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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This is an advanced course in German reading, focused on the literature of art history. Texts are selected from fundamental works of art history and criticism and from the writings related to concurrent seminars in the Graduate Program. The course includes a grammar review.
Prerequisite:
German 511-512 or equivalent preparation (a score of 500 or higher on SAT II German Reading Test)
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3.00 Credits
In a way, all historical thinking and writing deals with travel accounts given that, as many scholars have noted, the past can be likened to a foreign country and the historian can be viewed as a traveler in foreign places. Nevertheless, actual travel narratives--narratives about the actual physical visits of writers to distant lands--call for careful and critical analysis because they can be seductive, and they can shape the ways we think about the present--and the past--of distant lands and cultures. This course discusses Arab, Indian, European, African and African American travel narratives about various regions of Africa since the 14th century. We will mine the travel accounts for descriptions of local contexts. We will also explore what travel writing says about the author's perceptions of self, home, and "other." Ultimately, we will investigate the authors' biases and how the narratives influence both our perception of Africa and the writing of African history. This course is highly interdisciplinary and draws heavily on literary, anthropological, geographical, and historical methodologies.
Prerequisite:
First-year or sophomore standing
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3.00 Credits
This course examines the careers, ideas, and impact of leading politicians, religious leaders, intellectuals, and artists in the Middle East in the twentieth century. Utilizing biographical studies and the general literature on the political and cultural history of the period, this course will analyze how these individuals achieved prominence in Middle Eastern society and how they addressed the pertinent problems of their day, such as war and peace, relations with Western powers, the role of religion in society, and the status of women. A range of significant individuals will be studied, including Gamal Abd al-Nasser, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Ayatollah Khomeini, Muhammad Mussadiq, Umm Khulthum, Sayyid Qutb, Anwar Sadat, Naghuib Mahfouz, and Huda Shaarawi.
Prerequisite:
First-year or sophomore standing
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3.00 Credits
By the middle of the thirteenth century, Mongol armies led by Genghis Khan had conquered an enormous swath of territory, extending from China westward to Eastern Europe. Further expanded by Genghis's descendants, the Mongol Empire incorporated a vast range of different peoples and cultures, enhancing communications, trade, and exchange among them. In this course we will examine the "world order" of the Mongol Empire from its origins on the Asian steppe through its expansion, consolidation, disintegration, and legacies for later periods. From a wide range of primary and secondary sources, including travelers' accounts, chronicles, art, and literature, we will investigate the diverse experiences of the Mongol world in different places, such as China, Russia, Persia, and Central Asia.
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3.00 Credits
Between 1096 and 1099, thousands of peasants, soldiers and nobles set out to seize Jerusalem from the Turks. Their unprecedented military expedition, which ushered in a long series of religious wars and has deeply influenced modern impressions of the Middle Ages, is known to history as the First Crusade. In this seminar, we will follow the crusaders through medieval chronicles and histories as they respond to ecclesiastical demands for military intervention in the East, travel to Constantinople, lay siege to Nicaea and Antioch, and finally capture Jerusalem. Along the way we will pause frequently to study the broader social, religious and political environment that gave birth to the crusading movement. Careful reading and discussion will drive this writing-intensive course.
Prerequisite:
First year or sophomore standing
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3.00 Credits
During the nineteenth and early twentieth century Europeans and their immediate offspring created the modern world. European industry, science, trade, weapons, and culture dominated the globe. After a century of general peace the continual "progress" of Western Civilization seemed assured. Then, in August, 1914, the major European powers went to war with one another. After four years of unprecedented carnage, violence, and destruction, Europe was left exhausted and bitter, its previous optimism replaced by pessimism, its world position undermined, and its future clouded by a deeply flawed peace settlement. What were the fundamental causes of the Great War? How and why did it break out when it did and who was responsible? Why was it so long, ferocious, wasteful, and, until the very end, indecisive? Why did the Allies, rather than the Central Powers, emerge victorious? What did the peace settlement settle? How was Europe changed? What is the historical significance of the conflict?
Prerequisite:
First-year or sophomore standing
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3.00 Credits
Paris and Berlin were the two poles of Europe in the 1920s, rival capital cities of two historically hostile nations that had only just put an end to the carnage of World War I. Paris was the grande dame; Berlin the upstart. In the 1920s, these two pulsating metropolises became the sites of political and cultural movements that would leave a lasting imprint on European society until the present day. This course focuses on the politics, society, and culture of these two cities in their heyday in the 1920s. We will also consider their fate in the 1930s, first as depression set in, and then as the Nazis came to power. Devoting half the semester to Paris and the other half to Berlin, we will examine a range of parallel topics in both contexts, including the impact of World War I, the growing popularity of right-wing political movements and the increase in political violence, shifting gender norms and sexual mores, and new developments in the realms of art, film, theatre, cabaret, and literature.
Prerequisite:
First-year or sophomore standing
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3.00 Credits
This course examines the rise of soccer (futbol/futebol) in modern Latin America, from a fringe game to the most popular sport in the region. Focusing especially on Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Mexico, we will analyze the central role that soccer played as these countries faced profound questions about race, masculinity, and regional and national identities. Using autobiographies, videos, and scholarly works from several disciplines, we will consider topics including: the role of race and gender constructions in the initial adoption of soccer; the transformation of this foreign game into a key marker of national identity; the relationship between soccer and political and economic "modernization"; the production of strong, at times violent identities at club, national, and regional levels; and the changes that mass consumerism and globalization have effected on the game and its meanings for Latin Americans. As an Exploring Diversity Initiative course, the class uses primary sources as well as recent scholarship to explore these issues comparatively between regions and nations. Throughout the semester, we will look at how the world of soccer reflects, produces, and at times apparently resolves cultural difference.
Prerequisite:
First-year or sophomore standing
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3.00 Credits
The collision of cultures and peoples in colonial North America created a New World that demanded new forms of political leadership. This course explores the history of leadership from the colonial era to the Civil War through the study of consequential individuals whose actions shaped seminal moments in American history. The course opens with Powhatan, whose Native American empire spanned the East Coast of North America, and John Smith, who confronted this Indian empire as he tried to establish England's first toehold in the New World. It ends with Abraham Lincoln, who tried to keep together a nation that Jefferson Davis aimed to destroy. In between, the course will explore colonial leaders like John Winthrop, African American leaders like Gabriel Prosser and James Forten, presidents like George Washington and Andrew Jackson, advocates for women's rights like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and others. Through the study of these individuals, students will have a deeper appreciation of how historical processes shaped leaders--and how leaders have shaped history.
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3.00 Credits
Ever since the Manhattan Project produced atomic weapons for Harry Truman to use against Japan at the end of World War II, atomic science has fueled Americans' fears, hopes, nightmares, and fantasies. This course will examine all aspects of American nuclear culture, from scientists' movements to abolish atomic weapons and expand peaceful atomic energy production to dystopian fiction about the nuclear apocalypse. It will investigate the role of the nuclear arms race in the cold war and the development of civil defense and bomb shelter culture in the United States. Using scholarly books and articles, primary sources, novels, and films, we will explore the interactions between science, diplomacy, and culture in the nuclear age. As this is a writing intensive course, we will focus on analyzing sources, writing clearly and effectively, and making persuasive arguments. Students will not only learn about history, but they will learn to think and write as historians.
Prerequisite:
First-year or sophomore standing
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