History (HIST-UH)

This course is a broad survey of African history. The course will explore the African past in its diversity. Students will explore the continent's political complexity and social creativity across a period of several millennia. The class will consider the impact of gender, religion, healing practices, trade, mobility, and the environment on major historical developments in Africa before the continent's colonization by European imperialistic powers, through the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and up to the contemporary period. The course will also introduce students to African history's methodology and to the use of linguistic, material, and oral sources in the writing of history.

China's rise to global prominence may seem to be a recent event, but it is in fact the product of a longer history of globalization, of which "China," in various guises, has always been a defining part. This course introduces and examines those features of history in China that help explain China's evolving place in the world, including: the geography of empire, military organization, population growth, cultural production, urbanization, technological innovation, gender dynamics, migration and diaspora formation, foreign relations, and, of course, economic development. Along the way, the course addresses key debates about China's origins, cartographic contours, and cultural imaginaries, as well as the performative aspects of ethnonyms and toponyms like "China" and "Zhongguo."

This course introduces students to the colonial origins of Latin America and examines colonialism's lasting impact on the region. It follows the unfolding and demise of a new social order under European rule over a period spanning from the 16th-century conquest through the early 19th-century wars of independence, highlighting international and global connections that shaped this region's social, cultural, and political history. Specific topics covered include Pre-Columbian worlds, Native-European confrontations and negotiations, the Catholic Church and popular religiosity, patriarchy and honor codes, racial dynamics and slavery, the development of capitalism, anti-colonial struggles, imperial rivalry, reform and decline, and colonial legacies.

The course surveys the relationship between modern Russia and the rest of the world from 1917 to the present. It will begin with the Bolsheviks and their dream of worldwide socialist revolution as situated in its international context, the creation and expansion of the Soviet socialist state, the onset and development of Stalin's personal despotism, the experiences and consequences of World War II, and the various postwar reforms. Special attention will be paid to the dynamics of the new socialist society, the connections between Soviet domestic and foreign policies, the economics of the cold war, Soviet orientalism, the 1991 collapse, and the legacies of Soviet empire under Putin.

This course offers an opportunity for in-depth study of the history and culture of the South Asians who comprise the majority population of the United Arab Emirates. Situated at the center of the Indian Ocean world, the Indian subcontinent is currently home to over a billion people, and is the site of richly interconnected histories with regions around the wider Indian Ocean, including the Gulf. The course explores these histories, with a focus on understanding major cultural, political, economic, and environmental connections and changes as they affected ordinary people (including migrant laborers) and shaped the nature of collective identities (ethnic, national, religious, caste, class, gender, regional, and linguistic) over time. In developing an understanding of how collective identities were produced historically, students ultimately acquire valuable tools for appraising and navigating competing models of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and universalism in the wider Indian Ocean world today.

Rethinking the traditional narratives of US history, this course explores America's past from a transnational and global perspective. Chronologically, it covers America's interaction with the wider world from the earliest European settlements to the present, examining the Colonial Period, the founding of the republic, westward expansion, the Civil War and Reconstruction, as well as the country's emergence as a global power leading up to World War I, the progressive reform movement, the Great Depression and the New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, and America after 9/11. Readings and classroom discussions focus on the major political, economic, and cultural forces that shaped the process of American nation building, reevaluating the allegedly "exceptional" elements of US history in relation to networks, identities, and events that transcended the nation-state.

From the jungle palaces of Angkor Wat to the eight million person futuristic metropolis of Kuala Lumpur; from the fall of Saigon to President Obama slurping Pho in the street of Hanoi; from the Portuguese, Persian, and Arabic trading ships sailing the Strait of Malacca to Bangkok's Tom Yum Kung crisis, Southeast Asia has always been a vital nexus for the interaction of cultures from both within Southeast Asia and without. This course explores key themes in Southeast Asia's connections with world history: colonialism, maritime trade connections and cultural contacts, religious division, the diversity of political regimes, war and conflict, economic development, and international relationships with Great Powers. Paying special attention to the history of diversity within and across countries in this region clarifies how politics operates and produces different social and economic outcomes for different national and non-national communities. The first part of the course reviews long-term history trends. The second part turns to a series of thematic discussions on issues related to ASEAN nations' constructive engagement, conflict management, and international relations.

History offers a unique perspective on the process of globalization, by virtue of its insistence that human experience be understood in its spatial and temporal contexts. Rigorous global history questions and even supplants common understandings of globalization as Westernization. But how does history do this, and can a global historical framework enhance all forms of historical, humanistic, and social scientific inquiry? Following an assessment of foundational modern Western frameworks for understanding world history, including those of Marx and Hegel, students examine how and why people around the world have variously embraced and rejected such foundational accounts. Readings address all world regions, including Asia, Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Oceania, and familiarize students with state-of-the-art knowledge about globalization. NOTE: This course maybe used in place of SOCSC-UH 1011 (GEPS) for Social Science Majors or Minors.

The subject of this course is the Cold War as global conflict. The course focuses on Europe and the Global South, as well as on the United States and the Soviet Union. The course examines issues in international politics and diplomacy, nuclear rivalry and the culture of the bomb, Cold War economic competition and development policies, and the impact of the Cold War on culture and gender in various countries.

What are the major causes of deforestation, pollution, and climate change? When and where did these, and other pressing environmental concerns, have their origins? What can history teach us about how we might best address these issues in the present? This course offers a comprehensive overview of the world's environmental history with a focus on the period from 1500 C.E. to the present a time marked by a dramatic intensification in the use of land, water, and energy resources. The course's central goal is to understand the relationships between globalization, natural resource and energy use, and environmental change, and to explain how these relationships unfolded, and continue to unfold, differently in major world regions, including the Gulf. By incorporating material from the fields of ecology, biology, geology, demography, economics, political science, and anthropology, this course also provides students with important historical grounding in the multidisciplinary field of global environmental studies.

What are the major causes of epidemics and pandemics including HIV/AIDS, ebola, malaria, bubonic plague, cholera, diabetes and cancer? When, where, and why did these diseases, among others, establish themselves in humans and spread? What can history teach us about the most effective ways to reduce the number of lives that they claim? This course explores the historical relationships between globalization, economic development, and public health and medicine. It highlights important connections between the ways in which people understand the underlying causes of sickness, explanations that are at once cultural and political, and the particular approaches to healing and disease prevention that they adopt. Paying special attention to these dynamics in the global Gulf, students consider both biomedical approaches and those conventionally classified as "traditional" and "folk" medicine.

This course explores the artistic and intellectual avant-gardes, counter-cultures and protest movements of the 1960s and the early 1970s from a global perspective, assessing their impact on individual identities, social and gender hierarchies, domestic politics and international relations during the Cold War. It traces the history of the various protest movements and explores a plethora of national experiences with respect to domestic and transnational networks of dissent as well as global imaginaries. Taking into account the aesthetics and performativity of protest, the course examines the role of cultural practices, action repertoires, the media, visual representations, lifestyle and fashion, the politics of memory, and the impact of dissent on political decision-makers and society at large.

This course explores the emergence of the "modern city" in three significant urban centers (Paris, Istanbul, Berlin) in relation to the demographic, economic, and political pressures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Attention is given to the foundations of community, the changing uses of public space, the appearance of new strategies of urban planning, and the contested process of defining the "modern" within a specific local culture.

The Second World War was the most destructive in human history and has become a touchstone for historical understanding in the postwar period. This course seeks to examine not only the strategic decisions of major belligerent states (Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan, Britain and the United States), but also the transformative power of the war in societies across the globe. Course topics will include the experience of soldiers and civilians, the mobilization of populations within far-flung empires, the use of new weapons and occupation strategies, and the critical social and political consequences of the war on populations across Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and the Middle East.

The course will explore the beginning of colonial museums in Europe, in particular the early museums established in Britain, France, Belgium and Netherlands in the 19th and the 20th centuries. Set against the backdrop of empire building, the course will discuss how museum spaces, collections, display and labeling of objects was planned to fit the colonial ideology of racial supremacy and territorial conquest on the one hand, and establish the "otherness" of the colonial subjects on the other. The museums were also meant to display the "splendors" of the colonies such as crafts, flora, fauna and minerals, produce knowledge about the acquired territories as well as disseminate this knowledge among museum visitors. Finally, the course will shift the focus to colonial museums of South Asia and analyze how museum-making has shaped the way in which we understand the history and heritage of these former colonies and how these museums are being restructured in the present day, post-colonial world.

The key events you read about in your morning twitter feed or on your favorite news sites are usually not unique in world affairs. They have a background, a context, that makes them more understandable and often more interesting. History is about everything that happened before you started reading this course description. And thinking historically means trying to make sense of the new in the context of what human beings have done before. In this lecture series, historians and scholars employing a historical perspective in their work will take you on a behind the scenes tour of current events you thought you knew, with the goal of making you a better observer and analyst of the world around you. This is a two-credit course designed to show students how thinking historically can help them understand better the key issues in the world around them. The weekly 90-minute meeting begins with a lecture by a specialist with the remaining portion of the session devoted to Q&A and discussion. Course can be repeated one-time for a maximum of four credits.

Global Asia defines Asia as a space of perpetual globalization and explores Asian societies, cultures, and political economies as they have been shaped by dynamic historical processes which expand human connectivity and transform territorial formations of power and authority. Pre-modern Global Asia embraced regions all around the old Silk Roads and Indian Ocean, from ancient times. In this course, we study the evolution of Asian worlds of mobility that Europeans sought to join in the fifteenth century and Asia's spatial subsequent expansion in worlds of empire up to the onset of industrial capitalism. This course thus provides students with a long-term view of History and a broadly transnational understanding of Asian History in the development of the modern world.

This course is about globalization as a very long-term historical process of spatially expansive mobility, communication, exchange, and territorial transformation, in which Asia is an open space of perpetual globalization, with no fixed boundaries, spanning Arctic and Tropics and lands from the Mediterranean to Pacific, all around the Indian Ocean, from Africa to Fiji. The standard view of Asia as being a static collection of fixed bounded territories, cut off from Europe, Middle East, Africa, and America, and propelled by Europeans into modernity, is dangerously archaic. In this course, we explore the ways in which Asia's long globalization launched and sustained the imperial production of the modern world economy and energized global capitalism in a world of nations. We see the rise of Global Asia today as a key to Asian history, with a long-term Asia-centric view of modern World History.

Course topics may include: slavery; world history of science and technology; global history of women and gender; labor migrations; global revolutions; history of the modern city; empire and globalization; the industrial age; consumption and modernity; pirates and piracy in world history; opium; and others.

The Mongol Empire and its Legacy: The rise and expansion of nomadic empires represents significant turning points in Asian history. One can say that they made Asia genuinely global. The Mongol Empire was one of the greatest empires, covering virtually all of Eurasia (from the Pacific Ocean to the outskirts of Central Europe). Its impact went far beyond its physical boundaries and lasted well after it disappeared. This course examines the history of that nomadic empire from a world history perspective. It places a great deal of emphasis on how it shaped significant cultures and civilizations all over Asia, Europe, and North Africa. Major themes of this course will include nomadic life and culture, the structure of a nomadic empire, how that nomadic empire interacted with the various settled states it conquered. We will also study the impact of the Mongol conquests on economy and trade, science and technology, medicine (the plague!), food and art, culture and religion, as well as social and intellectual developments across Eurasia, during the period from approximately 1200 to 1450 CE.

How is history written? This course offers a survey of the major theories and practices that have defined history as a scholarly discipline, and as a way of writing, over the last fifty years. Students are introduced to the major theoretical and narrative perspectives that have shaped historiography: to the kinds of historical questions that drive the research agendas of contemporary historians; and to the kinds of historical literature historians write, including analytical, narrative, scholarly, popular, and experimental. How do historians find and interpret their sources? How do they engage with existing scholarship while still striving to push their discipline forward? What methods do they apply to communicate the results of their research to other scholars and to a wider public readership? Students will learn to evaluate a wide array of different historical sources (including written documents, material artifacts, oral histories, and visual culture). They will also gain experience in meeting the challenges of writing their own works of historical scholarship, producing an original piece of written history by the end of the semester.

Can China strike a balance between economic development and environmental protection? This question, perhaps the most important question facing China (indeed the world) over the next few decades, pits economy and environment against one another. How did this adversarial relationship come about? Is it necessarily adversarial? Is it rooted in long-term trends in Chinese history, or in the most recent decades of double-digit economic growth? Are there solutions? Or are there better ways of asking the question? This course will look closely at the benefits, the consequences, and the costs of economic growth to society, ecology, and environment in China. The focus in on present dilemmas, examined through an historical perspective.

How do we study peoples, places, and societies that lie within "borderlands," spaces that either connect or separate larger powers? This course considers that questions through two examples of borderland regions that lie within and between southeast Asia and China. The first is a place that appears on no world map by which scholars now call "Zomia," the densely populated upland regions of mainland Southeast Asia and Southwest China. We will look at different ways studying this "non-place," test the heuristic limits of key analytical categories like nation, state, and citizenship, and explore alternative notions of political and cultural community. The second borderland region is the South China Sea, which others call the Champa Sea, or the Philippine Sea, or the North Natuna Sea. It is a place that few people inhabit, but which has been a crucial source of natural resources and mobility for states and peoples claiming ownership or rights to parts of it. Some fear it may be the flashpoint of a third world war, and how we understand its history may make the difference.

This course focuses on intra-Asian interactions and Asia's connections to other parts of the world from early history to the contemporary times. It examines how these interactions and connections have shaped Asian societies, facilitated long-distance transmissions of ideas and practices, and influenced modern-day geopolitics. Additionally, the impact of Asia on global economy and the environment will be explored. Readings for the class with include primary sources, including the writings of key Asian intellectuals. Topics such as the transmissions of Buddhism and Islam, the impact of the Mongol Empire, Indian Ocean connections, and intra- and extra-Asian migrations will be analyzed in detail. This course may be taught as a hybrid (online and in "distributed" classroom) course (mixing online and in-class meetings) with faculty and student participants from NYU's Global Network University.

What can the long history of humanitarian interventions in Africa teach us about global justice and our shared humanity? This course explores more than two centuries of interactions between the West and Africa through the prism of humanitarianism. Many humanitarian campaigns and movements analyzed in the course used a Manichean rhetoric of good versus evil. Yet, their motivations were often complex; and their effects, sometimes questionable. During the first part of the course, students formulate questions about the ethics of modern humanitarianism by exploring scholarly works by anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists, as well as films and literary texts. Students then use these questions to review historical case-studies, from the abolition of the slave trade to the #Kony2012 campaign. The course invites students to critically reflect on the logic of "salvation" projects and to deconstruct problematic clichés about the African continent.

This course offers a historical investigation of the evolution of Nazi policies toward Jews; of Jewish behavior in the face of those policies; and of the attitudes of other countries, both within and outside the Nazi orbit, toward the situation of Jews under the rule of the Third Reich.

The course explores the relationship between arts and politics in modern Latin America. It focuses on the role played by the arts in some of the region's main political processes, such as state formation, revolutions, and modernization. The course traces the intellectual and social repercussions of theater plays, music, literature, and the visual arts in Latin American societies. Specific themes include baroque and neoclassical poetics, nationalism, modernism, race and ethnicity, avant-gardes, memory, and truth.

This course focuses on love in Africa, from the late 19th Century to the present. By doing so, the course introduces students to a multiplicity of themes in African history, from the history of gender and sexuality to popular culture, generational conflicts, and the AIDS epidemics. Studying love is central to understanding how Africans have imagined and lived their lives as gendered individuals and members of their societies, often in the face of oppressive colonial regimes and strenuous living conditions. The course will view love in its various declensions: as an emotion and expression of intimacy (the notion of romantic love), as virtue (love in theological and political discourses), as a set practices at the chore of conjugality and sexuality, and as an object of debate in the public sphere. Students will learn how to historicize affects and their relationships to society, politics, and economy. We will read fiction and primary sources, watch movies, and discuss recent academic works that will help us understand change and continuities in how individuals and communities across Africa have defined, debated, and experienced love.

This course introduces students to the major themes of African history through film, literature, and music. Beginning with recordings of oral tradition originating in the early empire of Mali to novels addressing the roles of African colonial intermediaries to music protesting apartheid in South Africa, students will engage with a variety of sources of cultural and artistic nature. The course will focus on historical developments such as the Atlantic and internal slave trades, the process of European colonization, religious practice, decolonization, genocide and migration, urbanization, and AIDS. We will also examine various themes, such as local and imposed notions of race and ethnicity, lived experiences of and Africans' responses to colonialism on the continent, issues of gender and class, and political resistance. The broad goal of the course is to investigate to what extent long-term historical dynamics determine the present. Course requirements provide students with a language and historical framework for understanding the dynamic history of the continent.

The expansion of the modern economy over the past 200 years is unprecedented and awesome. Liberals, Marxists, Keynesians, and supply-siders alike recognized this capacity, and together they overturned the Malthusian propositions of old. They provided the toolkits into which we reach when we redress economic crisis and seek sustained improvement. Arguably we are failing today, with much of the industrialized world hovering between recession and tepid growth. The inequalities are enormous. Good ideas notwithstanding, they are animated and limited by politics. We will study thinkers such as Smith, Mill, Malthus, Marx, Keynes, and Friedman, those who offered us some foundational approaches to modern economics. We will consider how their thinking made for contrasting approaches to the crises of 1929, 1973, 2008, and the current epidemic. We will continue with the context of Greece, the EU, and the euro, spaces enabled and constricted by the architecture of the EU and the Eurozone.

This course will explore the central events, issues, and ideas driving US foreign policy throughout the 20th century, starting with the Spanish-American War in 1898 and closing with the "war on terror." It will analyze the country's ascent to become both an industrial and political global player by the end of the 19th century, its rise as an economic and financial power during the first half of the 20th century, its global military presence during/after World War II, its cultural diplomacy efforts and 'grassroots Americanization' of USA popular culture and lifestyle, as well as its military and political conflicts abroad during and after the Cold War. The course will examine notions of national power, territorial acquisition, modern warfare, racial discrimination, and class and gender hierarchies. It will also discuss the consequences of and resistance to US foreign policy at the receiving end, critically examining concepts such as "American exceptionalism," "the American Century," "imperialism," the "free world," "grand strategy" and global leadership, among others. For students interested in international relations and foreign policy, as well US history, politics, and culture.

This course explores the African American freedom struggle in the United States. It analyzes its historical origins, African American emancipation during the Civil War and reconstruction, migration patterns and economic conditions in the agricultural and industrial sectors, "Jim Crow" laws and the "Separate, but equal" doctrine, as well as the impact of US military engagements and the Cold War on race relations during the 20th century. The course examines the various challenges to legalized segregation in the aftermath of World War II, the powerful grassroots campaigns of African American civil rights activists and organizations during the 1960/70s and their political and cultural impact, and the emergence of black nationalism and black power. It also traces the ways in which the struggle for racial equality in the US was perceived as part of a larger struggle against colonialism around the world. Furthermore, the course incorporates discussions about affirmative action, the "prison-industrial complex", the notion of a "post-racial America" under the Obama administration into the broader context of an ongoing quest for equal rights and social justice in the US.

This course explores the development of port cities on both sides of the Atlantic as vital nodes of economic and cultural exchange from the early modern period of European colonization to the contemporary era of globalization. Tracing the entangled histories of the Atlantic World, students will explore the emergence of new colonial cities and the transformation of established urban centers as a function of new patterns of commodity circulation, labor migration, and cultural influence. Special attention will be given to changes in the built environment in response to shifting technologies and political contexts and to the spatial, racial and gendered restrictions that characterized these new urban forms. Case studies will be drawn from a wide range of cities, including Rio de Janeiro, Liverpool, Havana, Seville, and Lagos.

This course will explore the philosophies, ideas, and practices that went into the making of the American republic. We will begin with Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Harrington, and Montesquieu and new notions of republicanism, liberalism, and empire. We will explore the radical currents of the English Revolution that sought to place democracy on the political agenda. And we will see how these ideas influenced the views of Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and Paine. Throughout, we will read selections from original texts.

Empire is usually associated with developments and formations in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, but Africa also witnessed and participated directly in this form of political experimentation and expansion of cultural and economic influence. This course focuses on imperial formations centered in West Africa and Ethiopia, whose independent histories date back to the beginning of the first millennium CE. The convergences and divergences between the regions as they relate are noteworthy, especially as they relate to religion. Monotheism would prove to be a critical motivating and explanatory factor, expressed through Christianity in Ethiopia, and Islam in West Africa. Islam alleged "clash" with the West has occupied the center of the world stage for decades now. Both cultural advances and intense conflict have characterized developments in the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia, while the question of Islam in Europe has become a major issue for the continent and Great Britain given ongoing demographic changes. Africa south of the Sahara is no less a part of this unfolding global drama, where both Christianity and Islam has played a seminal role in the continent's development.

The history of slavery poses a particular set of challenges for historians and for cultural practitioners - how do we document and understand an institution whose practices were, at least partially, rooted in the denial that African people had history or historical importance? This course will give students the opportunity to engage with the economic, social and political history of the slave trade on both sides of the Atlantic. We will explore the history of the trade through a variety of texts, both primary and secondary, and will travel together to some key sites of the slave trade in Ghana - thus grounding this massive historical event in the particulars history of Ghana and the "gold coast" as we ask how the trade is documented and remembered. The archives of slavery are fundamentally incomplete, with only rare testimony from any of those 12 million people who were captured and sold into Atlantic slavery. This means that scholars and artists alike have employed a range of disciplinary strategies to grapple with the history and afterlives of slavery. We will consider public histories, acts of memorial and remembering, films, novels, datasets, and economies.

Course topics may include the Enlightenment; American colonial history; Atlantic immigration; race, gender, and sexuality in US history; African- American history; New York City past and present; women and slavery in the Americas; the New Deal; and others.

The objective of this course is to trace and understand the history of Islam as a religious tradition and Muslim societies in Africa as part of a larger world. This course surveys the history and historiography of Islam in Africa from its arrival in North Africa in the seventh century through the present day in postcolonial Africa while also paying attention to continuing points of contact and exchange between Muslims in Africa across the Sahara as well as the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Students will examine the history of Islam in Africa in light of issues such as conversion, interactions with other religious traditions, reform movements, slavery and race, education, gender, European colonial rule, and postcolonial politics. Possible sources for the course include Arab geographical and travel accounts, juridical texts debating social categories of race, slavery and gender, regional chronicles reflecting the interface between Islam and local African religious traditions, colonial reports revealing fears of Islam as a unifying force across empires, and audio recordings of religious sermons.

Why do most of the world's Muslims live in the Indian Ocean world a region often referred to as the 'cradle of globalization'? How, specifically, did Islam spread in relation to the extension and intensification of agriculture and trade? What diverse forms have Islamic ideas, institutions, practices, and subjectivities taken in this expansive world region? What, additionally, is the relationship between Indian Ocean Muslims' beliefs and practices and those of the followers of other religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity? This course addresses these questions by engaging with cutting-edge scholarship from the fields of global, Indian Ocean, and Islamic history, as well as a wide variety of primary source materials. Throughout, students also probe the relationship between power and the production of knowledge about Islam.

This history course is a journey - both a physical one from the UAE to India, and an intellectual one exploring the historical relationship between human interaction with the Arabian Sea and the development of the sciences of astronomy, meteorology, geography, physics, marine biology, botany, pharmacology and medicine. The course features sailors, fishermen, pearlers, farmers and other ordinary social groups as 'collective scientists' who contributed in important ways to both the production and the practice of these sciences. The course additionally explores the Arabian Sea as an 'information super-highway' for the cross-cultural movement and exchange of scientific knowledge, institutions, and practices - considering connections and comparisons between the interior and coastal landscapes of the UAE and Gujarat, in particular. It concludes by assessing the extent to which Europeans simultaneously became dependent upon, and worked to remake and redefine, both the region's science and the stories that we tell about its history. Students should expect to do some camping and possibly a short period of sailing during the course. All students must know how to swim.

The Indian Ocean has provided an important avenue for the movement of people, traditions and ideas over centuries. The course explores the cultural exchange in the Indian Ocean world with the spread of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and later Christianity. How are the different regions of the Indian Ocean littorals tied together through networks of piety, pilgrimage and mythologies? Do the surviving material remains that dot the littorals - built structures, religious iconography, inscriptions, maps, travelogues, legends and poetry of traveling saints and mythologies about the Oceanic waters itself, attest this dynamic exchange and interconnectedness? How do the circulation of people, relics and mythologies connect the hinterland with people and places across the waters?

Is biography central to the study of history? Can an individual's experiences explain their role in history? To what extent does biography form intellectual history? Studies of the past show that different periods had significantly different approaches towards the idea of the individual, and how a person should be remembered. During the first part of the course in Abu Dhabi, we will critically examine the life, work and ideas of figures including Barack Obama, Doris Lessing, Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Babur, Queen Victoria and Francis Younghusband. We will look at the power of photographs and self-fashioning in determining the image of an individual, the recovery of marginalized historical figures, and approaches towards the idea of the self. The second part of the course takes place at Ahmedabad (home of Gandhi's Sabarmati Ashram, and an important site in the Indian independence movement) and Baroda (where BR Ambedkar wrote in Waiting for a Visa about the workings of untouchability). As well as using analytical discussion of Ambedkar and VS Naipaul in India, we will engage in archival and street-level work to learn how a sense of place can inform biography.

Course topics may include: Southern Africa; trading networks of the Indian Ocean; colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism in the Middle East; the Portuguese seaborne empire; Iran past and present; Southeast Asia; and others.

This course examines the interconnected histories, cultures, and societies of Central Asia and the Middle East. It will begin with an overview of the Mongol empire and its legacies in Central Asia and the broader Muslim world. The course will compare the emerging post-Mongol Eurasian and Ottoman states through the lenses of law, political legitimacy, succession, and ruling institutions. The course will then compare Russian and Ottoman civilizing missions, imperial nationalisms, treatments of sectarianism and ethnic minorities, constitutionalism, public health policies, responses to Islamic modernism, Marxist and other radical leftist ideas, and women's emancipation. The course will conclude by considering how post-imperial modernization projects transformed identity, gender, and religion in Central Asia and the Middle East.

This seminar explores the involvement of the United States and the Soviet Union in the Middle East from the nineteenth century down to the near-present, with emphasis on the Cold War period. We will consider different, sometimes conflicting, interpretations of the sources, character and consequences of US and Soviet foreign policy in this part of the world, along with the images and representations of the Middle East and its peoples that have informed (and, some argue) helped shape American and Soviet policy and public debates.

We will examine the course of Roman history from the earliest beginnings down to the period of the Early Empire, so, about the first-second century AD. Our chief concern, however, will be the project of empire. How and why did the Romans come to possess such a vast empire? How did they perceive their realm? Why were they able to put this thing together? Furthermore, we will have one special concern in all of this. There was one geographical region, which the Romans tried repeatedly to conquer, and to hold. They never succeeded at this. That area is, roughly speaking, the modern Middle East. So, one of our chief questions will revolve around the fact that the Romans were so successful elsewhere, yet, for the most part, failed in their imperial project here. Can this be explained in terms of their imperial project writ large? There is, to my knowledge, no scholarly literature dealing with this question specifically, and as a whole. Therefore, we will get at the matter via a consideration of Roman expansionism, as this played itself out against the background of Roman history altogether.

What was it that kept the Russian empire together for centuries? This course is designed as a survey of Russia's multiethnic empire from the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan to the early Soviet-era formation of the "affirmative action empire." Topics to be covered include patterns of imperial expansion, gender and the nature of autocratic authority, religious institutions and practices, colonialism, intellectual debates and key thinkers, serfdom and emancipation, radicalism and the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, early Soviet nationalities policies, the "New Soviet Person," and revolutionary culture.

This course approaches the Mediterranean as a multicultural site that lends itself to questions concerning cultural encounters and crossovers, as well as to the issue of historical memory. The Mediterranean emerges in our investigation as the substance of, and the backdrop for, a reevaluation of the various narratives of modernity; for an examination of the centrality of colonialism in that modernization process; and finally, for an encounter with the realities of contemporary immigration. The course brings in methodologies and material from different approaches to the topic, from historical sociology, to philosophy of history, and cultural theory. Key concepts will be defined rigorously: world system, world economy, subaltern, hegemony, archive and translation.

This course considers the emergence, diffusion, and resonance of classical Greek thought and habits. Exploring the variety of Hellenisms expressed over time, the course explores the contributions of Sophocles, Plato, and Aristotle alongside those of Al-Ghazali, El Greco, and Nietzsche. It traces the varied spaces Hellenism has occupied and reflects upon the various ways the Hellenic legacy has been interpreted and renegotiated through films, novels, operas, "heritage flings," and genocides. Decoupling Hellenism from Greekness, it promotes a more expansive approach; one that considers Arabic, Ottoman, and Jewish Hellenisms, and is more inclusive of non-Christian, female, queer, and cosmopolitan voices.

Topics may include history of Egypt; the Roman Empire; religion and culture from Alexander to Muhammad; Venice and the Mediterranean; premodern science; Western expansion in the Eastern Mediterranean, 11th-15th centuries; Napoleon; modern Greek history; Israel and Palestine; and others.

The History Capstone Seminar guides students through the capstone writing process. The course helps students identify the challenges of conducting long-term historical research and writing and develop strategies for meeting those challenges. Course assignments help students complete the project in stages, in collaboration with each student's capstone advisor, and clarify the specific expectations for submitting a polished work of historical scholarship for review. The course combines writing workshops and individualized review sessions with structured time for research and writing.

The capstone experience provides seniors with the opportunity to work closely with a faculty mentor and to conduct extensive research on a topic of their choice. The program consists of a capstone seminar, taken in the first semester of the senior year, and a year-long individualized thesis tutorial. During the capstone seminar, students define a thesis topic of their choice, develop a bibliography, read broadly in background works, and begin their research. In the tutorial, students work on a one-to-one basis with a faculty director to hone their research and produce successive drafts of a senior thesis. The capstone experience culminates in the public presentation of the senior thesis. Students may also elect to participate in a College Capstone Project with students majoring in other disciplines in the arts, and the natural and social sciences. Collaborating students work with a faculty member to define the overall goals of the Capstone Project, as well as the particular goals of each participant.