Tentative Schedule

Part one of a two-quarter sequence required of all Ph.D. students during the second year of the program; not required for M.A. students. Includes primary research and writing a research paper, often related to a future dissertation topic.

Restriction: Graduate students only. History Majors only.

This course introduces graduate students to some of the most foundational ideas and debates that have shaped historiographical practice over the past half-century. Surveying historiographical models or theoretical provocations that have commanded the attention of a broad range of historians working across the various subfields, this course explores questions at the heart of the historical discipline, including: what is time and how, exactly, do historians grapple with issues of change or continuity? How do historians establish temporal and spatial boundaries for their narratives, and how those choices reflect different theoretical and interdisciplinary interventions? And how do historians approach primary materials to understand experiences of difference and embodiment? Though not an exhaustive survey, the readings raise fundamental questions about how historians imagine the past as they try to write about it, how they constitute it as a domain of study, how they can claim to know it, and how (and why) they argue about it. The aim of the course is to explore these questions as clearly as possible and to encourage you to make your (provisional) answers to them as explicit as you can. 

Part one of a three-quarter sequence required of all Ph.D. students during their first year of the program. History in the Professions is a year-long colloquium for first year graduate students. Students, faculty members, and guests will gather for 90-minute sessions five times each quarter for a variety of presentations, hands-on workshops, and guided explorations. This colloquium centers conversations and topics that illuminate the hidden curriculum of graduate school, explore the political economy of labor in the university, and provide students a foundational introduction to the historical profession. 

Restriction: Graduate students only. History Majors only. 

This course will explore the themes of revolution and radicalism from the age of revolutions to the twenty-first century through selected works of scholarship that go beyond the geo-spatial conventions of the area studies paradigm and instead take broader transnational and connected approaches.

U.S., World

Race

This class will explore how the US state creates carceral subjects within its borders and beyond. It will examine historical processes of racialization and how incarceration is deployed to transform certain groups into an underclass whose human, civil, and political rights could be legally and extralegally voided. By tackling US imperial projects, we will analyze how US allies and the military construct open-air prisons, concentration camps, and other carceral spaces across the globe to assert Western dominance.

This course introduces students to many of the ways historical interpretations circulate, with particular attention to characteristics of scholarly and public spheres. The course will interrogate the role of academic journals by putting that form of communication in conversation with other forms of interpretation and consumption of historical information. In this comparative context, students will engage with the questions, best practices, and ethical considerations at the heart of scholarly editorial work. 

Students will develop foundational skills that are applicable to careers in publishing and professional communications. Class meetings are a mix of presentation, discussion, demonstration, and hands-on workshops. Assignments consist of summary and analysis of texts and video; weekly journal exercises to prepare for in-class discussion; practice exercises in proofreading, copy editing, style editing, citation checking, and fact checking; and a final reflection paper. 

After taking this course, you will have the opportunity to put your skills into practice through an internship at the Journal of World History.  

Analyzes social and cultural understandings of the body, health, illness, medicine, and disease. Themes include critical histories of the body; non-compliant subjects interacting with medicine; racial-sexual hierarchies of health; and theories and expressions of pain and suffering.

Restriction: Graduate students only.

*Please contact Graduate Program Coordinator, Aryana Valdivia, if you would like to use the course for History degree requirement.

This seminar will theorize and analyze histories of global struggles in the modern world. By engaging with theoretical texts on social revolutions, slave uprisings, popular rebellions, and grassroots collective mobilizations, students will understand the positionalities and methodologies that scholar activists have deployed to document histories from below. It will also introduce specific methodological frameworks—such as theories for and against vanguardist revolutions; subalternity and fugitivity; organic intellectuals within popular struggles; as well as the ways in which power is framed and critiqued through intersectional inquiries of history. Students will also be tasked to explore how such theories and methods can be deployed in their doctoral research.

Introduction to historical methodologies and preparation for the first-year research paper. Required of all first-year doctoral students and M.A. students.

Repeatability: Unlimited as topics vary.

Restriction: Graduate students only. History Majors only.

Part two of a two-quarter sequence required of all Ph.D. students. Taken during the second year of the Ph.D. program; not required for M.A. students. Includes primary research and writing a research paper, often related to a future dissertation topic.

Prerequisite: HISTORY 204A. HISTORY 204A with a grade of B- or better

Restriction: Graduate students only. History Majors only.

Part two of a three-quarter sequence required of all Ph.D. students during their first year of the program. History in the Professions is a year-long colloquium for first year graduate students. Students, faculty members, and guests will gather for 90-minute sessions five times each quarter for a variety of presentations, hands-on workshops, and guided explorations. This colloquium centers conversations and topics that illuminate the hidden curriculum of graduate school, explore the political economy of labor in the university, and provide students a foundational introduction to the historical profession. 

Restriction: Graduate students only. History Majors only. 

Europe, World

Gender and Sexuality

This course brings into dialogue two bodies of literature animating the field of world history and yet unevenly in conversation: feminist and postcolonial studies, on the one hand, and studies of political economy, on the other. Under the rubric of empire, historians of sexuality have taken transnational and global turns. While studies of sexuality have profoundly enriched our understanding of the consolidation of imperial nation-states and their exercise of power, often marginalized in these accounts are other agents equally, if also differently, vested in the racialized regulation of sex and reproduction: companies, corporations, and nonstate capitalist actors. Similarly, so-called “new histories of capitalism” often prioritize dominant vectors of power while sidelining attention to intimacy and the categories of difference that galvanized feminist and postcolonial analysis. Reading across these fields, this course will address themes of interest to students in multiple fields: scales and methods of historical analysis; tensions and connections among state and nonstate actors; and the intersections among capital, race, and sex.  

World, Europe, U.S., Caribbean

Global Migrations, Race, Diasporas; Empire and Colonialism

This course examines the intersections of Capitalism and Slavery from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries and how to understand this crossroads in World History. While slavery existed even before written history, capitalism has a distinct record within Europe, Africa, and the Americas. After discussing definitions of Slavery and Capitalism, this course will focus on the debates on the connections between these two terms in British and U.S. History, as well as the impact of these debates in African, Latin American, and Asian History, by looking at how the World-System scholarship and comparative studies conceptualized this problem. In doing so, this course also follows the encounters, quarrels, and departures between History and Economic History.

Research and writing of a paper demonstrating command of historical methods explored in HISTORY 202A. Required of all first-year Ph.D. students and M.A. students.

Prerequisite: HISTORY 202A. HISTORY 202A with a grade of B- or better

Repeatability: May be taken for credit 1 times as topics vary.

Part three of a three-quarter sequence required of all Ph.D. students during their first year of the program. History in the Professions is a year-long colloquium for first year graduate students. Students, faculty members, and guests will gather for 90-minute sessions five times each quarter for a variety of presentations, hands-on workshops, and guided explorations. This colloquium centers conversations and topics that illuminate the hidden curriculum of graduate school, explore the political economy of labor in the university, and provide students a foundational introduction to the historical profession. 

Restriction: Graduate students only. History Majors only. 

World

Gender, Race, Empire

This seminar uses practices of resistance as an entry point for developing expertise in the theories and methods of world history and as a site interrogation for concepts of race, racial segregation, and Blackness in the twentieth century. We will use South Africa's anti-Apartheid struggle as a lens to examine:

- the transnational and nationalist influences on the struggle in South Africa, both on the ground and in detention 

- world-wide anti-Apartheid movements

- the global influence of South Africa's resistance movements

Representative readings include Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism; Robinson, Black Marxism; Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; texts by Nelson Mandela, Robert Sobukwe, Steve Biko, Alex La Guma, Blanche La Guma, Adhmed Kathrada, Joe Slovo, and Ruth First; and foundational statements about the shape of world along with critiques from third world/global south thinkers.

Latin America, World

Global Migrations, Race, Diasporas; Empire and Colonialism; Gender and Sexuality

How was colonial order simultaneously regulated and destabilized through race, gender, sex, class, and ethnicity? This course considers the policing mechanisms of colonialism and slavery in sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth-century Latin America alongside insurgencies, evasions, and refusals of Indigenous and African Diaspora communities. We will explore how colonial authorities, ecclesiastical officials, and transatlantic merchants coopted Indigenous leadership, regulated sex roles, and trafficked Black people for profit to illuminate interwoven structures of early modern capitalism and modern state surveillance. Concurrently, we will ask: if colonial patriarchy was hegemonic, how did affective family ties uphold sexual violence? If conquering white patriarchs envisioned pious households, how did mestiza daughters challenge masculine impositions of honor? If Catholic clerics demanded conversion, how and where did Atlantic Africans imagine new Christianities, hijack church archives, and practice Diaspora religions?

U.S., World, Middle East, Africa

Race, Gender, Diasporas, Social Movements, Radicalism

This course explores histories of Black radicalism and Black radical social movements. Students will examine various theoretical articulations of Black radicalism including Cedric Robinson's concept of the Black Radical Tradition, Black Feminism(s), Black Marxism, Black religious nationalism, and Pan-Africanism among others. We will also examine histories written about several Black radical social movements whose members sought to put such theories into practice. The readings for this course will be eclectic, including intellectual and social histories, memoirs and biographies, cultural histories, and more theoretical works penned by both academics and organizers. While the majority of these readings will consider the writings and the organizing work of twentieth century Black radicals in the US, we will also consider a few figures and movements from the African continent and the Caribbean as well. The goals of this course are 1.) to acquaint students with some of the major works, questions, and intellectual interventions that have characterized Black radicalism - primarily in the Americas during the twentieth century, 2.) to familiarize students with some of the major Black social movements of the period, 3.) to enable students to identify how particular theorizations of Black radicalism informed these movements, and to critically reflect on what they reveal about the uses and limits of such theories, and 4.) to further develop student's ability to critically engage different genres of historical writing.