This course explores selected topics in the political, economic, social, and intellectual history of Western Europe in the wider world in the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the fourteenth century. Special emphasis will be given to understanding the ways in which medieval society functioned as it reorganized itself after the almost total collapse of the ancient world. Topics include: religious plurality, sovereignty and subjecthood, flourishing of learning, chivalric culture, crusading, and the plague and its effects. We will follow the interplay between material and cultural forces in the processes of social organization.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course surveys the history of Europe and its interactions with Africa, the Americas, and Asia during the early modern period (c. 1400-1800). Topics include: the Renaissance, the Reformation, International Relations and Warfare, Colonialism, the Enlightenment, and the Age of Revolutions.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Modern European World familiarizes students with key moments, ideas, communities, individuals, and movements which have formed European History since the Revolutionary era.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
From slave revolts on the West African coast to national conventions and civil war, people of African descent have defined freedom and struggle in terms of kinship, diasporic connection, and fighting antiblack violence. This course explores the arc of that history and its role in the making of America.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course examines race and social movements in America from the Revolution to 1921.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A class combining Latin American history since independence and digital humanities (revised with 2021 student feedback). Students will build guided research projects while thinking about questions of republicanism, freedom and unfreedom, migration, and development.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
An introduction to the African past since 1880.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Introduction to three major themes in African history, from the precolonial era to the present.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The course will provide an introduction to the study of Jewish History.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Jewish history 1750-present in Europe, the Near East, the US, Israel; the challenges of modernity and new forms of Jewish life and conflict from Enlightenment and emancipation, Hasidism, Reform and Orthodox Judaism to capitalism and socialism; empire, nationalism and Zionism; the Holocaust. Extensive attention to US Jewry and State of Israel.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
In this course we will use popular depictions of Mexico’s heroes and villains, tragedies and triumphs to delve into both the nation’s history and the importance of thinking historically.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course is an introduction to Japan’s history from 1800 to the present with emphasis on the influences of an increasing global circulation of ideas and people. Topics include the emperor system, family and gender, imperialism, World War II, the postwar economy, and global J-pop.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Cultural Revolution was Mao Zedong's last attempt to transform Chinese society spiritually and structurally. The events of this period were marked by social upheaval, personal vendettas, violence, massive youth movements, and extreme ideological pressure. This course will explore the Cultural Revolution from a variety of perspectives, focusing on the relationship between events in China from 1966-1976, and their interpretation in China and the West during the Cultural Revolution decade and since. (Previously offered as AS.100.219 and AS.100.236. )
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The course will introduce the student to the main themes and debates in Jewish historiography.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course introduces students to the defining social, political, and cultural moments that reflect the experience of African Americans in the United States, 1896 – present. Topics include the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Freedom Struggle, African American politics, urban rebellion, mass incarceration, Hip Hop culture, the current movement for Black Lives, and more.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The first semester of the two-semester sequence required for majors, this course introduces students to the theory and practice of history. Following a survey of approaches to the study of the past and an introduction to research methods, students undertake original research and write an extended essay. Intended for history majors and prospective majors.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The second semester of the two-semester sequence required for majors, this course further introduces students to the theory and practice of history. Students write an essay based on original research.
Prerequisite(s): AS.100.193
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course explores the series of religious and political conflicts that make up what are known now as the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Explores religious culture in medieval and early modern Europe, with an emphasis on spiritual beliefs and practices, relics, miracles, pilgrimage, and saint-making. Emphasis on reading and discussing written sources and visual culture.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Worlds of Hip-Hop explores hip-hop as an arts movement whose forms, conventions, and standards responded to the specific political and social conditions to address questions of freedom and community.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
There is more to Germany than beer, BMWs, and Bayern Munich. We explore politics, culture, economics and society to understand Germany and its role within Europe and the world from the 18th century to the ‘Refugee Crisis’, climate change and EU politics today.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will introduce students to some major issues and problems in the history of the Early U.S. Republic, c. 1750 to 1815, by focusing on the theme of “expansion.”
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores 20th century U.S. history through the works of writers and artists. We will ask how essays, novels, performance, and art can function as cultural and social criticism.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course provides an intensive introduction to the causes, character, and consequences of the American Revolution, the colonial rebellion that produced the first republic in the Americas, and set in motion an age of democratic revolutions in the Atlantic world. A remarkable epoch in world history, the revolutionary era was of momentous significance.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This class offers a broad overview of changes in China from Neolithic times through the Song Dynasty (roughly from 5000 BCE through the 13th century CE) and will include discussion of art, material culture, and literature as well as politics and society. Close readings of primary sources in discussion sections and extensive use of visual material in lectures will help students gain firsthand perspective on the materials covered.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
An introduction to Japan’s history from 1700 to the present, with emphasis on the influences of an increasing global circulation of ideas, goods, and people in early modern and modern times. Topics include samurai, nation-building, gender, imperialism, World War II, the postwar economy, and contemporary popular culture.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course considers the American Revolution from the perspective of locations beyond the thirteen rebelling colonies. Covering a range of global hotspots, the focus is on events from 1763 to 1788.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores the rich history of West Africa and its place in the broader world. Topics include the environmental history of the Sahara desert, West African empires, and the rise of Nollywood and contemporary culture.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course will trace the historical development of Jewish and Christian mysticism between the 12th and the 17th centuries.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This class focuses on Europe from the end of World War II until today. We will discuss such topics as the Cold War, social democracy, the welfare state, the relationship to the US and the Soviet Union, decolonization, migration, 1989, European integration, neoliberalism, and the EU. We will discuss and analyze academic literature, movies, documentary films, textual and visual primary sources.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will trace the historical development of Jewish and Christian mysticism between the 11th and the 19th centuries.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores passing narratives – stories that feature people who cross race, class, ethnic, or gender boundaries. We will consider what passing narratives can teach us about power and identity, especially as power is presumed to reside in the self and race is presumed to no longer matter.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Overview of modern South African history, with a focus on the origins of the racial state and the development of black liberation movements.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Making and Unmaking Queer Histories introduces students to the major themes and historical developments which shape contemporary understandings of LGBTQ+-identified subjects and communities in the US and Western Europe.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
How did medicine emerge as a distinctive body of knowledge and a profession in the early modern period? The answers lie in the histories of disease, empire, and global commerce.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Surveys methods, approaches, and practices of historical writing. It asks students to think about the questions historians ask, the archives they use, and the arguments they make. Students will be introduced to subversive and emancipatory potential of contemporary scholarship that importantly incorporates subaltern, marginalized, or formerly forgotten voices.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The second semester of the two-semester sequence required for majors, this course further introduces students to the theory and practice of history. Students write an essay based on original research.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Readings in American social thought since 1865, ranging across developments in philosophy, literature, law, economics, and political theory.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course explores the history of late twentieth-century America by examining the social, economic, and political legacies of 1960s civil rights protest for the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Examines the history of France from the reign of Louis XIV to the French Revolution, focusing on early modern society, popular culture, absolutism, the Enlightenment, overseas empire, and the French and Haitian Revolutions.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course uses the writings of medieval women to explore their social and religious worlds and orients visionary writing within the broader narrative of religious movements from the 12th-14th centuries.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Seminar on modern Russia. No midterm and no final. 6 short weekly journals, two short papers, and two small quizzes.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Political, social and cultural history of a turning-point in European history that witnessed the birth and death of democracy.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Examines the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement that swept Europe in the eighteenth century to shape the modern world. Topics include science and religion; print culture; gender and sociability; political economy; and race, slavery, and colonialism.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course examines reproductive politics in the United States from the colonial era to the present. Topics include contraception, abortion, and sterilization, emphasizing the impact of gender, class, and race.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course will examine both the Haitian Revolution and the early period of Mexican independence by engaging with the ideas of actors within these events in international contexts.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The years between 1959, when the course begins, and 1971, when it ends, were tumultuous and divisive. This course explores the political, racial, and cultural struggles of a half century ago.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This discussion-based seminar focuses on Colonial American history, using maps, objects, and other primary sources to examine such topics as colonialism, slavery, war, disease, trade, empire, and cultural encounters.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Explores the development of society and institutions in the medieval west including kingship and law, religion and difference, gender and ideology. Looks closely at social responses to change and adversity.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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).
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Russian Literature and the arts in Revolutions of 1905, 1917, and Stalin era to 1941. Req: 6 journals of 350 words, 2 papers 1250, 2 quizzes. No midterm or final.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The history of money is a history of power exercised by states, institutions, and individuals. It is also a history of the structural possibilities and constraints faced by people in the past. We will address making, using, and conceptualizing money in the early modern Atlantic World, a time and a place of expanding empires, extractive enterprises, and changing categories of difference like race, gender, and class.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores the expansion and creation of an American West—and its inhabitants—from the Constitution to the end of the nineteenth century.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course delves into the variegated, often divergent national politics, social landscapes, and cultural shifts in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland since Britain’s Acts of Union in 1707.
Prerequisite(s): AS.100.101 OR AS.100.102 OR AS.100.103[OR AS.100.104
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This interdisciplinary course surveys critical themes related to Asian American art and activism including perspectives from history, art and visual culture, literature and gender and sexuality studies.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This is not a typical history course but one on historical theory and modern historiographical thought. How did historians in the past generations attempt to analyze the past? To what extent is history connected to other disciplines? What was the French contribution to contemporary historiography? What is "new history"? In this seminar, we are going to examine the scholarship of the French Annales, arguably the most influential and revolutionary “school” of historiography in the twentieth century. Students will read selected works of the Annales historians and discuss concepts such as economic history, serial history, longue durée, conjuncture, total history, mentalité, historical psychology, and historical anthropology.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The focus will be on Soviet-American interactions, Cold-War Cultures, and the impact on both societies.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The history of China from the 16th to the late 19th centuries.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Survey of the history of China from ca. 1895 to ca. 1976.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
"Entertaining America” will trace the history of popular culture in the United States, starting inthe 1830s, when blackface minstrelsy initiated a new wave of commercial performance, andending in the 1920s, when records, films, and radio ushered in the era of mass culture.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course will turn to known and not-so-known black writers during the early to mid-twentieth century who defied literary expectation and wrote stories that featured or focused on whiteness. We will consider what whiteness offered black writers and the political work that their literary experimentations did for a white American publishing industry.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will examine how early modern views on the body, gender, and sexuality shaped beliefs about the abilities and rights of women and men.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The Modern British World introduces some of the major events, themes, and controversies that led to Britain’s global dominance and ultimate decline as an imperial power. This course focuses on varying forms of imperial governance, the interrelationships between metropole and colony, and the formation of British and colonial national identities.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Tolstoy and his era, 1820s to 1910s. Topics include state and politics, empire, the Russian identity, and forms of cultural expression. Students consider "War and Peace" and other masterworks.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course will cover the period commonly known as the High Middle Ages, that is, the civilization of Western Europe in the period roughly from 1050 to 1350. . It is a period of exceptional creativity in the history of Western Europe and in medieval history specifically, a time when many of the most characteristic institutions of Europe came into being.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The course will introduce the student to the main themes and debates in Jewish historiography from the 19th century to the present.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Jewish history, politics, and culture across a century of enormous transformations and transformative enormities in Europe, the US, and the Middle East. Topics include: impacts on Jewish life of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the post-imperial reordering of the Eastern Europe and the Middle East; Zionism and other modes of Jewish contestatory politics; the consolidation of American Jewry; Nazism and the Holocaust in Europe; formation and development of the State of Israel; the global reordering of Jewish life amid cross-currents of the Cold War, conflict in the Middle East, and success in the US. Substantial attention to recent and contemporary history including the dramatic changes in Israeli society and polity over the past forty years and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Using legal texts as a window into English society, we will address the changing nature of royal power, trial by jury, treason, felony, and the freedoms enshrined in the Magna Carta.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Examines case-studies of imperial conquests (Islamic, Mongol, reconquista, early colonialism) and attendant changes in religion (Christianization; Islamization) and in language (Arabization; transition from Latin to European vernaculars) across medieval Eurasia.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The year 2020 will mark 100 years since the 19th Amendment guaranteed American women the right to vote. Or did it? This course will examine the long history of women’s voting rights in the United States, including the story that extends from a convention at Seneca Falls, NY to a constitutional amendment. It will also examine alternative stories, especially those of women of color whose campaigns for the vote did not end in 1920 – and continue until today.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will discuss the problem of historical representation on the basis of an analysis of movies depicting the Age of the Enlightenment.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Using textual and visual documents (including books from Peabody Library), we will examine the contrasts of Brazilian history and culture, and its connections with 19th and 20th century Baltimore.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Compares religious transformation in medieval Europe and the Middle East (ca. 600-1500), including conquest and conversion; conversion narratives; apostasy, martyrdom and other encounters between medieval Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Pre-requisite for enrollment: Students must have taken one history course.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Each week we examine a commodity that defined a new era of global connectivity in the centuries after 1492, including money, medicines, slaves, and fashion.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Sport is key to understanding the Cold War. We will investigate how the Cold War has shaped sports, the Olympic movement, the role of athletes at home and abroad, how sports were used in domestic and foreign policy, and how Cold War sports reinforce or challenge notions of race, gender, and class.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Explores the daily lives of non-elites in the medieval Middle East—food; housing; clothes; marriage and divorce; urban festivals—through primary documents (e.g. letters, court records) and artifacts (e.g. clothing).Pre-requisite for enrollment: Students must have taken one history course.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Cause lawyering aims to change the status quo. This course examines histories of this approach to social justice, from battles against the slave trade to contemporary campaigns for marriage equality.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores the origins of the idea of crusading, examines the experiences of those who traveled east, and analyzes the cultures of contact that developed ca. 1095 and 1291.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The course will examine the early modern attitudes to lie and dissimulation.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A research-intensive seminar, this course uses the rich history of Maryland to approach broader themes in early modern American and global history including colonialism, slavery, revolution, race, gender, and sex.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Place of contrasts, Brazil has a multi-ethnic cultural heritage challenged by social and racial inequalities. Its political life remains chaotic. We will examine these problems through Brazilian history and culture.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This discussion-based seminar will explore some of the ways that the sex and gender binary was produced out of American statecraft in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Particular attention will be paid to US imperialism, both domestically in its settler form, as well as in Hawaii, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. What happens to the study of the modern gender binary if it is treated as a transnational artefact of US imperialism’s encounter with a multitude of cultures and nations?
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Through archival, literary, and other cultural texts, this course considers the history of “diversity” as both a practice and concept, beginning with the arrival of “colorblindness” in the 1890s and moving through recent approaches to institutionalized multiculturalism.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Seminar style course in which John Locke’s major works will be read intensively, together with some of his contemporaries’ works, and select scholarly interpretations.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
We will read and analyze key works of social and critical theory produced in relation to 20th and 21st century problems of state and society, nationalism, empire, totalitarianism, genocide, capitalism, political order, gender, race, sexuality, secularism, religion, environmental catastrophe. Possible readings include Weber, Du Bois, Adorno, Arendt, Foucault, Balibar, Beckamong others.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Through intensive and extensive reading, we will explore contemporary Israeli society, politics, and culture, contemporary Palestinian society, politics, and culture under occupation, and the historical processes that have shaped both societies and their ongoing entanglement.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
How do museums represent the world? The course will focus on the colonial legacy of museums and complicate discourses of decolonization by looking at a range of case studies. We will study the world’s fairs, artworks, artifacts, collections, curatorial practices, exhibition histories, repatriation requests, and exhibitionary modes of display, in order to analyze their relationship to histories of decolonization, temporality, translation, untranslatability, spectatorship, provenance, and the life of objects.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Seminar-style class analyzing the social, cultural, gender, religious, economic, and political history of London from Shakespeare's time through revolutions, plague, fire, and commercial, colonial, and industrial expansion.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Key works on the history of Nazi Germany’s murder of European Jewry during the Second World War; Jewish responses; the recasting of Jewish and global thought in relation to this signal event; genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ since the Holocaust.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Objects from the past offer a powerful window into a set of experiences not recorded in texts. We will follow objects and things as they appear in lists, letters, and descriptions, as they travel surprising routes, and bring to life the medieval world before 1400.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
ISIS, “virgins” in paradise, the sexual slavery of Yazidi women…. This course will use anthropological and historical studies to examine the long history of how rules and understandings about sex, sexuality, and gender have mattered in how people think about Islam.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
What did Chinese local society look like under the Qing Empire, and how did it change over the early modern era?
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
An advanced undergraduate seminar on the intertwined histories of race, ethnicity, and empire in Japan and its former colonies from the early twentieth century to the present.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course examines the experience of Chinese women, and also how writers, scholars, and politicians (often male, sometimes foreign) have represented women’s experiences for their own political and social agendas.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Witchcraft, magic, carnivals, riots, folk tales, gender roles; fertility cults and violence especially in Britain, Germany, France, and Italy.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
An upper-level history reading seminar with a focus on histories of gender and sexuality in colonial and postcolonial Africa.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This undergraduate research seminar examines censorship laws, practices, and debates over the past century; topics include political radicalism, indecency, pornography, and racist hate speech. In addition to discussing common readings, each student will choose a censorship case or issue to research and present to the class.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
What was medieval Cairo like? Students explore urban life in this imperial capital (969-1517), including food and market habits; relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims; patronage; plague, drought, and famine.Pre-requisite for enrollment: Students must have taken two history courses.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course examines shifting understandings of the philosophical foundations, political implications, and social effects of the market economy since the early twentieth century.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
A history of forced and voluntary migration and displacement in Africa, its causes and consequences, with a focus on refugees and labor migrants since 1960.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This seminar-style course will focus on discussing British and American political thought from the "Age of Revolutions", a period also of many critiques of Empire and of many works of Antislavery. Readings include Paine's Common Sense and Rights of Man, the Declaration of Rights, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers; works by Smith, Burke, and Wollstonecraft; and antislavery works by Cugoano, Equiano, Rush, Wesley, and Wilberforce.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
In this course, students participate in a research “laboratory,” engaging in direct research on an area of faculty’s research, leading to the development of a collective, digital humanities project.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
An advanced undergraduate seminar on the history of modern Japan from the perspective of regions and people often considered as belonging to its geographical, cultural, social, and political peripheries.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Study of Western, Chinese, and Japanese understandings of the history of China, emphasizing their implications for cultural understanding and for policy.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.”
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
A first-of-its kind seminar hosted by the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship, this course explores the practice of composition for professional writers. It considers the “light” and “dark” sides of clear, direct scholarly writing and intentional, academic obfuscation, respectively. Attendees will also learn strategies and potential hazards that accompany the written description of power in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
A two-semester coordinating seminar for history majors writing senior honors theses. Admission is granted by instructor only after the student has selected a faculty thesis advisor. AS.100.494 is to be taken concurrently with AS.100.507 Senior Thesis.
Prerequisite(s): AS.100.494 is to be taken concurrently with AS.100.507 Senior Thesis.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The Senior Honors Seminar is a coordinating seminar for senior history majors who are writing senior honors theses and wish to graduate with departmental honors. To be taken concurrently with AS.100.508, Senior Thesis.
Corequisite(s): AS.100.508
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The sixties were a polarizing decade of unrest, revolutions, and fundamental change across Europe and the US. We will discuss 1968 through the lens of national case studies, the Cold War, and the history of Baltimore. This is a community-engaged class!
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Two semesters. Senior thesis writers will undertake research in primary materials that will explore a significant historical issue or problem. The DUS will confirm admission as soon as the student has selected a faculty thesis advisor: the outside deadline for confirmation is May 1. AS.100.507 is to be taken concurrently with AS.100.494 Senior Honors Seminar.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
Writing Intensive
This seminar is required for senior history majors who are writing senior honors theses and wish to graduate with departmental honors.
Prerequisite(s): AS.100.507;You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
Writing Intensive
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
Writing Intensive
How do museums represent the world? The course will focus on the colonial legacy of museums and complicate discourses of decolonization by looking at a range of case studies. We will study the world’s fairs, artworks, artifacts, collections, curatorial practices, exhibition histories, repatriation requests, and exhibitionary modes of display, in order to analyze their relationship to histories of decolonization, temporality, translation, untranslatability, spectatorship, provenance, and the life of objects.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Introduces graduate students to the rich historiography of the French Revolution. Topics include: revolutionary origins, political culture and radicalization, citizenship, violence, family & gender, the search for stability after the Terror, global revolution, Napoleon’s Brumaire coup.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Small intensive group reading: the course is primarily intended for students working on their graduate field lists. Other formats are possible with permission of the instructor.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Modern Britain and the British World is a graduate seminar which familiarizes students with major themes and historiographic debates in Modern British and Modern British Imperial History.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
First semester of year-long seminar examining transformations in European consumption from 1650 to 1800. Topics include cultural theory; fashion, gender, and social identity; capitalism, retail, and credit; Enlightenment and the public sphere; political economy; overseas empire; globalization; and the Atlantic revolutions.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Second semester of year-long seminar examining transformations in European consumption from 1650 to 1800. Topics include capitalism and consumption; political economy; fashion, gender, and identity; Enlightenment and the public sphere; globalization; empire and colonization; and the Atlantic revolutions.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This seminar will discuss the use of the concept of the "Baroque", as developed in the history of art, architecture, and music, as a category of historical periodization.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The seminar examines scholarship on central questions in medieval Islamic cultural history including historical writing; the history of education and scholarly cultures; cultural patronage and urban development.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A reading seminar on the interconnected histories and historiographies of Japan and Korea in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A seminar covering major milestones in research on late imperial and modern Chinese history, primarily in English.Open to undergraduates with the permission of the instructor.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Historical survey of scribal and archiving practices of medieval Islamic states (in comparative perspective); includes close readings of primary documents, including legal deeds, petitions, edicts, fiscal receipts, and administrative reports.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This seminar will focus on texts by post-1945 authors who wrote in French and engaged with what it means to write about the past and how to do so. Among those we will focus on are: Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Assia Djebbar, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, Paul Ricoeur, Alain Corbin, Arlette Farge, François Hartog, Paul Ricoeur, Etienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière, Paul B. Preciado, Fernand Braudel.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course focuses on the emergence and development of various strains of Black political thought and action within the modern US. Our course will explore themes of equality, citizenship, democracy, and freedom throughout the 20th Century, specifically as it pertains to the Black experience in America.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Introduction to recent work on the history of law and empire, with a focus on critical legal history perspectives.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The second part of a two-semester sequence, this seminar examines the history of France and its empire from the seventeenth century to the French Revolution.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Part of a two-semester sequence, this seminar examines the history of France and its empire from the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century. Topics include: state formation; political culture; political economy; commercial capitalism; the Enlightenment; popular culture; empire, race, and slavery; and the French and Haitian Revolutions.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
How have historians grappled with the quite recent past? We will explore histories of the 1970s and 1980s, with a focus on France, Germany, and the UK, as well as transnational and post-decolonization approaches.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Drawing on key works in classic and contemporary social theory of religion and secularity as well as historical, ethnographic, and sociological monographs, this course investigates some scholars’ answers to the question of why we might want to take "religion in modernity" as an object of study (or not), what kinds of roles and importance religion (or various institutions, impulses, practices, and ideas connected to major faith traditions) has/have arguably enjoyed in an arguably global modernity often imagined as intrinsically secular, whether and how it matters that the category of religion itself may be a modern invention intertwined with specifically Christian-European and European imperial and colonial projects, whether and how we should take “secularism” or “secularity” as our object of study no less than or more than religion, what special kinds of research agendas and assumptions the empirical study of 'religion' and its workings and significance in modern political and cultural life might demand, what sorts of scholarly value it might add, and how the answers to those questions change when we look to a global present which is sometimes framed as post-secular. A more theoretically and comparatively oriented first part of the course will give way to focused attention on historical, sociological, and ethnographic monographs, with much attention to European, North American, and Near Eastern histories and societies, but ample room for students interested in East Asian, South Asian, African, and Latin American religious formations to investigate those literatures and bring to bear in class discussion. Readings likely include Weber, Bergson, Asad, Charles Taylor, de Vries, Lambek, Das, Roger Friedland, Wuthnow, Margaret Jacobs, Blackbourn, Mahmood, Susan Harding, William Connolly, Chidester, Bryan Turner.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A graduate-level seminar on the political, social, and intellectual concerns that have both shaped and undermined dominant ways of telling Japanese history, especially in Japan and the U.S. since 1945.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Reading seminar on the history of development as both ideology and practice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Through a careful study of texts and objects produced for and by the Capetian rulers during the thirteenth century we will interrogate the creation of the French state, the cultivation of royal ideology, and its practice of sovereign power.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This seminar examines the origins, course, and legacies of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), the most radical movement of the Age of Revolutions. It explores the colonial background, the overthrow of slavery, the founding of an independent nation, and the aftermath of revolution in the nineteenth century.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This is a graduate seminar devoted to close reading of crucial works in early modern history and historiography.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will look at recent historiography on extranational approaches to 20th-century European histories, with a focus on France, the United Kingdom, USSR/Russia, and Germany.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Explores religious culture in medieval and early modern Europe, with an emphasis on spiritual beliefs and practices, relics, miracles, pilgrimage, and saint-making. Emphasis on reading and discussing written sources and visual culture. Graduate students only.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Intensive introduction to the key trends and trajectories in modern Jewish history and the major themes in Jewish historiography. Intended to serve both graduate students outside the Jewish history field and graduate students pursuing a field in modern Jewish history.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This seminar examines the relationship of law to the construction of race and inequality in US history, investigating the legal archive through the perspectives of critical race theory and critical legal history. Course can be taken a maximum of two times.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Explores mechanisms of political power and the rise of the state in Europe during the High Middle Ages by analyzing royal ideology, administrative growth, legal change, and cultural production.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A survey of European socialist theories, including Marxism, anarchism, Social Democracy, feminism, and anti-imperialism. Authors include Proudhon, Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Bernstein, Lenin, Luxemburg, Sorel, Kollontai, Gramsci, and Fanon.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Reading seminar in modern African history. Focus for 2022 will be on gender and sexuality.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores how to use race as a historical category of analysis, and teaches attendees how to locate how historical actors deploy race and racism to make claims, organize labor and identities, and imagine political possibility.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The course explores the rise of heresy and holiness as categories during the Middle Ages.It traces the advent of religious movements, the effects of religious reform, the centralization of ecclesiastical authority, the rise of vernacular spirituality and dissent, and analyzes the historiographical and methodological approaches to the study of medieval religion.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Continuation of AS.100.668 Colloquium in Modern Jewish History.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Since the work of Geertz, Huizinga, Bakhtin and Caillois, among others, the intersection of play and violence has been a focal point for historians, anthropologists, literary scholars, even psychologists. This seminar traces the twin themes of violence and play as instantiated by the fighting classes in the High Middle Ages, beginning with the emergence of the tournament and the crusading movement in the eleventh century. By examining sources in Old French and Latin, we will contextualize music, dances, comedies, and contests that accompanied the violent rituals around which French aristocratic life revolved. Course may not meet weekly.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Colonization and settlement in the Americas brought people from all kinds of places together. This course will explore those contacts, and how they shaped the American experience. The focus is on new books in early American history.
Writing workshop for graduate students at all stages presenting work in progress. Discussion of theories, methods, and challenges of graduate student writing.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The first half of this seminar course consists of non-mathematical introductions to, and discussions of, the fundamental motivations, vocabulary, and methods behind computational techniques of particular use for humanistic research. The second half combines selected readings chosen to address specific questions raised by these discussions with hands-on application to students' research goals. Each participant will lead discussion for one of the selected readings relevant to their interests.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A graduate level seminar in social and cultural history in the 19th and 20th centuries.
An intensive graduate seminar exploring various topics in US social and cultural history, focusing on the period from the late 19th century to the late 20th century.
Readings on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and transatlantic social theory.
This course explores the practice of writing and reading the history of African Americans and the wider African Diaspora. Participants will share written work and do close readings of primary and secondary texts exploring the black experience in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Black World Seminar considers the making and meaning of blackness between the 14th and 20th centuries and Africans and people of African descent’s impact on the making of the modern world, from the slave trade to the present. We explore, too, the historical forces which created blackness as a marker on the body and as a political and cultural identity.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A course discussing major recent works of historiography on Reformation Europe, examining Lutheranism, Calvinism and Anabaptism; iconoclasm, visual, and print culture; urban, social, and gender history; demonology and witchcraft; and martyrology, tolerance and intolerance.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
What does a usable history of black womanhood (black queer and trans womanhood inclusive) look like? How do we imagine, create, and narrate black women’s stories? Black women’s history across time and space.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
An examination of modern cultural theories, with emphasis on mass culture and consumerism. Authors include Simmel, Kracauer, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno, Barthes, Debord, Bourdieu, and de Certeau.
This seminar will offer training in feminist, queer, transgender and postcolonial approaches to the history of sexuality by exploring what methods are adequate to writing the history of trans femininity as a specifically nineteenth and twentieth century phenomenon. Areas of emphasis will include histories of sexology, sex work, social movements, and trans feminism and its opponents. The primary geographic focus will be the US, but through a transnational lens that connects to Western Europe, South Asia, and Latin America.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Research and methods in the field of sexuality and slavery studies. Graduate students may take this course up to two times.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Research and methods in the field of sexuality and slavery studies. Part 2: Caribbean & African Continent.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course investigates the basic techniques of writing history and the matters traditionally covered in medieval historical texts by reading a series of exemplary medieval historiographical works. This is preceded by a section on theoretical orientations to the study of history and historiography in order to provide the analytic tools for analyzing medieval texts.
Introduction to the history and historiography on British North America and the United States.
Continuation of AS.100.729 for students conducting field exams.
A reading seminar in colonial African history; the focus may be on French African empire.
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.
In May 2020, Johns Hopkins will host the meeting of the Berkshire Conference on Women, Gender and Sexualities, a gathering of 1200 scholars from across the world. Our seminar will use the Berkshire Conference program to organize a set of readings that will anticipate the panels, roundtables, performances, and plenaries that will be on campus between May 28 and 31, 2020. Attendance at the conference is not required, but it is recommended.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
We will read and discuss recent monographs and historiographical essays that emerge from and inform French history, with particular attention transnational, imperial, Mediterranean, international, and colonial frames and questions.
An examination of the works of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, as examples of the Hegelian, positivist, and hermeneutic traditions of social theory.
Early Modern European Intellectual History
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
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.
A seminar covering recent work on late imperial and modern Chinese history, primarily in English.
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The course examines various genres of Arabic historical writing during the high and late Middle Ages (10th-15th c.). All primary readings are in English/French translation (no Arabic required).
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Readings on the history of capitalism since the mid-nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the American context.
This course will look at recent historiography on France and the French empire, notably in North Africa. We will pay particular attention to transnational and imperial questions.
An exploration of recent work in women’s and gender history, focusing on some of the following: sexuality, cultural production, politics, family formation, work, religion, difference, and civic orders.
Workshop for presentation of works-in-progress on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality, including drafts of dissertation chapters, research papers, talks, and proposals. Students in disciplines other than history are welcome.
Workshop for presentation of works-in-progress on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality, including drafts of dissertation chapters, research papers, talks, and proposals. Students in disciplines other than history are welcome. Graduate students only.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course features presentations from invited speakers. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
This course features presentations from invited speakers. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
A graduate workshop in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in Medieval European History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
A graduate workshop in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in Medieval European History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
A graduate workshop in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in Early Modern European History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
A graduate workshop in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in Early Modern European History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
A graduate workshop in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in Modern European History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
A graduate workshop in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in Modern European History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
A seminar series in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in American History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
A seminar series in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in American History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
A seminar series in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in Latin American History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly
A seminar series in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in Latin American History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
A seminar series in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in African History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
A seminar series in which graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers present their latest research results in African History. Q&A, with an emphasis on critical thinking, intellectual discussions, and written and oral presentations. Course may not meet weekly.
First-year graduate workshop for History PhD candidates only.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
First-year graduate workshop for History PhD candidates only.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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