanding the ways in which medieval society functioned as it reorganized itself after the almost total collapse of the ancient world. Topics include: religious plurality, sovereignty and subjecthood, flourishing of learning, chivalric culture, crusading, and the plague and its effects. We will follow the interplay between material and cultural forces in the processes of social organization.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Modern Europe familiarizes students with key moments, ideas, communities, individuals, and movements which have defined European experiences in global encounters since the Revolutionary era. We will particularly focus on European imperial expansion, the formation of the modern nation-state, the history of political ideas and their global ramifications, and popular culture and social change.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course examines race and social movements in America from the Revolution to 1921.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A class combining Latin American history since independence and digital humanities (revised with 2021 student feedback). Students will build guided research projects while thinking about questions of republicanism, freedom and unfreedom, migration, and development.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This introductory course aims to introduce students who have no prior knowledge of the Middle East to the region. Emphasis will be placed on the history, geography, languages, religions, and culture of the pre-modern and modern Middle East. Students will also be exposed to different methods and approaches to the academic study of the region.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
An introduction to modern African history, with emphasis on colonialism and decolonization.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Introduction to three major themes in African history, from the precolonial era to the present.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Through issues of illicit pleasure (sexuality, hallucination, play, etc.) in Black, Indigenous, queer, and women's history circa 1500-1850, we will investigate the politics of morality. Assessment will be based on "Un-Essay" projects instead of written exams.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The course will provide an introduction to the study of Jewish History.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Jewish history 1750-present in Europe, the Near East, the US, Israel; the challenges of modernity and new forms of Jewish life and conflict from Enlightenment and emancipation, Hasidism, Reform and Orthodox Judaism to capitalism and socialism; empire, nationalism and Zionism; the Holocaust. Extensive attention to US Jewry and State of Israel.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course is an introduction to Japan’s history from 1800 to the present with emphasis on the influences of an increasing global circulation of ideas and people. Topics include the emperor system, family and gender, imperialism, World War II, the postwar economy, and global J-pop.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Cultural Revolution was Mao Zedong's last attempt to transform Chinese society spiritually and structurally. The events of this period were marked by social upheaval, personal vendettas, violence, massive youth movements, and extreme ideological pressure. This course will explore the Cultural Revolution from a variety of perspectives, focusing on the relationship between events in China from 1966-1976, and their interpretation in China and the West during the Cultural Revolution decade and since. (Previously offered as AS.100.219 and AS.100.236. )
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course introduces students to the defining social, political, and cultural moments that reflect the experience of African Americans in the United States, 1896 – present. Topics include the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Freedom Struggle, African American politics, urban rebellion, mass incarceration, Hip Hop culture, the current movement for Black Lives, and more.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
We will discuss Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project, the scholarship supporting each of the essays, and the public debates that ensued. Students will learn how authors build historical arguments and develop critical reading and fact-checking skills. The class will balance a deep investigation of the Project’s essays with an analysis of how those essays have influenced political discourse. This is a reading-intensive, discussion-based class. There will be two small writing assignments, including a final project which can take the form of a podcast, blog post, video, or other multi-media format beyond a traditional essay. The goal is for students to be able to communicate their expertise to people outside the classroom.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores the series of religious and political conflicts that make up what are known now as the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This class explores the construction and articulation of Black womanhood between the anglophone and francophone worlds in the 19th and 20th century. Through a study of secondary and primary sources, we will follow African American women across the Atlantic and analyze their experiences with France and the French language.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course offers an overview of the history of the Uyghur people from their conversion to Islam in the tenth century to the present-day human rights crisis in Xinjiang, China.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course introduces students to significant ideas and debates on the appropriate role of private individuals, institutions, and wealth in leading social change from the Gilded Age through Silicon Valley.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Explores religious culture in medieval and early modern Europe, with an emphasis on spiritual beliefs and practices, relics, miracles, pilgrimage, and saint-making. Emphasis on reading and discussing written sources and visual culture.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Worlds of Hip-Hop explores hip-hop as an arts movement whose forms, conventions, and standards responded to the specific political and social conditions to address questions of freedom and community.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
There is more to Germany than beer, BMWs, and Bayern Munich. We explore politics, culture, economics and society to understand Germany and its role in Europe and the world from the 18th century to the 2015 ‘Refugee Crisis’, climate change, EU and NATO politics today.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will introduce students to some major issues and problems in the history of the Early U.S. Republic, c. 1750 to 1815, by focusing on the theme of “expansion.”
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores 20th century U.S. history through the works of writers and artists. We will ask how essays, novels, performance, and art can function as cultural and social criticism.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course provides an intensive introduction to the causes, character, and consequences of the American Revolution, the colonial rebellion that produced the first republic in the Americas, and set in motion an age of democratic revolutions in the Atlantic world. A remarkable epoch in world history, the revolutionary era was of momentous significance.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This class offers a broad overview of changes in China from Neolithic times through the Song dynasty (roughly from 5000 BCE through the 13th century CE!). It features discussion of art, material culture, philosophical texts, religious ideas, and literary works as well as providing a broad overview of politics and society. Close readings of primary sources in discussion sections and extensive use of visual material in lectures will allow students to consider the relationship between what (sources) we have—and what we can know about the past.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Challenging the conception that Islam is synonymous with the Middle East, this course considers Muslim populations across Asia and interrogates how Islam and these regions have shaped one another.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course considers the American Revolution from the perspective of locations beyond the thirteen rebelling colonies. Covering a range of global hotspots, the focus is on events from 1763 to 1788.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores the rich history of West Africa and its place in the broader world. Topics include the environmental history of the Sahara desert, West African empires, and the rise of Nollywood and contemporary culture.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Why are cities associated with sex and vice? Are cities a natural refuge for LGBT people? This course explores the role of American cities in the history of sexuality.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course is a survey of the history of Jewish magic, mysticism, and secret tradition from the Middle Ages till the 19th century. We shall explore the concept of the sod (mystery) and its historical variants. We shall read excerpts from the most important texts of Jewish esotericism, such as Sefer Yetzirah, the Bahir, and the Zohar. We shall also discuss “practical Kabbalah”, i.e. the preparation and use of amulets and charms, as well as demonic (and angelic) possession.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The course examines religious difference in the medieval Middle East, including everyday encounters and relations between members of different communities; the policies of some Islamic states towards non-Muslims; conversion to Islam and the Islamization of society and space.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores how historical events and processes, such as colonialism and globalization, have shaped ideas of health, healing, medicine, and power in specific African societies since the 19th century. 100-level course in African History recommended.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This class focuses on Europe from the end of World War II until today. We will discuss such topics as the Cold War, social democracy, the welfare state, the relationship to the US and the Soviet Union, decolonization, migration, 1989, European integration, neoliberalism, and the EU. We will discuss and analyze academic literature, movies, documentary films, textual and visual primary sources.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will trace the historical development of Jewish and Christian mysticism between the 11th and the 19th centuries.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores passing narratives – stories that feature people who cross race, class, ethnic, or gender boundaries. We will consider what passing narratives can teach us about power and identity, especially as power is presumed to reside in the self and race is presumed to no longer matter.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Overview of modern South African history, with a focus on the origins of the racial state and the development of black liberation movements.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Making and Unmaking Queer Histories introduces students to the major themes and historical developments which shape contemporary understandings of LGBTQ+-identified subjects and communities in the US and Western Europe.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
How did medicine emerge as a distinctive body of knowledge and a profession in the early modern period? The answers lie in the histories of disease, empire, and global commerce.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will survey the main methods of and approaches to history since the Ancient times till the present. We shall begin by asking “What is history?” and explicate the basic concepts such as “fact”, “event”, “source”, narrative”, “evidence”, etc. We shall inquire if history can teach lessons for the future, or, for that matter, any lessons at all. We shall explore the interactions of history and collective memory and discuss various social, political, and psychological uses and abuses of historical writing.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The second semester of the two-semester sequence required for majors, this course further introduces students to the theory and practice of history. Students write an essay based on original research.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
A survey of major developments in American philosophy, literature, law, economics, and political theory since 1865. Among other subjects, readings will explore modernism and anti-modernism, belief and uncertainty, science and tradition, uniformity and diversity, scarcity and surfeit, and individualism and concern for the social good.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course explores the history of late twentieth-century America by examining the social, economic, and political legacies of 1960s civil rights protest for the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
The Algerian Revolution (1954-1962) successfully challenged French claims that Algeria was part of France and led to an independent Algerian Republic. This struggle is often seen as the touchstone anti-colonial struggle as well as the matrix for modern forms of terrorism and state-sponsored torture. We will explore its history.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Examines the history of France from the reign of Louis XIV to the French Revolution, focusing on early modern society, popular culture, absolutism, the Enlightenment, overseas empire, and the French and Haitian Revolutions.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course uses the writings of medieval women to explore their social and religious worlds and orients visionary writing within the broader narrative of religious movements from the 12th-14th centuries.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Seminar on modern Russia. No midterm and no final. 6 short weekly journals, two short papers, and two small quizzes.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This class explores the history of the USSR through its varied cultural domains. It will consider music, literature, film, painting, and sculpture in both “high” and “low” registers, as well as aesthetics, power, and control over the entire Soviet period, at both the center and, especially, the periphery.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Political, social and cultural history of a turning-point in European history that witnessed the birth and death of democracy.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Examines the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement that swept Europe in the eighteenth century to shape the modern world. Topics include science and religion; print culture; gender and sociability; political economy; and race, slavery, and colonialism.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course examines reproductive politics in the United States from the colonial era to the present. Topics include contraception, abortion, and sterilization, emphasizing the impact of gender, class, and race.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course will examine both the Haitian Revolution and the early period of Mexican independence by engaging with the ideas of actors within these events in international contexts.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This discussion-based seminar focuses on Colonial American history, using maps, objects, and other primary sources to examine such topics as colonialism, slavery, war, disease, trade, empire, and cultural encounters.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
What’s the worst that can happen? We examine the seventeenth century as a warning, traversing the lives of soldiers, captives, and philosophers during one of the world’s most difficult moments.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
“In the sixteenth century of our era”, wrote the eminent historian of Muslim societies Marshall Hodgson, “a visitor from Mars might well have supposed that the human world was on the verge of becoming Muslim”. They would have based this assertion, continues Hodgson, on the political, cultural, and economic vitality of the empires of the Ottomans, the Mughals, and the Safavids. This survey course will introduce students to the history, culture, institutions, and socio-religious makeup of these three early modern polities that ranged from the Balkans to Bengal, paying particular attention on issues of dynastic and religious law, cultural, religious, and military-diplomatic exchanges with the world and with each another, and their impact on the social, religious, and ethnic makeup of modern Europe and Asia.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The history of money is a history of power exercised by states, institutions, and individuals. It is also a history of the structural possibilities and constraints faced by people in the past. We will address making, using, and conceptualizing money in the early modern Atlantic World, a time and a place of expanding empires, extractive enterprises, and changing categories of difference like race, gender, and class.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores the expansion and creation of an American West—and its inhabitants—from the Constitution to the end of the nineteenth century.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course delves into the variegated, often divergent national politics, social landscapes, and cultural shifts in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland since Britain’s Acts of Union in 1707.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
In this course we will explore how religion in general and Islam in particular informs the world of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune, laying particular emphasis on how the messianic and mystical tradition within Islam pervades the first novel. We will also watch excerpts from the film adaption by Denis Villeneuve, and the forthcoming second part in its entirety together in a local theater. As we do so, we will also discuss questions of Orientalism, representation, adaption, and appropriation in both the books and the films.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This interdisciplinary course surveys critical themes related to Asian American art and activism including perspectives from history, art and visual culture, literature and gender and sexuality studies.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This is not a typical history course but one on historical theory and modern historiographical thought. How did historians in the past generations attempt to analyze the past? To what extent is history connected to other disciplines? What was the French contribution to contemporary historiography? What is "new history"? In this seminar, we are going to examine the scholarship of the French Annales, arguably the most influential and revolutionary “school” of historiography in the twentieth century. Students will read selected works of the Annales historians and discuss concepts such as economic history, serial history, longue durée, conjuncture, total history, mentalité, historical psychology, and historical anthropology.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The focus will be on Soviet-American interactions, Cold-War Cultures, and the impact on both societies.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The history of China from the 16th to the late 19th centuries.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
History of China since ca. 1900.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
"Entertaining America” will trace the history of popular culture in the United States, starting inthe 1830s, when blackface minstrelsy initiated a new wave of commercial performance, andending in the 1920s, when records, films, and radio ushered in the era of mass culture.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course will turn to known and not-so-known black writers during the early to mid-twentieth century who defied literary expectation and wrote stories that featured or focused on whiteness. We will consider what whiteness offered black writers and the political work that their literary experimentations did for a white American publishing industry.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will examine how early modern views on the body, gender, and sexuality shaped beliefs about the abilities and rights of women and men.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The Modern British World introduces some of the major events, themes, and controversies that led to Britain’s global dominance and ultimate decline as an imperial power. This course focuses on varying forms of imperial governance, the interrelationships between metropole and colony, and the formation of British and colonial national identities.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Tolstoy and his era, 1820s to 1910s. Topics include state and politics, empire, the Russian identity, and forms of cultural expression. Students consider "War and Peace" and other masterworks.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course will cover the period commonly known as the High Middle Ages, that is, the civilization of Western Europe in the period roughly from 1050 to 1350. . It is a period of exceptional creativity in the history of Western Europe and in medieval history specifically, a time when many of the most characteristic institutions of Europe came into being.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
A survey of European socialist theories, including Marxism, anarchism, Social Democracy, feminism, and anti-imperialism. Authors include Proudhon, Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Bernstein, Lenin, Luxemburg, Kollontai, Césaire, and Fanon.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The course will introduce the student to the main themes and debates in Jewish historiography from the 19th century to the present.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Jewish history, politics, and culture across a century of enormous transformations and transformative enormities in Europe, the US, and the Middle East. Topics include: impacts on Jewish life of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the post-imperial reordering of the Eastern Europe and the Middle East; Zionism and other modes of Jewish contestatory politics; the consolidation of American Jewry; Nazism and the Holocaust in Europe; formation and development of the State of Israel; the global reordering of Jewish life amid cross-currents of the Cold War, conflict in the Middle East, and success in the US. Substantial attention to recent and contemporary history including the dramatic changes in Israeli society and polity over the past forty years and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This class explores the geographic, economic and cultural issues resulting from Africa’s urban growth from precolonial times to the present.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Using legal texts as a window into English society, we will address the changing nature of royal power, trial by jury, treason, felony, and the freedoms enshrined in the Magna Carta.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Examines case-studies of imperial conquests (Islamic, Mongol, reconquista, early colonialism) and attendant changes in religion (Christianization; Islamization) and in language (Arabization; transition from Latin to European vernaculars) across medieval Eurasia.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The year 2020 will mark 100 years since the 19th Amendment guaranteed American women the right to vote. Or did it? This course will examine the long history of women’s voting rights in the United States, including the story that extends from a convention at Seneca Falls, NY to a constitutional amendment. It will also examine alternative stories, especially those of women of color whose campaigns for the vote did not end in 1920 – and continue until today.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will discuss the problem of historical representation on the basis of an analysis of movies depicting the Age of the Enlightenment.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Using textual and visual documents (including books from Peabody Library), we will examine the contrasts of Brazilian history and culture, and its connections with 19th and 20th century Baltimore.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Compares religious transformation in medieval Europe and the Middle East (ca. 600-1500), including conquest and conversion; conversion narratives; apostasy, martyrdom and other encounters between medieval Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Pre-requisite for enrollment: Students must have taken one history course.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This class reassesses the history of the Cold War through sports. We will investigate how the Cold War has shaped sports, the Olympic movement, the role of athletes at home and abroad. We will discuss how sports were used in domestic and foreign policy, and how Cold War sports reinforced or challenged notions of race, gender, and class.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Explores the daily lives of non-elites in the medieval Middle East—including food; housing; clothes; marriage and divorce; poverty and charity; urban festivals. Half of our meetings devoted to close readings of primary documents (e.g. private letters, court records).
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Students work on producing an individual research project. In certain cases, advisors may allow this requirement to be substituted with a History Research Lab course.
Prerequisite(s): AS.100.293
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
We live in an age that values authenticity, sincerity, and open and transparent communication. Yet this was not always the case. This course will examine the attitudes to lie, falsity, and dissimulation in pre-modern European society. We shall begin by exploring the concepts of lie and discussions of permissibility of lying in the canonical texts of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. We shall then focus on the texts composed between the 16th and the 18th centuries and explore questions posed by theologians (“Is lying always a sin?”, “Should one lie to protect lives?”, “Can God lie?”), philosophers and politicians (“Is the morality of the rulers different than that the ruled?”, “Are politicians bound to lie?”), and courtiers (“Is not telling the truth a necessary part of being polite?”, “Is all civility based on falsehood?”). We shall then move beyond the question of lying and probe the questions of dissimulation, imposture, and false or invented identities. We shall end with a discussion of the early romantic “cult of sincerity”.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A research-intensive seminar, this course uses the rich history of Maryland to approach broader themes in early modern American and global history including colonialism, slavery, revolution, race, gender, and sex.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Place of contrasts, Brazil has a multi-ethnic cultural heritage challenged by social and racial inequalities. Its political life remains chaotic. We will examine these problems through Brazilian history and culture (literature, cinema).
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This seminar explores how the sex and gender binary was produced through US colonialism since the nineteenth century. Topics include domestic settler colonialism, as well as Hawaii, the Caribbean, and Asia.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Through archival, literary, and other cultural texts, this course considers the history of “diversity” as both a practice and concept, beginning with the arrival of “colorblindness” in the 1890s and moving through recent approaches to institutionalized multiculturalism.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Seminar style course in which John Locke’s major works will be read intensively, together with some of his contemporaries’ works, and select scholarly interpretations.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
We will read and analyze key works of social and critical theory produced in relation to 20th and 21st century problems of state and society, nationalism, empire, totalitarianism, genocide, capitalism, political order, gender, race, sexuality, secularism, religion, environmental catastrophe. Possible readings include Weber, Du Bois, Adorno, Arendt, Foucault, Balibar, Beckamong others.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Through intensive and extensive reading, we will explore contemporary Israeli society, politics, and culture, contemporary Palestinian society, politics, and culture under occupation, and the historical processes that have shaped both societies and their ongoing entanglement.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
How do museums represent the world? The course will focus on the colonial legacy of museums and complicate discourses of decolonization by looking at a range of case studies. We will study the world’s fairs, artworks, artifacts, collections, curatorial practices, exhibition histories, repatriation requests, and exhibitionary modes of display, in order to analyze their relationship to histories of decolonization, temporality, translation, untranslatability, spectatorship, provenance, and the life of objects.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Seminar-style class analyzing the social, cultural, gender, religious, economic, and political history of London from Shakespeare's time through revolutions, plague, fire, and commercial, colonial, and industrial expansion.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Key works on the history of Nazi Germany’s murder of European Jewry during the Second World War; Jewish responses; the recasting of Jewish and global thought in relation to this signal event; genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ since the Holocaust.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Objects from the past offer a powerful window into a set of experiences not recorded in texts. We will follow objects and things as they appear in lists, letters, and descriptions, as they travel surprising routes, and bring to life the medieval world before 1400.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
What did Chinese local society look like under the Qing Empire, and how did it change over the early modern era?
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course examines the experience of Chinese women, and also how writers, scholars, and politicians (often male, sometimes foreign) have represented women’s experiences for their own political and social agendas.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Witchcraft, magic, carnivals, riots, folk tales, gender roles; fertility cults and violence especially in Britain, Germany, France, and Italy.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This reading intensive seminar will explore the myriad ways in which questions of sovereignty and the sacred were joined together across the early modern world. Emphasis will be placed on sacred and universal modes of kingship, saintly cults, and messianic movements amongst the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and South Asia.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This undergraduate research seminar examines censorship laws, practices, and debates over the past century; topics include political radicalism, indecency, pornography, and racist hate speech. In addition to discussing common readings, each student will choose a censorship case or issue to research and present to the class.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
What was medieval Cairo like? Students explore urban life in this imperial capital (969-1517), including food and market habits; relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims; patronage; plague, drought, and famine.Pre-requisite for enrollment: Students must have taken two history courses.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course examines shifting understandings of the philosophical foundations, political implications, and social effects of the market economy since the early twentieth century.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
A history of forced and voluntary migration and displacement in Africa, its causes and consequences, with a focus on refugees and labor migrants since 1960.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This seminar-style course will focus on discussing British and American political thought from the "Age of Revolutions", a period also of many critiques of Empire and of many works of Antislavery. Readings include Paine's Common Sense and Rights of Man, the Declaration of Rights, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers; works by Smith, Burke, and Wollstonecraft; and antislavery works by Cugoano, Equiano, Rush, Wesley, and Wilberforce.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course examines the emergence and practice of medieval history as a field of history in the US beginning in the nineteenth-century. We will address what the medieval past meant for the formation of the discipline of history in the US and how an imagined medieval past came to inform scholarly discourse, research approaches, methodologies, ideas about race and gender, legal and constitutional history, and the contours of nation states. The narrative of the medieval origins of states will also be addressed and questioned as it developed over the course of the 20th century. Students will do archival research in the JHU archives and in other published and unpublished source sets.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
In this course, students participate in a research “laboratory,” engaging in direct research on an area of faculty’s research, leading to the development of a collective, digital humanities project.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
How has the history of modern China been told by Chinese, Western, and Japanese historians and social thinkers, and how did this affect popular attitudes and government policies toward China?
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A first-of-its kind seminar hosted by the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship, this course explores the practice of composition for professional writers. It considers the “light” and “dark” sides of clear, direct scholarly writing and intentional, academic obfuscation, respectively. Attendees will also learn strategies and potential hazards that accompany the written description of power in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
A two-semester coordinating seminar for history majors writing senior honors theses. Admission is granted by instructor only after the student has selected a faculty thesis advisor. AS.100.494 is to be taken concurrently with AS.100.507 Senior Thesis.
Prerequisite(s): AS.100.494 is to be taken concurrently with AS.100.507 Senior Thesis.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The Senior Honors Seminar is a coordinating seminar for senior history majors who are writing senior honors theses and wish to graduate with departmental honors. To be taken concurrently with AS.100.508, Senior Thesis.
Corequisite(s): AS.100.508
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The sixties were a polarizing decade of unrest, revolutions, and fundamental change across Europe and the US. We will discuss 1968 through the lens of national case studies, the Cold War, and the history of Baltimore. This is a community-engaged class!
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The Senior Honors Seminar is a coordinating seminar for senior history majors who are writing senior honors theses and wish to graduate with departmental honors. We will discuss the organization of your historical research projects and help you prepare for writing your senior thesis based on that research. This is an interactive class that helps make the most of your senior thesis experience!
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Writing Intensive
This seminar is required for senior history majors who are writing senior honors theses and wish to graduate with departmental honors.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.;AS.100.507
Writing Intensive
Undergraduate independent research under a faculty mentor.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Undergraduate independent research under a faculty mentor.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
How do museums represent the world? The course will focus on the colonial legacy of museums and complicate discourses of decolonization by looking at a range of case studies. We will study the world’s fairs, artworks, artifacts, collections, curatorial practices, exhibition histories, repatriation requests, and exhibitionary modes of display, in order to analyze their relationship to histories of decolonization, temporality, translation, untranslatability, spectatorship, provenance, and the life of objects.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will engage the rich historiography of the French Revolution. We will focus on recent scholarship to examine such themes as: the nature of revolution and popular activism; violence & trauma; constitutionalism; citizenship, democracy, and social rights; the revolution after Thermidor and why the republic collapsed.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Small intensive group reading: the course is primarily intended for students working on their graduate field lists. Other formats are possible with permission of the instructor.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Modern Britain and the British World is a graduate seminar which familiarizes students with major themes and historiographic debates in Modern British and Modern British Imperial History.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
First semester of year-long seminar examining transformations in European consumption from 1650 to 1800. Topics include cultural theory; fashion, gender, and social identity; capitalism, retail, and credit; Enlightenment and the public sphere; political economy; overseas empire; globalization; and the Atlantic revolutions.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Second semester of year-long seminar examining transformations in European consumption from 1650 to 1800. Topics include capitalism and consumption; political economy; fashion, gender, and identity; Enlightenment and the public sphere; globalization; empire and colonization; and the Atlantic revolutions.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This seminar will discuss the use of the concept of the "Baroque", as developed in the history of art, architecture, and music, as a category of historical periodization.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The seminar examines central questions in medieval Islamic cultural history including the formation of the Islamic scholarly tradition; the history of reading and education; institutions (e.g. madrasas and Sufi khanqahs); patronage and urban development, and overlaps between religious scholars and state bureaucrats.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A reading seminar on the interconnected histories and historiographies of Japan and Korea in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Historical survey of scribal and archiving practices of medieval Islamic states (in comparative perspective); includes close readings of primary documents, including legal deeds, petitions, edicts, fiscal receipts, and administrative reports.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This seminar will focus on texts by post-1945 authors who wrote in French and engaged with what it means to write about the past and how to do so. Among those we will focus on are: Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Assia Djebbar, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, Paul Ricoeur, Alain Corbin, Arlette Farge, François Hartog, Paul Ricoeur, Etienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière, Paul B. Preciado, Fernand Braudel.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course focuses on the emergence and development of various strains of Black political thought and action within the modern US. Our course will explore themes of equality, citizenship, democracy, and freedom throughout the 20th Century, specifically as it pertains to the Black experience in America.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Introduction to recent work on the history of law and empire, with a focus on critical legal history perspectives.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The second part of a two-semester sequence, this seminar examines the history of France and its empire from the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century. Topics include: political culture; political economy; the rise of commercial capitalism; the Enlightenment, gender, and sociability; print and popular culture; empire, race, and slavery; and the French and Haitian Revolutions.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Part of a two-semester sequence, this seminar examines the history of France and its empire from the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century. Topics include: state formation; political culture; political economy; commercial capitalism; the Enlightenment; popular culture; empire, race, and slavery; and the French and Haitian Revolutions.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
How have historians grappled with the quite recent past? We will explore histories of the 1970s and 1980s, with a focus on France, Germany, and the UK, as well as transnational and post-decolonization approaches.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A graduate-level seminar on the political, social, and intellectual concerns that have both shaped and undermined dominant ways of telling Japanese history, especially in Japan and the U.S. since 1945.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A reading seminar in African popular culture; the focus might be on Central and West Africa as well as the African Diaspora.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores canonical and cutting-edge research and scholarship in the broad fields of African American Studies and History, 1865 – present. Students will move beyond a basic knowledge of the modern African American experience, while enhancing their critical research and analytical skills. Broad themes covered include questions of freedom, citizenship, agency, identity, and empowerment.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Readings in Medieval History examines major historiographical and methodological developments in the history of the medieval world. Weekly readings and meetings will offer the opportunity to read comparatively and thematically often in preparation for a field in Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean World. Some major themes include: Heresy and holiness; gender and social relationships; franchise, manumission and serfdom; identity and difference; persecution and power; reform and the medieval church; materiality, movement and translation; law and sovereignty; learning and cultural production; and environmental and climate history.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Through a careful study of texts and objects produced for and by the Capetian rulers during the thirteenth century we will interrogate the creation of the French state, the cultivation of royal ideology, and its practice of sovereign power.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This seminar examines the origins, course, and legacies of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), the most radical movement of the Age of Revolutions. It explores the colonial background, the overthrow of slavery, the founding of an independent nation, and the aftermath of revolution in the nineteenth century.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course examines the emergence and practice of medieval history as a field of history in the US beginning in the nineteenth-century. We will address what the medieval past meant for the formation of the discipline of history in the US and how an imagined medieval past came to inform scholarly discourse, research approaches, methodologies, ideas about race and gender, legal and constitutional history, and the contours of nation states. The narrative of the medieval origins of states will also be addressed and questioned as it developed over the course of the 20th century. Students will do archival research in the JHU archives and in other published and unpublished source sets.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This is a graduate seminar devoted to close reading of crucial works in early modern history and historiography.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will look at recent historiography on extranational approaches to 20th-century European histories, with a focus on France, the United Kingdom, USSR/Russia, and Germany.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Explores religious culture in medieval and early modern Europe, with an emphasis on spiritual beliefs and practices, relics, miracles, pilgrimage, and saint-making. Emphasis on reading and discussing written sources and visual culture. Graduate students only.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This seminar introduces doctoral students to archival methods and other scholarly approaches critical to the development of History as an academic discipline over the past two centuries. More broadly, the course prepares students to analyze and to pose the kinds of far-reaching and complex questions that sit at the heart of any dissertation or monographic study.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This graduate seminar explores some of the most innovative approaches to the study of the built environment. We will consider the evolution of what is commonly called “urban history” to examine broader developments in American economic, cultural, spatial, and political history.
A survey of European socialist theories, including Marxism, anarchism, Social Democracy, feminism, and anti-imperialism. Authors include Proudhon, Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Bernstein, Lenin, Luxemburg, Sorel, Kollontai, Gramsci, and Fanon.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Graduate reading seminar in Modern African history.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The second part of a two-semester sequence, this seminar examines a variety of historical traditions in the field of black women’s history.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course considers how black intellectuals have envisioned alternatives to imperialism, racial oppression, and coloniality. It considers the role of imagination in Black Radical thought and how it has shaped political, theoretical, and epistemological questions that animate the black world.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores how to use race as a historical category of analysis, and teaches attendees how to locate how historical actors deploy race and racism to make claims, organize labor and identities, and imagine political possibility.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The course explores the rise of heresy and holiness as categories during the Middle Ages.It traces the advent of religious movements, the effects of religious reform, the centralization of ecclesiastical authority, the rise of vernacular spirituality and dissent, and analyzes the historiographical and methodological approaches to the study of medieval religion.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Colonization and settlement in the Americas brought people from all kinds of places together. This course will explore those contacts, and how they shaped the American experience. The focus is on new books in early American history.
Writing workshop for graduate students at all stages presenting work in progress. Discussion of theories, methods, and challenges of graduate student writing.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The first half of this seminar course consists of non-mathematical introductions to, and discussions of, the fundamental motivations, vocabulary, and methods behind computational techniques of particular use for humanistic research. The second half combines selected readings chosen to address specific questions raised by these discussions with hands-on application to students' research goals. Each participant will lead discussion for one of the selected readings relevant to their interests.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Readings on the intellectual history of the United States in a transnational context since the late nineteenth century.
This seminar will problematize the gradual advent of gender across the life sciences, clinic, anthropology, and state power by pairing them with competing Black, Indigenous, queer and trans vernacular theories of the same.
This course explores the practice of writing and reading the history of African Americans and the wider African Diaspora. Participants will share written work and do close readings of primary and secondary texts exploring the black experience in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Black World Seminar considers the making and meaning of blackness between the 14th and 20th centuries and Africans and people of African descent’s impact on the making of the modern world, from the slave trade to the present. We explore, too, the historical forces which created blackness as a marker on the body and as a political and cultural identity.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A course discussing major recent works of historiography on Reformation Europe, examining Lutheranism, Calvinism and Anabaptism; iconoclasm, visual, and print culture; urban, social, and gender history; demonology and witchcraft; and martyrology, tolerance and intolerance.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
What does a usable history of black womanhood (black queer and trans womanhood inclusive) look like? How do we imagine, create, and narrate black women’s stories? Black women’s history across time and space.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
An examination of modern cultural theories, with emphasis on mass culture and consumerism. Authors include Simmel, Kracauer, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno, Barthes, Debord, Bourdieu, and de Certeau.
Directed Readings in Early Modern European Intellectual History.
This seminar will offer training in feminist, queer, transgender and postcolonial approaches to the history of sexuality by exploring what methods are adequate to writing the history of trans femininity as a specifically nineteenth and twentieth century phenomenon. Areas of emphasis will include histories of sexology, sex work, social movements, and trans feminism and its opponents. The primary geographic focus will be the US, but through a transnational lens that connects to Western Europe, South Asia, and Latin America.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores the history and historiography of early modern Spain, with a particular emphasis on its relationship with the Mediterranean - from religious, economic, social, diplomatic, and military perspectives. It will discuss piracy, the slave trade, the "morisco" question in Spain, the Jewish diaspora, and North Africa-Spanish relations, among other topics. These topics will be explored with an eye to discussions on conversion, gender, and race among other lenses.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course investigates the basic techniques of writing history and the matters traditionally covered in medieval historical texts by reading a series of exemplary medieval historiographical works. This is preceded by a section on theoretical orientations to the study of history and historiography in order to provide the analytic tools for analyzing medieval texts.
Introduction to the history and historiography on British North America and the United States.
Continuation of AS.100.729 for students conducting field exams.
Open also to advanced undergraduates with at least one semester of Classical Chinese. This course has several objectives. First and foremost, it is a hands-on document reading class designed to familiarize students with the skills, sources, and reference materials necessary to conduct research in Qing history. To that end, we will spend much of our time reading documents. At the same time, we will engage in problem solving exercises designed to develop and enhance basic research skills. Finally, we will consider important archive-based secondary works which demonstrate the ways in which historians have made use of Qing documents in their scholarship.
The first part of a two-semester graduate seminar discussing major works on various aspects of early modern British history.
The second part of a two-semester graduate seminar discussing major works on various aspects of early modern British history.
In May 2020, Johns Hopkins will host the meeting of the Berkshire Conference on Women, Gender and Sexualities, a gathering of 1200 scholars from across the world. Our seminar will use the Berkshire Conference program to organize a set of readings that will anticipate the panels, roundtables, performances, and plenaries that will be on campus between May 28 and 31, 2020. Attendance at the conference is not required, but it is recommended.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
We will read and discuss recent monographs and historiographical essays that emerge from and inform French history, with particular attention transnational, imperial, Mediterranean, international, and colonial frames and questions.
An examination of the works of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, as examples of the Hegelian, positivist, and hermeneutic traditions of social theory.
A graduate workshop in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in 20th century history. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A graduate workshop in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in 20th century history. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
This reading seminar will introduce graduate students and advanced undergraduates (by permission) to recent studies of Late Imperial and Republican China that can (by various standards) be classified as works of cultural history.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The course examines various genres of Arabic historical writing during the high and late Middle Ages (10th-15th c.). All primary readings are in English/French translation (no Arabic required).
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Readings on the history of capitalism since the mid-nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the American context.
We will read and discuss recent work on nineteenth-century France, the French-dominated empire, and other “French” histories.
Workshop for presentation of works-in-progress on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality, including drafts of dissertation chapters, research papers, talks, and proposals. Students in disciplines other than history are welcome.
Workshop for presentation of works-in-progress on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality, including drafts of dissertation chapters, research papers, talks, and proposals. Students in disciplines other than history are welcome. Graduate students only.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course features presentations from invited speakers. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
This course features presentations from invited speakers. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
A graduate workshop in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in Medieval European History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
A graduate workshop in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in Medieval European History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
A graduate workshop in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in Early Modern European History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
A graduate workshop in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in Early Modern European History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
A graduate workshop in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in Modern European History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
A graduate workshop in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in Modern European History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
A seminar series in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in American History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
A seminar series in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in American History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
A seminar series in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in Latin American History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly
A seminar series in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in Latin American History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
A seminar series in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in African History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
A seminar series in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in African History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
A seminar series in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in Asian History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
The graduate workshop allows students, both the first-year cohort and all the graduate students in the department(s) as a group, to meet to discuss themes, topics, concerns, approaches, ideas, methods, and insights together and thus to build a sense of community, cohesiveness, and cooperation within the program and the department as a whole.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The intention of the graduate workshop is to allow students, both the first-year cohort and all the graduate students in the department(s) as a group, to meet to discuss themes, topics, concerns, approaches, ideas, methods, and insights together and thus to build a sense of community, cohesiveness, and cooperation within the program and the department as a whole. In the spring semester it will also be focused on drafting and presenting the First Year Paper.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Graduate dissertation research with their advisor.
Graduate dissertation research with their advisor.
Graduate independent research under a faculty advisor.
Graduate independent research under a faculty advisor.
Fall practicum for History TA enrollment only (register under the faculty member’s section for which you will serve as a fall TA).
Spring practicum for History TA enrollment only (register under the faculty member’s section for which you will serve as a spring TA).
Summer graduate independent research under a faculty advisor.
Cross Listed Courses
Agora Institute
Democracies around the world are under threat. This course introduces students to the philosophical foundations of democracy as well as the history of democratic revolutions, institutions, and principles. How can we defeat the most important contemporary challenges to democracy, including populism, authoritarianism and disinformation? And how can we revive the “democratic spirit” - in America and around the world?
Area: Humanities
We live in an era of disinformation’ mass persuasion and media manipulation run amok. More information was meant to improve democracy and undermine authoritarian regimes- instead the opposite seems to be happening. This course will take you from Russia to South Asia, Europe to the US, to analyze how our information environment has been transformed, why our old formulae for resisting manipulation are failing, and what needs to be done to create a model where deliberative democracy can flourish.
Prerequisite(s): Students who took AS.191.364, AS.196.310, OR AS.196.610 are not eligible to take AS.196.364.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Center for Africana Studies
What is Anti-Racism? How do we identify racism’s presence and effects, and how do we direct social and civic resources to end it? In this Freshman Seminar, students will learn from a series of faculty experts and invited guests about the history, workings, and legacies of racism. They’ll also study present-day and past approaches – attempted and theorized – to abolish racism in the modern world.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of African American Studies, with attention to the literature, film, culture, history, and politics of black life in the United States. Our reading list will likely include texts by David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Frances E.W. Harper, Sutton Griggs, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, and others.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course introduces students to the field of Africana Studies. It focuses on the historical experience, intellectual ideas, theories, and cultural production of African-descended people. We will consider how people of the black diaspora remember and encounter Africa.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores “critical university studies” through the lens of abolitionist thought, from W.E.B. DuBois to Ruth Wilson Gilmore. It historicizes universities’ growth within U.S. cities during the twentieth century.
Writing Intensive
In Anti-Black Racism and Black Freedom Struggles: History, Theory, and Culture, students will learn about key historical, intellectual, and political aspects of white supremacy as a system or racial domination, and anti-black racism as a central feature of that global system. This class will explore the historical forms that white supremacy has taken—from colonialism and plantation slavery to Jim Crow, gentrification, and mass incarceration—racial ideologies, and how modern political systems have hinged on racial oppression. Most important, we will explore how black people have responded to the structures and ideologies of white supremacy, their thinking about freedom, being, and rights, and their efforts to fit into the worlds in which they found themselves, to improve those societies, and those projects that sought radical alternatives to the an anti-black world.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This seminar will explore some of the pivotal historical and contemporary connections between the US and Liberia since the first Black American settlers arrived in West Africa with the American Colonization Society in 1822. This course asks: What are implications of these stories of migration and reception for how we make sense of global anti-Blackness in the contemporary moment? How does performance provoke new questions about shared histories of those impacted by colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade? Why is a more in-depth understanding of 19th century Black political thought and the precolonial West African indigenous category necessary for developing theory on the political economy of race today? Through the lens of performance studies, students will analyze the documents in the American Colonization Society archive, to reimagine these early encounters as informed by historical documentation including folklore and pan-Africanist theory. Through exploring a range of historical and contemporary materials that center the problematic “indigenous/settler” binary, students will engage in a dramaturgical process which presents powerful possibilities for unlearning historical misrepresentations. In particular, students will develop theater-based projects that interrogate the spatio-temporal connections between the stories of both, free Blacks and those who were enslaved in Maryland and manumitted to go to Liberia, and the contemporary politics of Liberia-US migration.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores the historical, theoretical, and political question of liberation in the African diaspora from the period of enslavement up to the current era. We will consider three major themes: enslavement, marronage, and freedom; Pan-Africanism and anti-colonialism; Black Power and national liberation. We will examine how African peoples conceptualized freedom and liberation in each period, the major organizations and intellectuals who framed them, and how popular activity developed and informed all three (ideas, organizations, and intellectuals). Some of the questions taken up include: How did enslaved Africans conceptualize freedom? Did their ideas and activities merely extend western notions of liberty and freedom, or did they develop distinct conceptions of freedom, rights, and humanity? Why, in the early Twentieth Century, did African peoples around the world pursue pan-Africanism as a political philosophy? How do class, nationality, gender, and sexuality inform such movements? Did national liberation struggles from the 1950s through the 1970s in Africa and the Caribbean bring about fundamental changes to those societies or merely replicate colonial regimes? What connections existed between national liberation movements in Africa and the Caribbean, and Civil Rights and Black Power in the United States and England?
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Classics
This seminar investigates the Eastern Mediterranean as a space of intense cultural interaction in the Late Bronze Age, exploring how people, ideas, and things not only came into contact but deeply influenced one another through maritime trade, art, politics, etc. In addition to class discussion, we will work hands-on with artifacts from the JHU Archaeological Museum, focusing on material from Cyprus.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course takes us on an exploratory journey through the ancient astronomical imaginary. We will focus on ancient Greek and Roman ideas about the structure of the cosmos, the substance and nature of the stars, the Earth’s place and role in the universe, ancient attempts to map the stars, and ancient beliefs about the significance of cosmic phenomena for events in the human world. The course will culminate in the extraordinary ancient tradition of lunar fictions, which are our earliest imaginative accounts of life on other worlds. Come join us for a voyage to the stars!
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Comparative Thought and Literature
This course offers an introduction to the political forces, cultural values, and social factors which have shaped the history of women’s labor in the US. This course will ask question such as: Why do we place a higher value on work which takes place in the public sphere than work in the home? How do representations of work in literature and popular movies reinforce or subvert gender roles? How have women negotiated gendered and racial boundaries through political action or writing? Focusing on racialized labor, domestic labor, sex work, and factory work, the course will provide an interdisciplinary cultural study of women’s work relevant to our current historical moment. Authors discussed include Saidiya Hartman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emma Goldman, and Kathi Weeks.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course offers a conceptual and historical introduction to Intellectual History. What makes the “history of ideas” different from the history of other objects? What, if anything, distinguishes the history of ideas from the history of philosophy? What is it exactly that we call “ideas”? In what sense do they have a history? These are examples of the kind of questions addressed in the course.
Area: Humanities
East Asian Studies
This course offers a comprehensive overview of Korean history and culture from ancient times to the modern era. Through primary, secondary, and audio-visual sources, students will become familiar not only with the overall contours of the entirety of Korean history, but also with its cultural and religious legacy. The course combines lectures and class discussions.
Area: Humanities
This course aims to inspire students to explore the impacts, meanings, and explanations of social transformation in contemporary China, via the lens of documentary photography. The photographic images of selective topics will include the products of photojournalism and documentary photography, and several documentary films, by both Chinese and non-Chinese photographers. While one picture is worth thousand words, one picture may also provoke countless interpretations. Students are strongly encouraged to read broadly about different aspects of social transformations in contemporary China, and to select and curate their own subjects of photo images. The spirit of comparative study of documentary photography of China and other parts of world will be strongly encouraged. Active class participation is imperative. A small exhibition on the campus will be organized by the Spring semester. The course is designed for upper division undergraduates. Cross-listed with Sociology and International Studies (CP).
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
In this course, students will engage with select topics in Korean history from premodern and modern times and examine how the past has been represented through various forms of film and literature. This will be combined with readings of academic articles to allow students to gauge the distance between scholarship and cultural expressions of history. Through this, students will be introduced to the highly contested and often polarizing nature of Korean history and the competition surrounding historical memory. Prior coursework in East Asian Studies strongly recommended.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course explores the transformation of labor relations in China over the past century. It will cover the origins of the labor movement, the changes brought about by the 1949 Revolution, the industrial battles of the Cultural Revolution, the traumatic restructuring of state-owned enterprises over the past two decades, the rise of private enterprise and export-oriented industry, the conditions faced by migrant workers today, and recent developments in industrial relations and labor conflict. The course is designed for upper division undergraduates and graduate students. Cross-listed with Sociology and International Studies (CP).
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This interdisciplinary survey course considers questions related to women and gender in Chinese society. Taking a long historical view, the course examines ideologies, social institutions, and literary representations of women and gender in traditional society and their modern transformation. Specific topics to be explored include the concept of Yin and Yang, Confucian gender ideology and the family, sex and sexuality, marriage and concubinage, footbinding, and calls for women's liberation in the context of twentieth-century Chinese revolutions. The course will end with an examination of the relationship between social media and gender politics as seen through the Chinese MeToo movement. Students will have the opportunity to work with a variety of primary sources including historical, literary, and visual materials.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
English
Using their recorded speeches, written lectures and published writings and drawing from their biographies, this course will explore the important life work of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. We intend to upend traditional conversations about political radicalism and ethnic politics by analyzing these spokesmen associated most indelibly with black nationalism and racial integration, respectively.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course explores the interlocking political and historical dimensions of personal experience, an account of ourselves and our relations (“the quest for competitive advantage between groups, individuals, or societies”) that points us in the direction of what “is ‘common’ to the whole community.” What does it mean for people who are not the chief actors or theoreticians of political movements to construe the record of their experience as an act of political intervention, an aid in our total understanding of the structure of popular belief and behavior? Furthermore, what happens when attempt to historicize and critique these recorded experiences? The class asks its members to focus closely on an episode of autobiographical experience as both an historical fossil and tangible politicized moment, particularly the places where race, gender and economic power are visible. By producing a “critical discourse of everyday life—by turning residual, untheorized everyday experience into communicable experience… one can reframe ostensibly private and individual experiences in terms of a collective struggle.” To help our investigation we will read and analyze closely memoirs, many of them from the African American experience. We function partly as a writers’ workshop and partly as a critical review. The final goal of the seminar is a polished 20-25 page autobiographical essay.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
In this course, we take up Hester Blum’s blunt observation that “the sea is not a metaphor” in order to consider the visions and hopes black writers have associated with the sea, as well as the despair and trauma transatlantic slavery has left “in the wake,” to quote Christina Sharpe.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
European and Eurasian Studies
This seminar/workshop might also be titled “Writing and Editing for Policy Debate.” Following short lectures and class discussion of fiction and non- fiction models for good writing, students will participate, in real time, in a ‘shadow editorial process’ putting together two issues of the bi-monthly journal, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy. Students will also meet with the instructor in individual tutorial sessions to assess and edit drafts of their own writing.
This course represents an introduction to the historical development of the European Community and the European Union. That said, the perspective I adopt is grounded more solidly in political science rather than history. My argument is that European integration can be explained as a function of three types of variables: Ideas, events, and ?unintended consequences?. The analytic claim is that European integration started and is perpetuated to shore up the weaknesses of individual nation-states and of the national state system. In other words, the course is grounded on a set of very specific (and very controversial) arguments and interpretations. These must be examined carefully, critically, comprehensively. They must be challenged. And, if necessary, they must be refuted. The material surveyed in the course should help you do all those things and more.
Film and Media Studies
This course uses French film to examine the history of twentieth-century Paris. We will consider how filmmakers interpreted the social, political, and technological transformations that shaped Paris in the modern era, treating movies as expressions of change and means by which filmmakers comment on it. Taught in English. $50 lab fee.
Area: Humanities
Examines changing ideals of masculinity in France after 1960 as they found expression on film, rooting the work of iconic stars and directors in their cultural, political and historical contexts.
Area: Humanities
First Year Seminars
Johns Hopkins invented the modern hospital along with modern medical education. This seminar will explore the history of the hospital from its monastic origins to its current form, with particular attention to how hospital design has reflected and reinforced ways of thinking about health, disease and medical treatment. We will also consider specialized hospitals and clinics, for the mentally ill, for particular diseases, for women and children, among other topics.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Japan is a world leader in biomimetic robotics. Japanese society enthusiastically embraces robotic nurses, robotic guides, robotic waiters, robotic pets, and even robotic girlfriends. What are the origins of the Japanese love of robots? What role did robotics engineers play in creating the image of loveable robots? What societal fears do Japanese robots assuage and what hopes do they foster? In the course of the semester, students will learn about the evolution of Japanese robotics, and explore the implications of this evolution to humans’ relationship with robots. While learning about Japanese robots, students will acquire skills necessary for college-level education, including how to write an email to a professor, how to organize and manage digital tools, how to navigate the information resources, and how to develop, complete, and present research projects. This course will equip students with skills essential to their success in college and beyond.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore instances of contact between different world cultures and pre-modern and modern science (16th-20th c.). The premise of the course is the understanding that in addition to the cultural, religious and political negotiations that took place during cross-cultural encounters, science also underwent a similar process. We understand science expansively, as the study of nature and the production of knowledge about it embedded in a particular cultural context. The historical episodes we will discuss are selections of instances where agents of the West—missionaries, explorers, businessmen, colonists, scientists—established prolonged contact with non-western cultures and engaged in conversations about their worldviews. Some cases considered include Jesuits in the Chinese imperial court, Spanish missionaries among the Maya, and English explorers in the Pacific islands.
Area: Humanities, Natural Sciences
Which ideas, movements, problems, and conflicts define the contemporary United States—and where did they come from? In this First Year Seminar we’ll study the history of this country over the last three decades to try to answer those questions. Using a range of written and visual materials, we’ll investigate the history behind concepts like “globalization,” “the free market,” “identity politics,” “culture wars,” and the “War on Terror,” and discuss the causes and consequences of the debates they provoked in this period. We’ll also assess what’s appealing and challenging about studying the very recent past and using it to interpret our present.
Area: Humanities
Long overshadowed by the American and French Revolutions, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) is now widely recognized as one of the most important events in modern history. The most radical of the Atlantic Revolutions, it began with a massive uprising of the enslaved against the institution of slavery and culminated in the independence of the nation of Haiti. This First-Year Seminar will examine the origins, course, and legacy of the Revolution, addressing such issues as colonialism, racism, slavery, emancipation, human rights, and national sovereignty – issues that continue to shape the contemporary world.
Area: Humanities
How does a notary’s son trained as a painter gain expertise in the construction of machines and acquire knowledge of the principles of optics, human anatomy, the flight of birds, the dynamics of air and water? How did an artist/engineer who brought few projects to completion come to have such a huge impact on later generations? This First-Year Seminar will focus critically on the myth of Leonardo’s singularity while showing his achievements to be characteristic of the artisanal culture of his time.
Area: Humanities
Sites of racial conflict, from Palestine to Baltimore, have been compared to South African Apartheid. This First-Year Seminar examines the creation of a totalizing system of racial segregation and exploitation in twentieth century South Africa, and how it can help us understand histories of race elsewhere in the world, including our own city.
Area: Humanities
We are living through a crisis in how we take in information. Bombarded by information of all sorts coming at us on phones, tablets, and computer screens, it can be difficult to make sense of it all and harder still to determine whether something is true or false, authentic or inauthentic. The scale and speed of the change in media that we are undergoing is unprecedented in human history. Nevertheless, people in the past have faced moments of crisis – moments when writing seemed unreliable, when the format of written information changed, and when new publication formats forced reevaluations of the nature of truth. This First-Year Seminar will take us from Greco-Roman antiquity to the modern age, with stops along the way in the European Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Enlightenment. We will read selected texts that illuminate the place of writing, books, and the search for truth, think about the structure of libraries in the western Middle Ages and Renaissance, do extensive hands-on work with rare books, and visit other repositories of information, all toward the end of evaluating how the history of books and information can help us in our current quest to make sense of our world.
Area: Humanities
This First-Year Seminar carefully considers the lives and works of two globally famous Black Baltimoreans: the abolitionist and statesman Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), and the premier jazz vocalist Billie Holiday (1915-1959). While we will explore key writings and performances of their work, the course also wants to use their historical lives in Baltimore to enrich our knowledge of the city and archival resources that reveal its past. During the semester we will consult a variety of primary resources like newspapers, novels, photographs, rare documents, correspondence, and recorded sound to investigate the complex and intraracial world of Baltimore in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Among the questions we will be considering: How did the city’s black abolitionist and religious networks contribute to Frederick Douglass’s evolution as a journalist and politician? What was the role of Chesapeake Bay black musical culture—ragtime, marching bands, banjo and fiddle ditties, and riverboat music—in the creation of Billie Holiday’s unique stylistic expression and singing? In what manner did Baltimore’s racial segregation and racism define her life and art? Students are required to visit three archival repositories during scheduled in-class trips, including a visit to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The final project is an archive-laden digital story map.
Area: Humanities
Music, Art, Theater, Novels, Autobiographies, and Material Culture all expanded dramatically in Britain in the long eighteenth century (c. 1714-1830), creating a culture celebrating ‘happiness’, 'beauty', and the 'pleasures of the imagination'. This First-Year Seminar will introduce students to themselves experiencing and discussing these exciting cultural forms, with students attending and watching plays and movies from plays, discussing Jane Austen novels as read and as filmed, reading and discussing an Afro-British autobiography, listening to performances of different kinds of music, and discussing works of art and architecture both in the classroom and in the museum.
Area: Humanities
Using maps from the 17th century to the present, students in this First-Year Seminar will explore the historical and contemporary landscape of their new hometown -- Baltimore. These primary sources will show how Baltimore was invented and developed in popular imagination to become the most vital port on the US Eastern Seaboard, but also a symbol American post-industrial decline. Students will have the chance to map how they see Baltimore, by learning and applying Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and converting geospatial data into visual stories. With the goal of fostering a deeper understanding of this complex city, and a student’s place in it, the class will include explorations outside of the classroom. The course will culminate with the creation of a small exhibit whose content and venue will be decided upon mutually by students during the course of the semester.
Area: Humanities
From the early 20th century, Chinese society underwent a turbulent process of modern transformation. Industrialization, urbanization, and democratization challenged previous gender and family norms. Meanwhile, at exactly this time, the Chinese film industry flourished, especially in the modern metropolis of Shanghai. Women and family provided a useful microcosm through which to explore national questions related to revolution, war, and modernity. They also entertained a public eager for new leisure pursuits. Popular feature films not only recorded but also interpreted and helped shape family and gender roles. Using filmic representations as the main material this First-Year Seminar will survey the "family question" (and "the woman question") in 20th century China
Area: Humanities
In this course, we will examine the concealment of scientific knowledge from the Scientific Revolution to present day. Although science is regularly described as a public good, it has often been a private affair. Why have various scientists, institutions, governments, and media outlets chosen to restrict the flow of scientific knowledge? How have their efforts fared in practice, and what factors explain their successes or failures? More generally, how does our picture of modern science change if we highlight work done behind closed doors? This First-Year Seminar will explore these questions through case studies on alchemy, trade secrecy, nuclear physics, and climate change denial. Students will work with formerly classified sources during several weeks of the term.
In times of pandemic, trade war, and restrictions on the export of strategic technologies, it has become common to predict the ‘death of globalization.’ Such predictions are hardly new, however, and neither are the protectionist technology policies that are currently in vogue. In this First-Year Seminar, we will examine how technology historically has both helped connect people in different parts of the world and contributed to division and inequality at national and global levels. Focusing on the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, we will pay special attention to the impact of transportation and ICT technologies ranging from the telegraph and container ship to the airplane and the internet. But we will also consider the consequences of globalization and technological change in areas such as mining and agriculture, taking into account the perspectives of a variety of actors including multinational enterprises, governments, standard-setting scientists and engineers, and the anti-globalization movement. The local effects of globalization will be discussed on a class trip to the Baltimore Museum of Industry, and students will have the opportunity to develop a research project on a topic of special interest to them in consultation with the instructor. Course readings will be made available on Canvas; they include both original historical sources and studies by historians and social scientists.
What makes one person a saint and another a sinner? By looking at saints' lives, painting, court cases, and theological treatises, this First-Year Seminar engages with Christian ideas about holiness and heresy, sin and virtue, revealing the complexity of theology and lived religious experience. Since visual culture is a key component to understanding premodern religious culture, the class will embark on a field trip to the National Gallery of Art (Washington DC) to discuss several important paintings in the collection. We will also work with manuscripts and printed materials in the library's Special Collections.
Area: Humanities
Despite its association with distant regions and time periods, Islamic art has a flourishing presence in today’s America, represented by rich museum collections, modern buildings designed in historical styles, and vibrant scholarly networks. This seminar explores how we, from the vantage point of twenty-first-century Baltimore, might experience works of Islamic art in ways that are informed by their own cultural contexts while also acknowledging the challenges involved in bridging this gap. We will spend much of the course engaging with objects and architecture in person, with visits planned to the recently reinstalled Islamic galleries at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, the Islamic Center of Washington, DC, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. You will be invited to handle artifacts in person and to try your hand at calligraphy, one of the most distinctive and esteemed Islamic artforms. In the classroom setting, we will read and discuss translations of primary sources written by historical practitioners and consumers of Islamic art, along with examples of modern scholarship that seek to understand the Islamic tradition from a variety of perspectives. As well as learning about such perspectives, you will be encouraged to develop and share—in presentations and written assignments—your own ideas about Islamic art, building on the close, firsthand encounters that run throughout the seminar.
Area: Humanities
History
This interdisciplinary course surveys critical themes related to Asian American art and activism including perspectives from history, art and visual culture, literature and gender and sexuality studies.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
How do museums represent the world? The course will focus on the colonial legacy of museums and complicate discourses of decolonization by looking at a range of case studies. We will study the world’s fairs, artworks, artifacts, collections, curatorial practices, exhibition histories, repatriation requests, and exhibitionary modes of display, in order to analyze their relationship to histories of decolonization, temporality, translation, untranslatability, spectatorship, provenance, and the life of objects.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
How do museums represent the world? The course will focus on the colonial legacy of museums and complicate discourses of decolonization by looking at a range of case studies. We will study the world’s fairs, artworks, artifacts, collections, curatorial practices, exhibition histories, repatriation requests, and exhibitionary modes of display, in order to analyze their relationship to histories of decolonization, temporality, translation, untranslatability, spectatorship, provenance, and the life of objects.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
History of Art
How does a notary’s son trained as a painter come to claim expertise in the construction of machines and acquire knowledge of the principles of optics, human anatomy, the flight of birds, the dynamics of air and water? The course will focus critically on the myth of Leonardo’s singularity and explore his achievements with regard to the artisanal culture of his time, as well as the problems of authority in the recognition of artisanal knowledge as scientific discovery.
Area: Humanities
Explores the different ways Early Modern painters and printmakers incorporated mirrors and optical reflections into their works for the sake of illusion and metaphor, deception and desire, reflexivity and truth-telling. Connecting sense perception and ethical knowledge, embedded mirror images often made claims about the nature of the self, the powers of art, and the superiority of painting in particular.
Area: Humanities
This course explores seven centuries of fruitful collaboration between physicians and artists, uncovering the shared discourses, diagnostic techniques and therapeutic agendas that united the art of picture-making with the art of healing. Topics include the origin and development of medical illustration; the long, cross-cultural history of the therapeutic artefact; the anatomical investigations of Renaissance artists such as Leonardo and Michelangelo; depictions of bodily pain and disease in the art of Matthias Grünewald and psychosomatic syndromes like melancholy in the work of Albrecht Dürer; the spectacularization of the body in Enlightenment science and the ethics of medical specimen display today -- all in order to bring the complex intersections of the history of medicine and the history of art into view.
Area: Humanities
This course explores the achievements and impact of the major painters working in the Burgundian Netherlands, especially the cities of Flanders, during the fifteenth century: Melchior Broederlam, Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden; the Master of Flémalle, Hans Memling, Hugo van der Goes, Hieronymus Bosch, and others.
Area: Humanities
In the premodern world, the five senses were conceived as central to human perception. This course will explore the significance of the senses in the conception, creation, and reception of the visual art and architecture in the Middle Ages. Medieval objects and buildings were not only meant to be seen, but also to be experienced by touching, tasting, smelling, and hearing. They could elicit multisensory, often performative, or synesthetic responses in the viewers. Each week, we will focus on a specific sense and a related group of images, objects, or buildings to discover how medieval people experienced and interpreted them. To test out these ideas ourselves, we will explore works of art from the collections of Baltimore. Over the course of the semester, we will study sculptures, panel paintings, illuminated manuscripts, reliquaries, stained glass windows, rosaries, censers, spice containers, buildings, and ephemeral objects from Christian, Jewish, and Islamic art.
Area: Humanities
From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, visual forms and practices linked such far-flung places as Mexico City and Naples, Manila and Lima, Cuzco and Antwerp, Quito and Madrid: all cities in the Spanish Empire. This course is conceived as a voyage, moving city by city to explore objects that connected Spain’s vast holdings. We will investigate how the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church used visual strategies to consolidate political power and instill religious faith across the world; and, alternatively, we will consider how local conditions, concerns, and resistance reshaped those efforts. This course surveys a diverse range of artistic production: religious paintings and sculptures; maps used for imperial surveillance; luxury goods crafted from shimmering feathers, ceramics, ivory, and precious metals; urban design and architecture from the ports of Europe to the highland outposts of the Andes; ephemeral cityscapes for civic performances. In examining such materials, students will be introduced to the art historical methods and theoretical concerns used to study a wide diversity of objects within an imperial frame.
Area: Humanities
Centered on modern-day Turkey and encompassing vast territories in Asia, Africa, and Europe, the Ottoman Empire (1299 – 1923) was the longest lived and among the most powerful Islamic states in history, with an artistic tradition to match. This course explores the functional and symbolic role that architecture played during the empire’s formative centuries, when three successive capital — Bursa, Edirne, and Istanbul — served to visualize the sultans’ growing claims to universal authority. With reference to mosques, palaces, tombs, and other categories of architecture, the course will examine the buildings in their artistic, social, and political contexts. Themes to be addressed include patronage and audience, architectural practice and the building trade, ceremonial and ritual, topography and urban planning, and the relationship of Ottoman architecture to other traditions.
Area: Humanities
Despite its modern-day association with a fringe extremist movement, the term “caliphate” was traditionally used to describe the Muslim world at large, the political and spiritual ruler of which bore the title of caliph. The original Islamic caliphate was established in the seventh century as a vast empire centered on the Middle East and extending deep into Africa, Asia, and Europe. It soon broke apart into a series of competing powers, until in the tenth century, three rival dynasties—the Baghdad-based Abbasids, the Spanish Umayyads, and the Fatimids of North Africa—each claimed to be the rightful caliphate. This course will examine how these fascinating political developments and conflicts played out in the realm of art and architecture between the seventh and thirteenth centuries. As well as palaces, mosques, and commemorative buildings, the course will look at media ranging from ceramics and metalwork to textiles and illustrated manuscripts, with many of the artifacts being viewed firsthand in local museum collections. These works will be considered in relation to such themes as patronage, audience, ceremony, and meaning. Particular attention will be paid to how the various caliphates—both in emulation of and competition with one another—used visual culture as a powerful tool to assert their legitimacy.
Area: Humanities
Since the publication of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives (1550), in which the history of art was first conceived as the successive accomplishment of a select group of great men, the discipline of Art History has had a gender problem. Today, feminist scholars continue to grapple with this troubled legacy, working to redress the masculinist biases inherent in disciplinary methods and assumptions while at the same time fighting to recover the value of traditionally overlooked subjects and genres. In the early 1990s, the history of masculinity emerged as an adjunct to traditional feminist history. Aimed at addressing misconceptions about the nature and naturalness of male identity, this subfield has helped open masculinity to critical reevaluation. Drawing on the contributions of contemporary feminist scholarship as well as those of the history of masculinity, this course explores the ways in which a reconsideration of the nature of male identity in the historical past might help us rethink key art historical issues, for example, paradigmatic notions of the Renaissance artist, the nature of copying and competition, and the concepts of creativity, invention, and genius. The course will focus on developments in the German speaking world in the late fifteenth and sixteenth-centuries; as numerous historians have noted, the German speaking lands underwent a crisis of masculinity during this period, in part precipitated by the events of the Protestant Reformation. At the same time, the region witnessed profound changes in the status of the arts and of the artist. In this course, we will explore the ways in which these phenomena were related, and how they contributed to culturally specific notions of the relationship between masculinity and artistry. We will also consider the ways in which a close examination of masculinity in the German Renaissance opens up new avenues of art historical and cultural historical investigation with relevance beyond the period itself.
Area: Humanities
Long characterized in the Western imagination as exotic realms of fantasy, harems in Islamic tradition served as private domestic quarters for the women of elite households. This course explores the harem—as an institution, a physical space, and a community of women—from various art-historical perspectives, considering such topics as the harem’s architecture, the agency of its inhabitants as patrons and collectors, the mediating role of eunuchs in the harem’s visual and material culture, and the ability of harem women to make their mark through public artistic commissions. Our case studies will address a range of Islamic geographical and chronological contexts, though we will focus on the empires of the early modern period and, above all, the famous harem of the Ottoman sultans at the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. In challenging popular misconceptions, the course will also look at the wealth of exoticizing imagery that the harem inspired in Western art, which we will consider through Orientalist paintings at the Walters Art Museum and illustrated rare books at Hopkins itself.
Area: Humanities
To what extent was the body and its depiction a site of contestation, identification, or desire in the Middle Ages and Renaissance? If the body in the West since the 1800s is seen to have been shaped by the rise of photography and film, the institutionalization of biomedicine, and the establishment of techniques of surveyance and mechanization, then how was the body represented, disciplined, and experienced in the preceding centuries? In an age of unprecedented encounter with non-European bodies, what did it mean to describe and categorize bodies by race, region, or religion? These are some of the major questions this class seeks to answer, which is fundamentally interdisciplinary as it draws upon insights and methods from anthropology and the history of medicine and history of science to investigate how the body has been represented and imagined in the visual arts. The bodies of the suffering Christ, the female mystic, the dissected cadaver, the punished criminal, and the non-European ‘Other’ will loom large as we work to problematize notions of a normative body, whether in the premodern world or in the contemporary one. While most readings and lectures will concern the body and its representation in the Christian West during the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, students are encouraged to work on a topic of their choosing from any geographical area 1000-1800 CE for their research papers.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course addresses the technology, iconography and social significance of metals and draws on case studies from the Americas. Collections study in museums.
Area: Humanities
The established historiography of Ottoman architecture is dominated by the patronage of the sultans and their elites, particularly as it shaped the empire’s third and final capital, Istanbul. While this focus on the “center” and its leadership reflects the Ottoman state’s own hierarchical structure, it also obscures the larger network of places and people that enabled the imperial system to develop and acquire meaning in the first place. This course will explore Ottoman architecture and its patronage from the perspective of these neglected regions and actors, covering such examples as Christian vassal states along the empire’s European borders, Arab lands with existing traditions of Islamic art, the curious persistence of Gothic models in the former Crusader kingdom of Cyprus, and the distinctive architectural practices of non-Muslim minorities within Istanbul itself. Drawn primarily from the early modern and modern periods, our case studies will be treated not as imitations of or deviations from the metropolitan mainstream, but as vital expressions of Ottoman culture that assertively engaged with, and themselves contributed to, the better-known strategies of the sultan’s court. We will also go beyond issues of architecture and patronage and consider these buildings as lived spaces whose associated objects, furnishings, and social and ceremonial activities were no less constitutive of the empire’s diverse architectural landscape.
Area: Humanities
This seminar examines the myriad ways artists and writers geared their work toward the therapeutic healing of mind, body, and soul, and the role images and texts could play in programs of individual and collective transformation. Taking as our point of departure the ancient tradition of spiritual exercises and inner dialogue, Petrarch's therapy of the passions, and the revival of consolatory letters, we will consider how the Christian artist could invest their work with medicinal, magical, sacramental, or spiritual efficacies, and even take on the mantle of a "physician of souls." Intersections with the histories of medicine and religion will lead us to the ways natural medicine and the thaumaturgical practices associated with pilgrimage could be transposed into the arena of spiritual therapy. Featured authors include Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine of Hippo, Boethius, Petrarch, Michel Foucault, Pierre Hadot, and Allain de Botton; artists include Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, and many others.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course investigates the complexities of medieval legal documents, their specific visuality and materiality, as well as practices of copying and forgery. We will address the aesthetics of legal documents, their graphic signs, seals, and paleography and the authenticating strategies used to corroborate their legitimacy. Another emphasis is set on the performative aspects of the medieval charters in court and church rituals. Comparison with contemporary illuminated sacred books will reveal the tight connections of monastic scriptoria and royal/imperial chanceries. The geographic focus is set wide, ranging from medieval Spain, to Carolingian and Ottonian chanceries in France and Germany, to the papal court in Rome and the imperial and monastic scriptoria in Byzantium.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Designed from the outset to be inhabited and used, works of architecture are inherently susceptible to changes in purpose, appearance, and meaning over time. This was particularly so in the Ottoman Empire (c. 1299–1922), a multiethnic and multireligious transcontinental polity whose territories were already marked by long and eventful architectural histories. Through such case studies as the Parthenon in Athens, the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople/Istanbul, the Citadel of Cairo, and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, this course investigates the ways in which buildings and sites have been appropriated, repurposed, transformed, and/or reconceptualized in response to changing sociopolitical and artistic conditions. Topics to be addressed include the conversion of places of worship, (re)decoration as a vehicle of ideology, and the phenomenon of spoliation—the recycling, whether for practical or symbolic reasons, of existing building materials. In addition to the monuments themselves, we will address the objects that filled them and the human activities they hosted. While our focus will be on the Ottoman context and its relationship to the past, the course will also consider comparable examples in other geographies as well as developments in the post-Ottoman era, including the current debate over the Parthenon marbles and the recent reconversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Stelae, altars, colossal heads, thrones, figures, lintels. This course considers how artists created these stone monuments in Mesoamerica, the historical region that encompasses Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras, and El Salvador. Sculptors meticulously carved stone blocks to shape and then scribes expertly incised their surfaces with hieroglyphic text or iconography. These stone monuments were then transported and moved into position, their physical placements structuring social hierarchy and mediating interactions with the divine. In reviewing recent literature within the fields of art history and material studies, we will explore the full cycle of production for monumental works of art.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Formed against the backdrop of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Orientalism and colonialism, the field of Islamic art history continues to grapple with the overwhelmingly Eurocentric assumptions, narratives, and approaches that shaped its emergence and development. These inherited perspectives and the debates they have sparked are the focus of this seminar, which critically examines the foundational characterizations of Islamic art—as ornamental, iconophobic, and timelessly other—together with the exhibitory, commercial, and scholarly contexts in which such ideas took root. Adopting a simultaneously thematic and chronological approach, the seminar will trace the ways in which diverse constellations of actors—including those from within the Islamic world itself—have variously established, consolidated, or challenged the field’s underlying concepts. We will explore how this discursive process has intensified in our own time, in which a spate of scholarly and popular treatments have laid bare the tension between calls to reevaluate the field and an enduring impulse to reinscribe its established contours. Alois Riegl, Oleg Grabar, Gülru Necipoglu, Yasser Tabbaa, and Wendy Shaw are among the authors whose writings will be assessed and compared. Throughout the seminar, we will ground our historiographical inquiry in discussions of specific works and categories of Islamic art—particularly those like carpets that traditional frameworks have fetishized as decorative—and consider more fruitful avenues for addressing such material, making use of local collections to the extent that we can.
Area: Humanities
This seminar examines the myriad ways artists and writers geared their work toward the therapeutic healing of mind, body, and soul, and the role images and texts could play in programs of individual and collective transformation. Taking as our point of departure the ancient tradition of spiritual exercises and inner dialogue, Petrarch's therapy of the passions, and the revival of consolatory letters, we will consider how the Christian artist could invest their work with medicinal, magical, sacramental, or spiritual efficacies, and even take on the mantle of a "physician of souls." Intersections with the histories of medicine and religion will lead us to the ways natural medicine and the thaumaturgical practices associated with pilgrimage could be transposed into the arena of spiritual therapy. Featured authors include Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine of Hippo, Boethius, Petrarch, Michel Foucault, Pierre Hadot, and Allain de Botton; artists include Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, and many others.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
The established historiography of Ottoman architecture is dominated by the patronage of the sultans and their elites, particularly as it shaped the empire’s third and final capital, Istanbul. While this focus on the “center” and its leadership reflects the Ottoman state’s own hierarchical structure, it also obscures the larger network of places and people that enabled the imperial system to develop and acquire meaning in the first place. This course will explore Ottoman architecture and its patronage from the perspective of these neglected regions and actors, covering such examples as Christian vassal states along the empire’s European borders, Arab lands with existing traditions of Islamic art, the curious persistence of Gothic models in the former Crusader kingdom of Cyprus, and the distinctive architectural practices of non-Muslim minorities within Istanbul itself. Drawn primarily from the early modern and modern periods, our case studies will be treated not as imitations of or deviations from the metropolitan mainstream, but as vital expressions of Ottoman culture that assertively engaged with, and themselves contributed to, the better-known strategies of the sultan’s court. We will also go beyond issues of architecture and patronage and consider these buildings as lived spaces whose associated objects, furnishings, and social and ceremonial activities were no less constitutive of the empire’s diverse architectural landscape.
Area: Humanities
Designed from the outset to be inhabited and used, works of architecture are inherently susceptible to changes in purpose, appearance, and meaning over time. This was particularly so in the Ottoman Empire (c. 1299–1922), a multiethnic and multireligious transcontinental polity whose territories were already marked by long and eventful architectural histories. Through such case studies as the Parthenon in Athens, the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople/Istanbul, the Citadel of Cairo, and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, this course investigates the ways in which buildings and sites have been appropriated, repurposed, transformed, and/or reconceptualized in response to changing sociopolitical and artistic conditions. Topics to be addressed include the conversion of places of worship, (re)decoration as a vehicle of ideology, and the phenomenon of spoliation—the recycling, whether for practical or symbolic reasons, of existing building materials. In addition to the monuments themselves, we will address the objects that filled them and the human activities they hosted. While our focus will be on the Ottoman context and its relationship to the past, the course will also consider comparable examples in other geographies as well as developments in the post-Ottoman era, including the current debate over the Parthenon marbles and the recent reconversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque.
Area: Humanities
This course investigates the complexities of medieval legal documents, their specific visuality and materiality, as well as practices of copying and forgery. We will address the aesthetics of legal documents, their graphic signs, seals, and paleography and the authenticating strategies used to corroborate their legitimacy. Another emphasis is set on the performative aspects of the medieval charters in court and church rituals. Comparison with contemporary illuminated sacred books will reveal the tight connections of monastic scriptoria and royal/imperial chanceries. The geographic focus is set wide, ranging from medieval Spain, to Carolingian and Ottonian chanceries in France and Germany, to the papal court in Rome and the imperial and monastic scriptoria in Byzantium.
Writing Intensive
History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
Course provides an introduction to health and healing in the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. Topics include religion and medicine; medicine in the Islamicate world; women and healing; patients and practitioners.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Medical practice is complex in Latin America and the Caribbean. Most countries in the region have universal healthcare; yet, the quality of clinical services varies widely, and is influenced by degrees of incorporation into—or marginalization from—social power structures. Many people take their health into their own hands by supplementing biomedicine with plant based remedies as well as religious and spiritual services. This course will interrogate the history and contemporary relevance of healthcare in Latin America and the Caribbean, with particular interest in how medicine intersects with colonialism, slavery, capitalism, neo-colonialism, grassroots revolutionary movements, the Cold War, and neoliberalism. Drawing on films, visual and performance art, and music, students will consider the ways in which race, gender, indigeneity, ability, class, and nation have affected people’s experiences with medical practice. Informed by postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, we will also examine why Latin America and the Caribbean have become “laboratories” for the production of medical knowledge, and importantly, how that knowledge was created by indigenous, enslaved, and migrant people as well as professionals. Finally, we seek to understand individual health problems in relation to the social and political determinants of health. As such, the course prompts students to reflect on why healthcare professionals—in the United States and abroad—would benefit from historically-informed communication with patients and their communities. This is a discussion-based seminar that requires active participation. There are no exams. The course does not assume any previous knowledge of the history of medicine or Latin American history.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course analyzes various episodes of “luddism” in the history of science and technology, from the destruction of textile machinery in the early 1800s up to recent controversies about robots and vaccines. What explains why different groups of actors did (or did not) resist the introduction of new technologies, ranging from the bicycle and the automobile to the nuclear energy plant? What types of fears did these technologies arouse? What can history teach us about the current recurring concern that technological innovation might destroy more jobs than it generates? These are some of the themes we will be examining in this seminar on the basis of research presentations and classroom discussions of assigned articles and book chapters.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course critically examines the role of technology in some of the main developments that have shaped the modern world, ranging from industrialization and globalization processes to the rise of new political ideologies and gender patterns. This course is co-taught by an instructor from the Smithsonian Institution and will include a public history research project.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
While there is a vast literature on reproduction in a global context, this course will focus on the arc of what we might call decolonial histories of reproduction—those that center issues of justice, freedom, intimacy, and agency, as well as cultural negotiation, conflict, and change. Students will write critical histories of reproduction, with attention to the ways in which reproductive politics interface with institutions that exert hegemonic, racialized, gendered, and ableist forms of state power and colonial power. We will also appreciate the ways in which reproduction interacts with other—non geographically-bound, non-institutionalized, and non-state mediated—forms of biopolitical power. We will analyze how the historiography has evolved over time and discuss future directions in the field.
Interdepartmental
"When the Spanish unleashed their regime of colonization of what is present-day Mexico, their primary justification was the religious salvation of Indigenous people. Spaniards, along with other Europeans, arrived by the boatload to impose colonial order, taking up bureaucratic and ecclesiastical positions. The result was far from smooth—the sixteenth-century saw widespread disease, missionary violence on behalf of salvation, crop destruction and the recultivation of land, urban plans that radically altered the environment, the resettlement of entire populations, among other dramatic social and environmental events. This course investigates the complex and dynamic elements of colonial New Spain (as Mexico was called) from an interdisciplinary perspective. It tries to make sense of the chaotic landscape of the first century of Spanish colonial rule in New Spain. It is a research and writing intensive course that serves as an introduction to both the history and art history of this place and moment. Our meetings will act as a springboard for a group trip to Mexico during the January intersession to study objects and spaces in situ. Final projects will relate to materials viewed in person in Mexico. The costs for this trip are included for all students, no fees required. Knowledge of Spanish preferred but not required.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
The Dutch East India Company, or VOC, is historically and art historically well documented and firmly understood. But the Dutch also had significant holdings to the west via the Dutch West India Company, or WIC. They operated and held outposts in the present-day United States (New York/New Amsterdam), Caribbean (Surinam, Curaçao, Bonaire), Latin America (Brazil), and West Africa. Despite the abundance of materials associated with the WIC from this wide geography, these have been scarcely assessed by art historians, and a defined and comprehensive corpus has never been assembled. This class will act as a research lab in which to do so. In research teams, students will map artworks and objects created from that broad, transnational cultural ambit—categories that might include maps, landscape paintings, still life paintings featuring American flora and fauna, botanical illustrations, plantation architecture, luxury objects made from precious raw materials gathered in the Americas, the urban environment of slavery—and develop individual research questions around them.The class will run with a partner lab in the form of a course led by Professor Stephanie Porras at Tulane University. The course will feature speakers; and there is potential for funded travel to conduct research. We will start at the ground level; no previous knowledge about the field is required. Students from all disciplines are welcome.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Learn the basics of ArcGIS and data management as you help Prof. Lurtz publish an agricultural dataset and maps from 10 years before Mexico erupted in revolution. No experience necessary.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Dutch East India Company, or VOC, is historically and art historically well documented and firmly understood. But the Dutch also had significant holdings to the west via the Dutch West India Company, or WIC. They operated and held outposts in the present-day United States (New York/New Amsterdam), Caribbean (Surinam, Curaçao, Bonaire), Latin America (Brazil), and West Africa. Despite the abundance of materials associated with the WIC from this wide geography, these have been scarcely assessed by art historians, and a defined and comprehensive corpus has never been assembled. This class will act as a research lab in which to do so. In research teams, students will map artworks and objects created from that broad, transnational cultural ambit—categories that might include maps, landscape paintings, still life paintings featuring American flora and fauna, botanical illustrations, plantation architecture, luxury objects made from precious raw materials gathered in the Americas, the urban environment of slavery—and develop individual research questions around them.The class will run with a partner lab in the form of a course led by Professor Stephanie Porras at Tulane University. The course will feature speakers; and there is potential for funded travel to conduct research. We will start at the ground level; no previous knowledge about the field is required. Students from all disciplines are welcome.
Writing Intensive
This course will engage with 20th century critical theory and social inquiry that wrestles with the idea that new mediations have profoundly altered the character of human experience and subjectivity, and it will consider the questions that these theorists pose for our disciplines. How have modern subjectivity, gender, affect, reason, and politics been shaped by the technologies and structures of representation that mediate them? Among figures of interest: Marx, Freud, Eisenstein, Benjamin, Bakhtin, Adorno, Deleuze, Guy Debord, Haraway, Stuart Hall, Teresa de Lauretis, Kitterer, Sobchack, Berlant, Latour, Linda Williams, Ranciere, Orit Halpern.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
An interdisciplinary seminar on Latin America’s role in global economic processes, from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Participants will engage with scholarly and primary texts as well as share written work. The Fall 2022 seminar will examine the topic of Latin American political thought.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The second in a two-semester graduate sequence, this course will be for graduate students and faculty to collaboratively workshop their own research and writing on topics related to Latin American studies.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Islamic Studies
The three most widespread monotheisms have much more in common than is generally portrayed: a common founding figure, a partly shared succession of prophets, closely comparable ethical concerns and religious practices, a history of coexistence and of cultural, religious, social and economic interaction. This course will focus on a number of key texts and historical events that have shaped the relationships between Jews, Muslims, and Christians during the Middle Ages and contributed to their reciprocal construction of the image of the “other.” The geographical center of the course will be the Mediterranean and the Near and Middle East, a true cradle of civilizations, religions, and exchange.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
In partnership with the social justice organization Justice for Muslims Collective, this community-engaged course and oral history project will explore how diverse Muslim communities navigated and contested belonging and political and cultural agency amidst state-sponsored violence and national debates on race, gender, citizenship and national security after 9/11 and during the ongoing War on Terror. Through history, ethnography, first-person narratives, film, fiction, and online resources, students will learn about the impact of 9/11 on American Muslim communities. This includes cultural and political resistance to imperialism, racism, and Islamophobia as well as to intersectional inequities within Muslim communities that were intensified in the context of Islamophobia. Students will learn about community activism and organizing from JMC, and complete a participatory action research project with the organization. This project is an oral history archive that will address gaps in the documentation of movement histories when it comes to early organizing against War on Terror policies by Muslim communities and communities racialized or perceived as Muslim. Students will be trained to record stories of resistance among leaders who organized and responded at the local and national-level in the Greater Washington region, to support the building of an archive that will shape a wide variety of future organizing and advocacy efforts.
Muslims have been a part of the American fabric since its inception. A key thread in that fabric has been the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants, some of whom were Muslims, and who not only added to the dynamism of the American environment, but eventually helped shape American culture, religion, and politics. The history of Islam in America is intertwined with the creation and evolution of African American identity. Contemporary Islam in America cannot be understood without this framing. This course will provide a historical lens for understanding Islam, not as an external faith to the country, but as an internal development of American religion. This course will explicate the history of early Islamic movements in the United States and the subsequent experiences of African-Americans who converted to Islam during the first half of the twentieth century. We will cover the spiritual growth of African American Muslims, their institutional presence, and their enduring impact on American culture writ large and African-American religion and culture more specifically.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Medicine, Science and the Humanities
Environment has an inexorable effect on human health, and certain human activities have had outsized impacts on the natural world and the ability of forms of life to thrive. This course brings medical humanities, history of science, and science & technology studies into conversation with environmental humanities to ask: how have our conceptions of the natural world emerged, and how have these shaped our understandings of bodies, ecologies, and health outcomes? How do we know and measure the environment and health, and to what effects? How have human and ecological health affected environmental politics? How have writers and artists understood and depicted their environments and environmental questions? Can works of fiction shape ecological transformations? What can we learn from case studies of health and environment in Baltimore and the Chesapeake Bay as well as in global contexts? Course topics will include ecology, epigenetics, toxicity, agriculture and food, radiation, air quality, and more-than-human entanglements.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
In this class, we will reflect on the ethical, gendered, and societal implications of the creation and exchange of British medical imagery. What purpose did this visual culture serve for artists, practitioners, and patients? How are we meant to look at these images today, outside of their original contexts? We will examine a range of images and objects from Britain, expanding our definition of “art” and interrogating the colonialist roots and origins of artistic and medical material. Our objects of study will extend from oil paintings of renowned physicians to diagnostic photographs of unnamed patients and from prints of gynecological dissection to satirical cartoons of “quack” doctors. We will look not only at how practitioners have had their patients depicted, but also at how those with illnesses or with disabilities have taken back their bodily power to portray themselves. Questions of portraiture, likeness, and consent will be constant themes throughout this course, guiding students’ development of ways of thinking critically and writing thoughtfully about medical images.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Modern Languages and Literatures
Italy and the “Italian style” have become synonym of exquisite taste, class, and elegance thanks to the quality of Italian craftsmanship. This course will explore some of the major factors that contributed to the rise of Italian fashion and Italian industrial design as iconic all around the world. The classes will focus on the main protagonists and art movements that influenced the development of Italian style. We will analyze trends, clothing, and style not only in a historical context, but also through a critical apparatus that will include themes related to gender, culture, power, and politics.The course is taught in English. No knowledge of Italian is required, but those who can read in Italian will have an opportunity to do so. Everyone will learn some Italian words and expressions.
Area: Humanities
This course will survey German ideas—in philosophy, social and political theory, and drama—since the Enlightenment. Authors include Kant, Schiller, Lessing, Goethe, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Horkheimer, and Adorno.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
iddish was the language of European Jews for 1000 years. From the 19th century to the present day it has been a language that millions of Americans — Jewish immigrants and their descendants–have spoken, written in, conducted their daily lives in, and created culture in. This course will examine literature, film, newspapers, and more to explore how Jewish immigrants to America shaped their identities—as Jews, as Americans, and as former Europeans. What role did maintaining, adapting, or abandoning a minority language play in the creation of Jewish American identity—cultural, ethnic, or religious? How was this language perceived by the majority culture? How was it used to represent the experiences of other minoritized groups? What processes of linguistic and cultural translation were involved in finding a space for Yiddish in America, in its original or translated into English? The overarching subjects of this course include migration, race, ethnicity, multilingualism, and assimilation. We will analyze literature (novels, poetry, drama); film; comedy; and other media. All texts in English.
As is clear from current events and debates surrounding monuments to the Confederacy, monuments play an outsize role in the public negotiation of history and identity and the creation of communal forms of memory. We will study the traditions of monuments and monumentality around the world – including statues and buildings along with alternative forms of monumentality – from antiquity to the present day. We will examine the ways that monuments have been favored methods for the powerful to signal identity and authorize history. This course will also explore the phenomenon of “counter-monumentality”, whereby monuments are transformed and infused with new meaning. These kinds of monuments can be mediums of expression and commemoration for minority and diaspora communities and other groups outside the economic and political systems that endow and erect traditional public monuments. The first half of the course will examine the theoretical framework of monumentality, with a focus on ancient monuments from the ancient Near East (e.g., Solomon’s temple). More contemporary examples will be explored in the second half of the course through lectures and also field trips. We will view contemporary debates around monuments in America in light of the long history of monuments and in comparison with global examples of monuments and counter-monuments. All readings in English.
Area: Humanities
The museum boom of the last half-century has centered largely around museums dedicated to the culture and history of identity groups, including national, ethnic, religious, and minority groups. In this course we will examine such museums and consider their long history through a comparison of the theory and practice of Jewish museums with other identity museums. We will study the various museological traditions that engage identity, including the collection of art and antiquities, ethnographic exhibitions, history museums, heritage museums, art museums, and other museums of culture. Some of the questions we will ask include: what are museums for and who are they for? how do museums shape identity? and how do the various types of museums relate to one another? Our primary work will be to examine a variety of contemporary examples around the world with visits to local museums including the Jewish Museum of Maryland, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of the American Indian.
Area: Humanities
Did you know that Brazil is very similar to the United States? This course is intended as an introduction to the culture and civilization of Brazil. It is designed to provide students with basic information about Brazilian history, politics, economy, art, literature, popular culture, theater, cinema, and music. The course will focus on how Indigenous, Asian, African, and European cultural influences have interacted to create the new and unique civilization that is Brazil today. The course is taught in English, but ONE extra credit will be given to students who wish to do the course work in Portuguese. Those wishing to do the course work in English for 3 credits should register for section 01. Those wishing to earn 4 credits by doing the course work in Portuguese should register for section 02. The sections will be taught simultaneously. Section 01: 3 credits Section 02: 4 credits (instructor’s permission required). No Prereq. THERE IS NO FINAL EXAM.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
How has the Holocaust been represented in literature? Are there special challenges posed by genocide to the social and aesthetic traditions of representation? Where does the Holocaust fit in to the array of concerns that literature expresses? And where does literature fit in to the commemoration of communal tragedy and the working through of individual trauma entailed by thinking about and representing the Holocaust? These questions will guide our consideration of a range of texts — nonfiction, novels, poetry — originally written in Yiddish, German, English, French and other languages (including works by Primo Levi and Isaac Bashevis Singer). A special focus will be works written during and in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. All readings in English.
Area: Humanities
Who were the witches? Why were they persecuted for hundreds of years? Why were women identified as the witches par excellence? How many witches were put to death between 1400 and 1800? What traits did European witch-mythologies share with other societies? After the witch-hunts ended, how did “The Witch” go from being “monstrous” to being “admirable” and even “sexy”? Answers are found in history and anthropology, but also in medicine, theology, literature, folklore, music, and the visual arts, including cinema.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have already taken AS.214.171 cannot take AS.211.477.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Dante's Divine Comedy presents a complete picture of the medieval world-view in all its aspects: physical (the structure of the cosmos), historical (the major actors from Adam to Dante himself) and moral (a complete system of right and wrong). Dante shows how the Christian religion portrayed itself, other religions, the nature of God, humans, angels and devils, and human society. We will explore these topics both from the viewpoint of Dante's own time, and in terms of its relevance to our own societal and cultural concerns.
Prerequisite(s): AS.214.479
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Theories of aesthetics and representation addressing the Holocaust have been characterized by assertions of the unrepresentability of this genocide. From a maximal position cautioning against representing the Holocaust or denying its very possibility to moderate positions underlining the ethical and aesthetic challenges and problems of the endeavor, these theories have dominated discussion of the subject for decades and have lead to the formation of a canon of Holocaust literature that confirms the salience of these theoretical approaches. Beyond this canon, however, things look quite different. From writing in the ghettos and concentration camps to a proliferation of literature in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, works in a range of languages — but especially in Yiddish — have not only raised a different set of ethical and aesthetic questions about representing the Holocaust, but have arguably bypassed or even negated the broader theoretical consensus. This course will survey both “sides” of the debate, ranging over an array of theoretical approaches to and literary representations of the Holocaust. The objective of the course is to find where the two approaches meet and to account for their divergences.
Literature and the Visual Arts is devoted to exploring the resonances between literary and visual forms of artistic expression and their enrichment of the modernist cultural landscape. We will aim to understand how the interest in visual art by modernist writers, and the impressions of literature on modernist and contemporary artworks newly illuminate or challenge traditional aesthetics of the temporality and spatiality of the work, aesthetic judgment, and the phenomenology of aesthetic attention. Readings may include works of literature or aesthetics by Immanuel Kant, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Klee, Stefan Zweig, Martin Heidegger, Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Siegfried Lenz, and Virginia Woolf, alongside work of many visual artists from van Gogh and Cézanne to German Expressionism and Anselm Kiefer. Taught in English.
Area: Humanities
What does it mean to traverse a name? What’s in a name? What if that name is Orpheus, one of antiquity’s most renowned poets? In this class we will try to answer these three questions. We will follow the myth of Orpheus from its origins in antiquity to the Italian Renaissance. Our aim will be to look at the ways a name and, in this case, a story is able to take on different forms as it travels through time and as it is being narrated. Through the texts of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and Poliziano, we will compare their delivery of the myth against those of the Roman poets Virgil and Ovid. Via a close reading of each text, we will use elements inherent to the story such as love, loss, pain, dismemberment, identity, gender and sexuality to explore the concept of multiplicity within a single unity. Historical contextualization, literary theory, textual criticism and reception will serve as further tools to help us in our questioning. Ultimately, we will follow the journey of transformation of the myth to ask ourselves two final questions: is it the same story? Are we the same readers? No prior knowledge of any of the texts is necessary. The course will be taught in English with section 02 available in Italian for Italian Majors and Minors to fulfill their requirements.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
One of the greatest works of literature of all times, the Divine Comedy leads us down into the torture-pits of Hell, up the steep mountain terrain of Purgatory, through the “virtual” space of Paradise, and then back to where we began: our own earthly lives. We accompany Dante on his journey, building along the way knowledge of medieval Italian history, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion. The course also focuses on the arts of reading deeply, asking questions of a text, and interpreting literary and scholarly works through discussion and critical writing. Conducted in English.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
The course is an interdisciplinary introduction to the study of Latin America. It brings together archeology, ethno-history, art history, literature and environmental studies.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
What does a novelist’s op-ed about economics have to do with her literary writing? In what ways does a fiction writer’s essays on the environment inform how we read her novels? What happens when we find the political opinions of a writer objectionable? This undergraduate seminar will consider what the Spanish writer Francisco Ayala termed “novelist intellectuals,” that is, literary writers who actively participate in a society’s public sphere. Considering writers from Madrid to New York, from London to Buenos Aires, we will ask how one should hold a novelist’s fictional and non-fictional writings in the balance and explore ways of reading that allow us to consider the public intellectual side and the aesthetic side of a novelist together.
Area: Humanities
The course will explore the history of the Idea of Latin America as a discursive and political entity. Students will read the work of Walter Mignolo, Maurico Tenorio Trillo and Fernando Digiovanni among other theorist and cultural historians.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Near Eastern Studies
A survey of medicine and medical practice in Egypt and, to a lesser extent, the ancient Near East in general. The abundant sources range from magical spells to surprisingly "scientific" treatises and handbooks. Readings are selected from translations of primary sources in the writings of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Israel. Topics will include the sources of our knowledge; the nature of medical practitioners, medical treatment, and surgery; beliefs about disease and the etiology of illness; concepts of contagion and ritual purity.
Area: Humanities
A basic introduction to Egyptian Religion, with a special focus on the nature of the gods and how humans interact with them. We will devote particular time to the Book of the Dead and to the "magical" aspects of religion designed for protective purposes.
Area: Humanities
Although it appears to be a relic of pre-modern Judaism, Hasidism is a phenomenon of the modern era of Jewish history. This course surveys the political and social history of the Hasidic movement over the course of the last three centuries. Students will also explore basic features of Hasidic culture and thought in their historical development. Cross-listed with Jewish Studies.
Area: Humanities
This course will present the Egyptological collections of the musée du Louvre in Paris, room by room, as in a real visit. From the Predynastic period, in the 4th millennium BC, to Roman time, the iconic “masterpieces” of this world-renowned art museum, as well as its little-known artifacts, will allow us to explore the history and material culture of ancient Egypt. We will also learn to observe, describe and analyze archaeological objects, in a global manner and without establishing a hierarchy between them, while questioning their place in the museum and its particular language. The objective will be to go beyond the objects themselves and answer, in fine, the following questions: What do these objects tell us about the men and women who produced them, exchanged them, used them, and lived among them in antiquity? What do they also reveal about those who discovered them in Egypt, several millennia later, about those who collected them and sometimes traded them, and what does this say about the relations between Egypt and the Western countries over time? The courses will be complemented by one visit to the JHAM and one visit to the Walters Art Museum; Dr. Aude Semat, curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) will also give a lecture about the Egyptian Collections at the MET.
Area: Humanities
How do art historians and archaeologists recover and study genders and sexualities of ancient people? This writing-intensive seminar looks at texts and objects from ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Greece through the lens of gender and sexuality studies. Beyond exploring concepts of gender in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean, students will also consider how modern scholars have approached, recovered, and written about ancient gender identities. There are no prerequisites for this course.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
King Tut, Napoleon, Champollion, Ozymandias, Nefertiti: the history of Egyptology is filled with big characters, huge monuments, and glimmering objects. But it is also made up of colonialist practices, looted sites, and forgotten scholarly contributions. “Up the Nile” examines the antiquarian, colonialist, racist, Western-centric, and patriarchal roots of modern Egyptology and Nubiology, and addresses how scholars and enthusiasts alike are continuing to grapple with these lasting legacies and biases. This class investigates how the Egyptians and Nubians thought of their own histories, as well as how other ancient cultures viewed the cultures of the Nile. It moves roughly chronologically, tracing understudied and marginalized voices from the Islamic, Medieval, and Ottoman periods into the 20th and 21st centuries. It examines the origins of scholarship, modern collecting, Egyptomania, and museums, delving into the problems and repercussions that still haunt us today. “Up the Nile” will engage with important and difficult aspects regarding Egyptology’s and Nubiology’s colonialist, racist, and sexist past and present. It asks: who decides who writes history, then and now?
Area: Humanities
Although it appears to be a relic of pre-modern Judaism, Hasidism is a phenomenon of the modern era of Jewish history. This course surveys the political and social history of the Hasidic movement over the course of the last three centuries. Students will also explore basic features of Hasidic culture and thought in their historical development. Cross-listed with Jewish Studies.
Area: Humanities
This writing intensive seminar examines the relationship between religion and science in ancient Mesopotamia and the rest of the Near East from the 4th millennium to the Hellenistic period. Using a variety of case studies, and through engagement with scholarly literature pertaining to the topic of the course, students will develop skills in specific research skills such as critical reading, analysis, and interpretation.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This writing intensive seminar examines the relationship between religion and science in the ancient world. While the focus will be on religious and scientific practices in Mesopotamia, the topics covered -- which include astronomy and divination, magic and medicine, cosmology, and cartography -- will be examined together with studies in anthropology, sociology, and comparative religion that shed light on the intersection of science and religion in the practices considered in the course. By reading and engaging with a wide range of perspectives on these subjects, students will develop specific research skills such as critical reading, analysis, and interpretation.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Political Science
In the 20th century, American universities became the envy of the world, leading in most categories of scholarly productivity and attracting students from every nation. In recent years, though, American higher education has come to face a number of challenges including rapidly rising costs, administrative bloat, corporatization and moocification. We will examine the problems and promises of American higher education, the political struggles within the university and the place of the university in the larger society. Upper classes and Grad Students only.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
What is the relationship between capitalism and empire in modern times? The history of capitalism and the history of imperialism are often treated as separate subjects. By contrast, this course begins with the hypothesis that modern empires were the progenitors of capitalist globalization, and that capitalism has been an international or geopolitical system from its earliest inceptions. The purpose of the course, then, is to engage students in a dual exploration of the political economy of modern empires and the geopolitical dimensions of modern capitalism, with a focus on Britain and the United States. We will draw our course readings from a diverse array of theoretical and historical sources on capitalism, empire and global political economy. The overarching aim of the course is to excavate how imperial histories can illuminate the nature of contemporary globalization.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Program in Museums and Society
“Fake News” is everywhere in both past and present. Explore that history first-hand throughJHU’s rare book collection of literary and historical forgeries spanning millennia of human history.Students learn how to examine and investigate rare books.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This hands-on course deals entirely with JHU’s collections of rare books and manuscripts as a springboard to build skills in the close visual and physical examination of rare books and manuscripts. You will investigate the technological and aesthetic transformation of textual artifacts from ancient papyri to Gutenberg imprints to digital surrogates, and contribute to the accumulation of historical clues about their meaning and significance as material cultural objects. You will learn what goes into curating and conserving book and manuscript collections today, and how to evaluate the quality and significance of collections. Materials/topics will include ancient Babylonian cuneiform and Egyptian papyri; medieval illuminated manuscripts; incunabula; Renaissance illustrated books of the Scientific Revolution and Spanish Golden Age; cheap print and unique ephemera; early books by and about women; forgeries; and “digital humanities” initiatives at JHU. Students will make regular visits to the Special Collections Reading Room in the BLC throughout the semester.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course surveys museums, from their origins to their most contemporary forms, in the context of broader historical, intellectual, and cultural trends including the social movements of the 20th century. Anthropology, art, history, and science museums are considered. Crosslisted with Archaeology, History, History of Art, International Studies and Medicine, Science & Humanities.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Introduction to queer & trans politics and culture in the period immediately preceding the gay liberation movement, from the early to late 1960s, focusing on intersections of race, sexuality, and gender. Course examines how we have come to narrate queer & trans history and investigates the ways archival practices shape conceptions of queer & trans life. Students learn research methods as they draw on and contribute to the university’s digitized archival collections.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course introduces students to a blend of public history, queer studies and transgender studies. Students learn oral history and archival research methods as they draw on and contribute to the university’s archival, museum, and library collections.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
We explore the possible futures of cultural heritage and museums in times of accelerating climate change, pandemics, armed conflict and political and social turmoil by examining past and contemporary events.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This hands-on course explores interpretive strategies for historic sites and culminates in the production of original, research-based, outdoor interpretive exhibits on the Homewood Campus.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This community-engaged course will address the historic role of the African American cemetery and its present dilemmas. Operating in partnership with Mount Auburn Cemetery in Baltimore, owned and operated by the Sharp Street Memorial United Methodist Church, and the Laurel Cemetery Memorial Project, in tandem with classes at Morgan State University and Coppin State University, our collective aim is to further the interests of these local sites by researching and telling stories with community and biographical relevance.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
What role did the colorful surfaces of sculptures, vessels and textiles play in the ancient world? We examine historical texts and recent scholarly and scientific publications on the technologies and meanings of color in antiquity, and use imaging and analytical techniques to study polychromed objects from the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Course will examine the collecting behavior of Americans. Students will explore how collectors have defined the holdings of the nation’s museums, galleries, and libraries and used objects to shape taste and status in the U.S.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
From psycho-spiritual autobiographers to mystical bi-locating nuns, convent crèche-keepers to choristers of sacred music, from rock-star-status mystics to the hidden careers of women printers, engravers, and miracle-makers, this course will explore the remarkable intellectual, cultural, and imaginative contributions of women who found refuge, agency, and power within alternative lives.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The course examines recent controversies in the conservation of major global art works and sites, raising questions concerning the basic theoretical assumptions, practical methods and ethical implications of art conservation. Cross-Listed with History of Art and Anthropology
Area: Humanities
Go behind the scenes of the Baltimore Museum of Art's Education Department and develop and implement programs for college students in conjunction with an exhibition about women and art in early modern Europe.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Students learn to conduct, analyze, and interpret their own oral histories as they contribute to a wide-ranging project documenting queer worldmaking in the Baltimore-Washington D.C. region. We engage with scholarship from performance studies, queer of color critique, LGBTQ history, and public humanities to consider the politics of storytelling and the promises of public-facing oral history projects. Students have the option of developing podcasts, multimedia projects, and public humanities proposals as their final assignment.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A material cultural exploration of the Vatican from the founding of St. Peter’s basilica in antiquity to the establishment of the Vatican Library and Museums in the Renaissance and Enlightenment.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Students investigate the Baltimore Museum of Art’s American art collection and its presentation to the public alongside current scholarship on American art to develop strategies for a new permanent collection display that aligns with the museum’s commitment to artistic excellence and social equity. M&S Practicum. Co-taught with BMA curator Virginia Anderson.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Examines the history of African art in the Euro-American world, focusing on the ways that Western institutions have used African artworks to construct narratives about Africa and its billion residents.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Investigates collaborative humanities methods that foster democratic participation among publics more broadly conceived than the academy, including participatory action research, collaborative oral history, indigenous research methods, interactive theater, participatory archival practices, and cooperative models for connecting art, artists, and audiences. Course focuses on queer, trans, and Black histories in Baltimore, includes excursions to local cultural institutions, and is co-taught by prominent public humanists, artists, and activists from Baltimore and beyond.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
As part of an ongoing collaboration with the Baltimore Museum of Art, students are invited to contribute to a special exhibition about touch and tactility in 20th century American art. Research artists such as Jasper Johns, Yoko Ono, Betye Saar, Felix Gonzalex-Torres, create thematic installations, and conceptualize museum interpretation to activate the tactile dimensions of art.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Sociology
While developments in biomedicine and health care have led to the eradication, cure and management of many human health problems, disease, illness and health have also been the focus for aggressive social controls and population management. The technologies and practices of disease control and health management have been foundational to some of the most aggressive structures of oppression in recent history such as the Jewish Ghetto, the Concentration Camp, the South African Township and techniques of segregation. This course seeks to explore how epidemics and disease control are linked to larger questions of power, state craft and international dynamics. This course asks how have outbreaks of infectious disease shaped social and political action? How do societies respond to outbreaks and why? What do epidemic moments tell us about global structures of power and the dynamics of control? Drawing on historical cases including plague during the European Renaissance and before, the HIV/AIDS Pandemic and the West African Ebola Outbreak of 2013-2016, this course will introduce students to the history and practices of disease control as well as important theoretical perspectives by which to understand the sociological and historical effects of disease and the responses to them. Students will engage sociological concepts such as biopolitics, social construction of disease and illness and biosecurity and produce a final research paper examining the outcomes and responses to an epidemic event to show mastery of the topics covered in the course.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality
This course will serve as an intensive introduction to contemporary approaches to theories of gender and sexuality, and their relationship to cultural production and politics. Students will develop a historically situated knowledge of the development of feminist and queer scholarship in the 20th and 21st centuries, and consider the multiply intersecting forces which shape understandings of sexual and gender identity. We will consider both foundational questions (What is gender? Who is the subject of feminism? What defines queerness?) and questions of aesthetic and political strategy, and spend substantial time engaging with feminist and queer scholarship in comparative contexts. Students will be introduced to debates in Black feminism, intersectionality theory, third world feminism, socialist feminism, queer of colour critique, and trans* theory. We will read both canonical texts and recent works of scholarship, and the final weeks of the course will be devoted to thinking with our theoretical and historical readings against a selection of feminist and queer literature and cinema. No prior familiarity with the study of gender and sexuality is necessary.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will encourage encounters with a number of concepts from a critical gendered perspective, including: sameness/difference, identity politics, race/gender, loyalty, security, queer ethics, and queerness in media.
Writing Intensive
Women in Western Thought is an introduction to (the history of) Western thought from the margins of the canon. The class introduces you to some key philosophical question, focusing on some highlights of women’s thought in Western thought, most of which are commonly and unjustly neglected. The seminar will be organized around a number of paradigmatic cases, such as the mind/body question in Early Modern Europe, the declaration of the rights of (wo)men during the French revolution, the impact of slavery on philosophical thought, the MeToo debate and others. By doing so, the course will cover a range of issues, such as the nature of God, contract theory, slavery, standpoint epistemology, and queer feminist politics. Students will engage with questions about what a canon is, and who has a say in that. In this sense, Women in Western Thought introduces you to some crucial philosophical and political problems and makes you acquainted with some women in the field. The long term objective of a class on women in Western thought must be to empower, to inspire independence, and to resist the sanctioned ignorance often times masked as universal knowledge and universal history. People of all genders tend to suffer from misinformation regarding the role of women and the gender of thought more generally. By introducing you to women who took it upon themselves to resist the obstacles of their time, I am hoping to provide role models for your individual intellectual and political development. By introducing you to the historical conditions of the exclusion and oppression of women (including trans and queer women as well as black women and women of color), I hope to enable you to generate the sensitivities that are required to navigate the particular social relations of the diverse world you currently inhabit. By introducing philosophical topics in this way, I hope to enable you to have a positive, diversifying influence on you future endeavours.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
While many recognize Zora Neale Hurston’s creative literary work, her methodological innovations are often overshadowed. This course will examine Hurston’s contributions to theorizing the African diaspora and creative use of ethnography.Dr. Amarilys Estrella, the 2020-2021 ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoc, will teach this course. For more info on Dr. Estrella, see https://history.jhu.edu/directory/amarilys-estrella/
Area: Humanities
Introduces students to the intersections of queer theory, performance studies, and LGBTQ history with a focus on “queer worldmaking:” the ways in which performances—both theatrical and everyday rituals—have the ability to establish alternative views of the world. Case studies include the ballroom scene in Baltimore and beyond, migratory street youth subcultures, and queer nightlife. This course also offers a unique lens on the archive and historical research by approaching embodied memory, gestures, and ritual as systems for learning, storing, and transmitting cultural knowledge.
Area: Humanities