Courses
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This survey course examines the history of Europe from the early sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries. Topics to be examined include the Reformations and religious wars, curiosity, contact and conquest of non-European lands, the rise of modern bureaucratic states, the emergence of popular sovereignty as a political criterion, the new science, as well as expanding literacy and consumption.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
The Cold War was a defining event of the 20th century. But what was it? Where did it take place? Who were the major contenders? And what were the consequences? This introductory course will examine the Cold War in a global context, looking beyond the United States and Europe. Students will learn about how the Cold War unfolded in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, in relation to the fall of European empires, the process of decolonization, and the rise of U.S. global power. This course will introduce students to key themes and primary sources in the study of the Global Cold War, as a foundation for further courses in History, Critical Diaspora Studies, International Studies, Political Science, etc.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
A class combining Latin American history since independence and digital humanities. Students will build guided research projects while thinking about questions of republicanism, freedom and unfreedom, migration, and development.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
This course provides an overview of Native American History in North America. We will investigate the diverse Indigenous cultures and political systems that have called the continent home from large and historically well-documented polities such as Cherokee nation and the Haudenosaunee to the crucial yet often-overlooked role of smaller polities such as those of the Abenakis and the Petites Nations of the Gulf Coast. Along the way we will ask: how have geography (and displacement) shaped culture and politics? how have Indigenous histories shaped the history of the United States (as well as Mexico and Canada)? what are the unique challenges of studying and writing Native American History today?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Where is the Middle East? What is it exactly in the Middle of? What, if anything, defines it, and who gets to do the defining? This introductory course poses such questions. Whilst promising no easy answers, it will nevertheless 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. The course, while at the introductory level, is reading and writing intensive.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Many Americans celebrate the United States as a “nation of immigrants,” but defining which immigrants to include and exclude in the nation has always been a contentious process. This course will put some of today’s immigration debates in historical perspective, examining how past Americans debated questions about the “fitness” of immigrants for freedom and citizenship, and how those debates in turn shaped immigrant experiences, the law, and American identity. Topics that we will cover include colonialism and slavery; immigrant labor; families; gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality; immigration law; borders and deportation; refugees and asylum seekers; and citizenship and belonging.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Explore the social and political changes that have transformed the African continent in the modern era, with a focus on the rise and fall of colonialism, the relation between Africa and the world in the post-colonial era, and effect of colonialism and its aftermath on African household structures and gender roles.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Introduction to three major themes in African history, from the precolonial era to the present.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
The growth of the internet and social media since the 1990s has been associated with an explosion of identities and a perception that younger generations have redefined gender and sexuality online. This course will introduce students to critically examining that premise. Topics will include the transgender history of Silicon Valley, the Tumblr era, the rise of queer and nonbinary influencers, and the redefinition of political engagement on social media.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
The course will provide an introduction to the study of Jewish History.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
What does the aphorism that “war is hell” mean in practical terms? The course will serve as a deconstructive introduction to military history, overviewing soldiers’ and generals’ experiences of historically significant military disasters. Students will also be guided through the creation of a research paper on a conflict of their own choosing.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
We live in a world of global consumption. This course introduces students to the birth of global consumer culture in the period from the 1600s through to the American, French and Haitian revolutions. These revolutions were themselves sold to consumers through “revolutionary things”, and this period witnessed the first major consumer boycotts against slave-produced goods. Students will examine the histories of many key commodities involved in the “consumer revolution”, including fashion items such as shoes, wigs, clothing and accessories. A significant portion of the course will examine addictive stimulants like sugar, coffee, tea and tobacco, globalized and imperial goods which became common for the first time in this period. We shall see how production of these goods involved new forms of racialized exploitation; simultaneously, we shall explore the diversity of people involved in the consumer revolution, studying the consumption of important new goods by people living in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. By the end of the class, students will understand how the emergence of mass consumption affected the global politics of race, gender and class, with especially important consequences for women and non-elite men. Students will examine objects lauded for their politeness, decorative appeal, and cultural importance such as porcelain tea sets, snuffboxes, and fans. Students will choose their own objects for a student presentation and research project.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
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. What were the causes of the Cultural Revolution? How was it experienced and how is it remembered? To what extent are its reverberations felt in contemporary Chinese society, politics, and literature? How have subsequent events affected our understanding of the Cultural Revolution decade? 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 subsequent interpretation as history and in historical memory in China and beyond.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution questions about the legacy and meaning of the revolutionary era circulate among both professional historians and the American public: How revolutionary was the American Revolution, and for whom? What did the diverse population of North America in the 1770s—including free and enslaved people of African descent, Native Americans, as well white women and men in the thirteen colonies—make of the political rupture between Britain and America? What type of nation did the founders envision and how does that continue to shape the United States today? How has the American Revolution been remembered and memorialized at different times in American history? In this course we will read current scholarship on the American Revolution and also visit museum and cultural sites to explore both the events of the American Revolution and their ongoing memorialization while exploring answers to these questions.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
This course introduces students to major debates and controversies within the feminist movement in the United Kingdom and the United States from 1850 to the present. From colonial and eugenic women’s movements to anti-trans and carceral feminism, the contents and assessments of this course ask you to consider a pressing question in contemporary feminism: how do we reckon with the reality that many feminists have excluded and continue to exclude people from the liberatory futures they imagine? Together we will analyze the value and limits of historical context and evaluate the relationship between past and present controversies within the feminist movement. Employing critical feminist concepts such as intersectionality and positionality, we will consider what it means for people (including ourselves) to be “products of their time.” By doing historical research in newspaper databases, we will evaluate how feminist claims about “sisterhood” have changed over time.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
This course explores the origins and evolution of antisemitism, with focus on questions of historical continuity and rupture, comparison with other hatreds, and the politics of history.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
There is more to Germany than beer, BMWs, and Bayern Munich. We explore politics, culture, economics and society to understand Germany and its role within Europe and the world from the 18th century, through imperialism, WWI and WWII, the Cold War to German unification, the ‘Refugee Crisis’, the rise of the AfD, and EU politics today.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
In this course we will explore the history of conservative ideas and their impact on American society from the late-19th century to the present. We will evaluate the successes and failures of conservative thinkers, activists, and movements in shaping policy and culture amidst major transformations in American life. In doing so, we will also investigate relationships and conflicts among a range of formations on the political right, including traditionalists, libertarians, the New Right, neoconservatives, paleoconservatives, neoliberals, and post-liberals. Some basic familiarity with modern U.S. history is recommended, but not required, to take this course.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean set off a chain of violence that swept through the early modern Americas. In this course we will investigate how warfare shaped North America and the Caribbean in the period between Columbus’s fateful 1492 voyage and the establishment of an independent Haitian state. The interlinked patterns of colonialism and trans-Atlantic slavery forced together people from three continents and made Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans in the Americas rethink what it meant to fight a war, and how to do it. We will consider how different cultures understood, deployed, and attempted to control violence, and then focus on specific wars, engaging with both contemporary scholarship and primary sources. Along the way, we will consider how the Americas, despite a long history before Columbus, became a “new world” through the warfare that followed after him. Throughout this semester we will read and discuss a variety of different forms of historical writing and consider the wide applicability of the history we are studying in the world around us today. Students will have the opportunity to explore different forms of historically informed writing in their own work.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
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, including Baltimore.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
This course surveys the history of Jewish magic, mysticism, and secret traditions from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. We will explore the concept of sod (mystery) and its historical variations, examining how it evolved over time. Readings will include excerpts from foundational texts of Jewish esotericism, such as Sefer Yetzirah, the Bahir, and the Zohar. Additionally, we will discuss practical Kabbalah—including the preparation and use of amulets and charms—as well as beliefs surrounding demonic (and angelic) possession.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
By 1900, France had conquered large parts of the African continent - mainly through violence - and gained a reputation as the least racist Western state. In 2023, the French government works to hold onto the power it still holds in multiple sub-Saharan countries while, at home and abroad, the perniciousness and persistence of French anti-African racisms spark debate and activism. This course examines the interactions between African and Afro-descendent people and France/the French, in Africa (with particular attention to North and West Africa), France, and beyond. We will focus on colonialism, decolonization, and neocolonialism - notably “Françafrique” - as well as how Africans and Afro-descendent people in France navigated the challenges and possibilities they encountered.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
This class focuses on Europe from the end of World War II until today. We will discuss topics such as the bipolar world order, the creation of the European welfare state, Europe’s volatile relations with the US and the Soviet Union/ Russia, decolonization, 1989 and neoliberalism, racism, and the emergence of the European Union. Expect to spend 25% of class time in group work, where we discuss the assigned academic literature, movies, documentaries, textual and visual primary sources.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Conspiratorial thinking is nothing new in American politics. Since the founding of the nation, Americans have been riveted—and riven—by conspiracy theories. This course introduces students to key methods and questions in U.S. history by exploring conspiratorial episodes from the American Revolution through the present. We’ll pick apart allegations and denials of conspiracies to discover what they tell us about American politics and culture. We’ll also consider historians’ analyses of conspiratorial claims, and think about the relationship between conspiracy and historical causality.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
From 1948-1994, South Africa was governed under the system of apartheid, which denied political and civil rights to non-white citizens. This class traces the rise of apartheid in South Africa as well as the liberation struggle that eventually defeated it.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
This course investigates sexual cultures through the lens of modern Queer History in the United States and Western Europe, with forays into global and transnational histories.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
The United States has had 59 elections in its history, and in 2024 it will be having the next. Every election reflects a particular moment. Political parties, of course, have a logic of their own, driven by individuals and circumstances, but in some way, the elections also reflect larger, changing questions about the future of the country. This course will set the 2024 election in the long history of the American election. Each student will choose a different election to study deeply for a substantial research project, drawing on the archives of DC. At the end of the semester, we will synthesize our findings into a more readily accessible format that lays out how the American election has changed over time. This shared piece, as well as the individual histories, will be combined into a volume and perhaps an exhibit.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
The political, social and cultural history of events that marked a turning-point to the modern era by inaugurating and then destroying a more popular democracy than Europeans had yet known.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Examines the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement that swept Europe in the eighteenth century to shape the modern world. Students will not only read canonical works of the period (Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, etc.) but also consider the broader social and cultural contexts in which ideas evolved. Thus, the class will explore the rise of the book trade and popular reading practices; new understandings of gender and sexuality; and the development of anti-Black racism and slavery in the Atlantic world.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
Praise and praxis of the small farmer and local foodways long predate "modern" advancements in farming technologies and industrial agriculture. And strands of agrarianism have persisted in the face of agro-industrial growth. Questions of sustainable agriculture, food security, food sovereignty, and heritage crops and cuisines have posed poignant social, political, and economic concerns in the past and present. This class focuses on topics and tensions around culture, agriculture, and the environment in U.S. history through intersectional and interdisciplinary frameworks.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Students must apply and be accepted by the global education office.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This is a larger seminar-style course devoted to the writings attributed to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X (El-Hajj El-Malik Shabazz). While the two the key African American male icons of the Civil Rights Movement era gained prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, they are typically discussed as representing two ideological camps: racial integration deeply committed to the idea of American exceptionalism and democratic perfection, and black nationalism, a non-state ideological move that adjudged the U.S. nation state on the same terms as any other imperial power. We will explore these binaries in their thought and the social movements connected to them, and also engage with multiple cinematic representations of the two figures that have carried them forward into contemporary times.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
In this course, we will survey the political, social, intellectual, and cultural history of the three Islamic early modern gunpowder empires that ranged from “the Balkans to Bengal”: The Ottomans (1300-1922), the Safavids (1501-1736), and the Mughals (1526-1858).
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Everyday, we all have encounters with animals: the mosquito that bites our arm, the rat that runs in front of us on the sidewalk, the dog that greets us upon our return home. These interactions are quotidian, but rarely reflected in the histories that we read. In this class, we will bring the animal back into the narratives that we tell by considering history from a multispecies perspective. Taking the examples of China and Japan, we will see how animals, both real and metaphoric, played a critical role in the political, economic, religious, and social lives of our historical, human, actors. We will see how the inclusion of animals in history bolsters and challenges history as it has been written and gain a deeper understanding of how our current mores regarding animals came to be. Our class will begin with a discussion of Japan and China in the 17th century and end with contemporary controversies surrounding Japanese whaling and shark fin soup. Throughout the course we will consider the ethical and philosophical ramifications of our inquiries like the agency of non-human animals. Designed for upper-level undergraduate students interested in the history of East Asia, prior knowledge of the region will be useful but is not required.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
Using primary sources, including literature and film, we will explore the changing ways in which ideologues, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens defined national identity in 20th century China and Japan.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
From 1565 to 1815, the Manila galleons sailed between Spanish colonies in the Philippines and Mexico. Thousands of free and enslaved Asians from all over coastal Asia disembarked these ships at Acapulco and, within decades, could be found throughout Mexico, Central America, and Peru. A second and larger migratory wave of Chinese and South Asian contract laborers arrived in the Caribbean and South America during the nineteenth century. This course examines these two waves and their entanglements to chart the trajectories of the earliest Asian diasporas in the Americas. In the evaluation of these topics, we will pay close attention to racialization, cross-cultural exchange, lived experience, and unfree labor.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
The focus will be on Soviet-American interactions, Cold-War Cultures, and the impact on both societies.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
The history of China from the 16th to the late 19th centuries.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Survey of the history of China from ca. 1895 to ca. 1976.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
The legacies of colonialism in Latin America have been bitterly contested in recent film and other digital media. From highlighting the afterlives of enslavement to asserting Indigenous rights, creators and audiences have turned to screens to address the open wounds of the region’s colonial past. By analyzing hits like También la lluvia and the Mexican cult favorite, 499, this course uses film analysis, cultural memory, and primary sources to understand how these media make arguments about Latin America's colonial past and its significance in the present. The course similarly engages with the field of historical game studies through the analysis of videogames and boardgames that create simulations of early modern societies in the Americas. In this course, students will develop the ability to identify how digital media production and reception shape the memory of colonialism in the American hemisphere. In so doing, they will also acquire a deeper knowledge of Latin American colonial histories and their influence on contemporary culture. Necessarily, the course heavily emphasizes Indigenous perspectives and so simultaneously serves as an introduction to Indigenous Studies in Latin America.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
This class explores the geographic, economic and cultural issues resulting from Africa’s urban growth from precolonial times to the present.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course explores the development of English law and the English legal tradition from the Norman Conquest through the English Revolution (ca. 1066-1688). We will begin by tracing the impact of the Norman Conquest of England and examine the origins and development of English legal and political institutions such as kingship, the common law, the evolution of legal procedure, and the court and jury system, ideas of franchise, treason and the emergence of Parliament. We will also consider how English law constructs legal categories including aliens, women, heirs, traitors as well as the legal framework for the emergence of the English Church under the Tudors. When applicable the implications of these institutions for developments in the contemporary American and British legal systems will be addressed.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
This upper-division course is designed to help students examine and probe the significant role Africa has played in shaping the Atlantic world and its place within its economic, social, religious, cultural, and political configurations.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
History Department experiential research lab courses cover a wide range of topics. This course is part one of a two semester sequence and will comprise of an in-class component (AS.100.384; 2 credits) during the Fall or Spring semester followed by a 10-12 day study abroad component (AS.100.385; 1 credit) during Intersession or Summer. Enrollment is by instructor permission. Interested students should contact the course instructor prior to enrolling in SIS. All expenses for the study abroad trip will be covered by Johns Hopkins.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
History Department experiential research lab courses cover a wide range of topics. This course is part two of a two semester sequence. After the completion of AS.100.384 [required] during the Fall or Spring semester, students will enroll in the 10-12 day study abroad element of the course for Intersession or Summer. Pre-requisite: Must have completed AS.100.384, in the previous adjacent semester, to enroll. All expenses for the study abroad trip will be covered by Johns Hopkins.
Prerequisite(s): AS.100.384
Distribution 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 intersected with domestic and foreign policy, and how sports constructed, reinforced, and challenged notions of race, gender, and class. We will also interview JHU alumni and former athletes who made a career out of sports.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Students work in close collaboration with a faculty member to produce an individual research project. The course is designed for history majors in conjunctions with AS.100.293, and it is recommended, although not required, that the AS.100.293 be taken first.
Prerequisite(s): AS.100.293
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
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”.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
This course explores development as an ideology and a practice. From colonialism to the Cold War to contemporary NGOs, we will interrogate the history of our attempts to improve the world. This iteration of the course will have a particular focus on the intersections between development and the environment. Graduate students welcome.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
How do we interpret history for and with broad public audiences? This class introduces students to public history and community-engaged research, emphasizing collaborative knowledge production between academic and non-academic publics. Case studies include virtual reality experiments, walking tours, exhibitions, public art and performance, activist oral history, and community mapping. Students receive training in oral history and podcasting, benefit from guest speakers, and explore methods such as participatory action research, indigenous research methodologies, and shared authority.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
This course engages both a ‘history of data’ and the ‘data of history’ by exploring American labor, consumer and business history. Students will learn how to think critically about how data are made and organized. They will then use that data to build arguments and visualizations about social and economic change over time. Throughout the course, we will learn to use various tools such as Google Sheets, Python, and ChatGPT for data analysis. No prior experience with statistics or programming is necessary, but students should come with a desire to learn.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
What did Chinese local society look like under the Qing Empire, and how did it change over the early modern era?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course builds students’ research, writing, and analytical skills by guiding them through an independent research project in a collaborative classroom environment.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Witchcraft, magic, carnivals, riots, folk tales, gender roles; fertility cults and violence especially in Britain, Germany, France, and Italy.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
“They Say I am a witch,” declared one woman in seventeenth-century North America. Trials and fights over accusations of witchcraft provide rich material for an examination of early American power dynamics. This class will explore moments of such accusations. The class will culminate in a final project on a witchcraft case in early America.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Can law end genocide? Modern Europe has formed the site for some of the worst global atrocities in modern history. It has also served as the birthplace and proving grounds for many of humanity’s boldest experiments in genocide prevention and global justice. In this course, we will examine the historical links between mass violence and legal change. We will focus on pivotal trials and legal campaigns in Central and Eastern Europe from World War I to the present, including the Nuremberg Trials, the UN Yugoslavian Tribunals, and the ongoing Russia/Ukraine war. We will pay special attention to the question of what the historical entanglements between international law, human rights, and empire mean for the future of universal justice in Europe and beyond.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This undergraduate research seminar examines laws, practices, and debates pertaining to censorship from the eighteenth century to the present. Issues include political speech, obscenity and pornography, and racist hate speech. In addition to discussing common readings, each student will choose a censorship case or issue to research, present to the class, and analyze in a final essay.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Presidential elections – even rare, unexpected, or paradigm-busting elections – do not occur in a vacuum. Instead, they are created, shaped, and constructed by a variety of significant forces, over time. This seminar thus suggests that you cannot understand modern presidential politics and contests, including the 2020 election and the upcoming 2024 election, without examining the historical antecedents that make the present-day moment possible. Consequently, while enrolled in this seminar, students will grapple with the following central question: what are the foundational moments in modern American social, political, and economic history that provided the “building blocks” for the 2024 United States Presidential Election? How can we use history to analyze and explain the developments of the 2024 election, as those moments are happening in real time?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Since 1900 global markets have undergone a dramatic transformation. This course will grapple with the writings of economists and social theorists who sought to understand the implications of these changes, and in some cases helped to inspire them. Questions they addressed include: does freedom result from the absence of coercion, or does it require the provision of capacities? Do markets reward desirable behaviors, or do they produce social and environmental pathologies? Does competition occur spontaneously, or does it require careful regulation and reinforcement? And what is the relationship between innovation and inequality? Readings include selections from Max Weber, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W.E.B. DuBois, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Polanyi, Joseph Schumpeter, Theodor Adorno, Milton Friedman, Donna Haraway, Wendy Brown, and Thomas Piketty. Class meetings will focus on the close reading of these texts, and discussion of how and why perceptions of the market economy have changed over time.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
We will explore key texts in the historiography of post-1939 North Africa as well as key recent publications, in French as well as in English.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Projects and Methods (FA6)
Introduction to the practice of global legal history, with focus on the growth of modern international law from the seventeenth century to the present, its relationship to nationalism and empire, war, atrocity-crimes and human rights, international institutions, and the relationship between law and history.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
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?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course explores the history, politics, and culture of legalized racial segregation in the United State between the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries – a regime commonly known as “Jim Crow.”
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
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
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
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 Baltimore and national case studies, and contextualize it within the Cold War and decolonization. We’ll speak with eyewitnesses, work with archivists, high school students, and community partners in the city!
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
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 Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
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 Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.;AS.100.507
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
Undergraduate independent research under a faculty mentor.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Undergraduate independent research under a faculty mentor.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning 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.
Distribution 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.
Distribution 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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course introduces major historiographical themes and debates in Modern British and British Imperial History to graduate students. It is designed to prepare students for major and minor fields in associated topics.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This graduate-level seminar provides an overview of innovative works in the overlapping histories of modern Japan and Korea. We will read both “classic” and recent works that will help us analyze the following: 1) trends in the historiographies of Japan and Korea; 2) analytical, conceptual, and political challenges in the writing of Japanese/imperial and Korean/colonial history; and 3) recent global, microhistorical, and transnational methodologies. Discussions will focus as much on the craft of writing history as on the content of it.
Distribution 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.
Distribution 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.
Distribution 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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will consider recent historical work on law and empire, with a focus on modern empires in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Distribution 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.
Distribution 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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This seminar engages graduate students with recent historiography on Gender and Sexuality in the context of Britain and the British Empire. Subthemes include labor history, the history of technology, trans studies, and urban history.
Distribution 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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores the interplay between the development of the colonial and post-colonial city and the emergence of popular cultures in Africa. Because the field of popular cultures is deeply interdisciplinary, this course draws on disciplines such as history, anthropology, literary studies, linguistics and others to illuminate the power of expressive urban cultures in the ways in which African societies have used them to cope with colonial change and modernity. It is organized around reading modules that focus on music, cinema, theater, religious movements, fashion, recycled art and sports. We will read a variety of texts from noted specialists in the field of popular cultures. As we examine the criteria each scholar establishes to determine the nature, content and social significance of popular cultures within the African context, participants will be encouraged to develop their own theoretical perspectives or, at the very least, a set of criteria for developing an encompassing interpretive theory of popular cultures.
Distribution 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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A reading seminar in African modern history, from the 19th century to the present, covering issues such as slavery, colonial encounters and resistance, Africa’s postcolonial trajectories as well as current decolonial debates.
Distribution 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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The history of the consolidation of the kingdom of the Franks offers a window into some of the most important events, developments, and themes of the High Middle Ages. Building out from primary texts, we will analyze the nature of medieval kingship – the office, institution, and the person of the king; the consolidation of territory as so-called “feudal” lordships gave way to the mechanisms of the state; the role of religion, spirituality, and the development of religious ideologies as they relate to king and nation; the impact of religious difference and the persecution of heresy; the construction of gender and its association to power and sanctity; the consolidation of law as it took shape in practice, procedure, and text; the development of crusading and its impact; and the place of culture and royal ideology in and on the everyday lives of individuals living in Europe, and especially, France at this time. In addition to weekly readings focused on secondary scholarship most weeks we will also read at least one primary text in Latin or Old French.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
An advanced graduate seminar devoted to the study and discussion of various early modern heretical groups and movements.
Distribution 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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Intended for graduate students preparing for a field exam in American Economic History, this course will cover the rise of the American economy from a variety of historiographic perspectives: financial, labor, consumption, macroeconomic, technological, etc. Students will write a historiographic research paper at the end of the semester.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This is a graduate seminar devoted to close reading of crucial works in early modern history and historiography.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This seminar explores the black intellectual tradition through a range of reading, both from historical intellectuals, artists, and activists and studies of those figures. The readings will draw from across the disciplines and multiple genres, and explore some of the key concepts, movements, and interventions that have helped shape a broadly understood project of Black Study. We will focus primarily on black intellectuals from the Caribbean and the United States, with particular attention, though not singular, to the twentieth century.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This seminar engages graduate students with recent and “classic” historiography on LGBTQ+ questions in French, German, and other western European spaces, with particular attention to empire.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Reading Sefer Yetsirah
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This seminar introduces History 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. This course is for History graduate students only.
Distribution 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, Kollontai, Césaire, and Fanon.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Graduate reading seminar in Modern African history.
Distribution 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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This seminar will examine the history and historiography of the eighteenth-century French empire. We will read recent work on colonialism, overseas trade, Atlantic slavery, economic thought, and the French and Haitian Revolutions.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Distribution 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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
An intensive research seminar for graduate students currently conducting research on theories, methodologies, and histories of inter-Asian movements and networks. Instructor permission required.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This graduate seminar delves into the intricate relationship between religion and the senses, critically examining how sensory experience and perception have been theorized, cultivated, and contested within religious traditions (broadly conceived). Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives from history, anthropology, religious studies, and art history, we will interrogate the senses as epistemological tools, vehicles of discipline, metaphors for doctrinal and ethical concepts, and markers of sacred presence. This seminar engages with the multiple boundaries of sensory experience and its sociocultural implications through close readings of theoretical texts and case studies of ritual, material culture, and sacred spaces drawn from various religious traditions, such as Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
We will use the meanings and methodologies of “materiality” to examine the medieval world, by analyzing objects, texts, networks, patterns of circulation and appropriation, aesthetics and enshrinement, production and knowledge communities.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Reading seminar on the state of the field in Early American History – mostly covering North America with some emphasis on transnational connections. Course is open to graduate students in history and other disciplines.
Writing workshop for graduate students at all stages presenting work in progress. Discussion of theories, methods, and challenges of graduate student writing.
Distribution 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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Graduate course in foundational texts in the history of religion in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean.
Distribution 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 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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Black World Seminar explores historical approaches to the study of African-descended people and analyzes processes of racial formation responsible for producing “blackness,” a human invention, as a social fact. This specific iteration of Black World will consider the role of political economy in shaping the life-worlds of Africans and those living throughout the African Diaspora.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This seminar investigates US trans history through the prism of the welfare state. Readings will prioritize the analysis of class, political economy, and labor to make sense of gender’s material functions, practices of transition, and the maneuvers and aims of policy and statecraft. The course will ultimately explore why a tiny population has become a significant object of welfare state management since the New Deal.
Distribution 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.
Distribution 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.
Directed Readings in Early Modern British History.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Distribution 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.
Distribution 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.
The Environment and Geography Seminar provides space for PhD students and professors to present works in progress. The goal is to bring together researchers in the physical sciences, social sciences, and humanities who work on the environment. In the 1990s, Donald E. Worster outlined two basic approaches to environmental studies: studying how cultures shape environments and how environments shape cultures. Since then, environmental studies scholars have attempted to synthesize these two approaches. Their key insight is that cultural and environmental change should be studied together, not separately. In that spirit, we convene this seminar so that scholars in the physical and social sciences can think together about how economic, social, and political systems interact with the environment (and vice versa). This seminar is open to researchers and students with an interest in agriculture, food, pollution, industrial waste, sustainability, energy policy, green growth/degrowth, epidemiology, conservation, more-than-human studies, biodiversity, deep-time, planetary systems, environmental justice, and climate change.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
A one semester graduate seminar discussing major works of early modern British and early modern British imperial history.
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
Distribution 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 English-language scholarship in the field (mostly) of early modern Chinese history.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Distribution 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).
Distribution 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.
Distribution 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 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. This course is for History graduate students only.
Distribution 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. We will meet for an hour on a weekly or bi-weekly basis to engage in discussion. Occasionally there may be related readings, first-year paper drafts, or common materials that you will be asked to read, edit, or engage with in advance of the workshop meeting, but I will let you know when that is the case. You may also be asked to present comments, questions, reflections, and sometimes written feedback on shared materials or to share drafts of your cv, cover letters, proposals and the like for comment and feedback. The goal of the workshop is to provide a shared space that is informative and supportive for our graduate student community and that will enrich your experience in the department.
Distribution 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. For History Graduate Students only.