History (HIST-SHU)

This course provides an introduction to a range of theoretical frameworks and methodologies that have influenced the academic study of history, including microhistory, global history, histories of gender and race, and subaltern/post-colonial historical studies. We will interrogate the key categories of historical temporality and geography by questioning how historians impose temporal and spatial boundaries around their research, as well as ways to expand or dissolve those boundaries. We will also examine how historians construct historiographical debates around particular research themes, such as the changing meaning of national histories. The aim is to acquire knowledge of a variety of historical approaches at work when reading both historical scholarship and historical source materials. Prerequisites: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Foundations/Introductory Courses (18-19 Critical Concepts Core Course).

This course introduces a range of theories that have influenced art history, which here refers to both the purported narratives of the history of art and the practice of re/writing such narratives. We will analyze biography as a mode of art history; connoisseurship, iconography, formalism, and post-structuralist theory; Marxist and feminist approaches; and queer and trans* methods. Recognizing the Eurocentrism in the texts considered foundational to the discipline of Art History, we will examine the ways that art history was conceptualized in East Asia. The aim is to acquire knowledge of key art historical approaches; to apply that knowledge to assess works of art and art historical texts; and to analyze the impact of the historically specific relationship between the visual text and the viewer/historian on our knowledge of art. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Foundations or Introductory Course.

This course seeks to spark and develop curiosity in historical research with easy to practice and accessible primary sources collected from oral history interviews. Students will receive comprehensive training on: 1) What is oral history; 2) How did this research methodology develop in the English and Chinese academy; 3) What are the differences and similarities between oral history, social science survey questionnaires, anthropological field work, and journalism; 4) How to prepare for the interview; 5) Important issues to be aware of during the interview; 6) Post-interview preservation of photos and memorabilia, audio and video files; audio transcript and video footage editing; and 7) How to use the data collected from oral history interviews for publication. Prerequiste: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Introductory Course; Social Science Methods course; GCS elective Chinese History, Culture and Society.

This survey of U.S. History since the Civil War examines the development of American Culture and its expansion into the global economy. Topics include: urbanization; industrialization; immigration; reform movements (populism, progressivism, the New Deal, and the War on Poverty); and foreign policy. Beginning with the post-Civil War expansion of the U.S. into the American West, the course traces the U.S.’s increasing global influence through the early 21st Century. Using film, TV, literature and popular culture, the course emphasizes broad themes and changes in U.S. culture, politics, and society. Prerequisites: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Introductory course (18-19: survey/topic).

This course utilizes multidisciplinary sources of evidence to address Arab-Islamic knowledge and culture, the influences that they had on medieval and early modern Europe, and that they continue to have today, while questioning why many Western scholars have minimized Arab-Islamic contributions in favor of “Western Exceptionalism” narratives. By exploring cross-cultural transmissions of knowledge, students are encouraged to think critically about how ideas and technologies evolve as they are adopted by individuals and groups in order to suit their personal and cultural needs. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Major Other Introductory Courses; Social Science International Relations Track 200 level focus course.

This course explores how the history of imperialism and nativism have shaped the racialization of Asian Americans. We examine key historical events, policies, and social movements that highlight how the American empire’s reach across the Pacific and Asia intersected with domestic racial anxieties to forge a unique space for Asians within the American racial hierarchy. From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and from annexation of Hawaii in 1898 to Cold War refugees from Southeast Asia, students gain a nuanced understanding of Asian American identity, community, and resistance. This course aims to foster a deep appreciation of the rich and diverse history of Asian Americans and the ongoing struggle for equity and inclusion within the broader tapestry of American history. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Introductory Course.

This course provides an overview of Chinese American history and its relevance for contemporary issues in the China and the United States. There are over 50 million people of Chinese heritage outside of mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and those in the United States have helped shape the course of Chinese history over the last hundred and fifty years. For the China side, this course covers major factors driving Chinese migration during the Qing, Republic of China, and People’s Republic of China periods, and the different impact Chinese migrants had on the economy, culture, and political structures of China. For the U.S. side, this course covers the first wave of Chinese immigration in the 19th century, the rise of anti-Chinese movements, Chinese Exclusion, and the experiences of Chinese Americans during WWII. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: CORE HPC/IPC; GCS China and the World; Humanities Introductory course (18-19: topic).

Covers the impact of World War II, the postwar division of Europe, the onset of the Cold War, the economic recovery and transformation of Western Europe, Stalinism in Eastern Europe, the 1960s and events of 1968, the origins and development of the European community, and the cultural and intellectual life of European nations in this period. Ends with a discussion of the Eastern European revolutions of 1989 and their significance, together with the reunification of Germany, for the future of the continent. Prerequisites: None Fulfillment: Humanities Major Other Introductory Courses (18-19 Survey Courses).

This unique interdisciplinary course, which fulfills both the Math and STS Core Curriculum requirements, interrogates the persistent notion that mathematics is fundamentally Western, by exploring the invention and evolution of foundational mathematical concepts within their historical and cultural contexts throughout the world. Using hands-on activities to explore historical mathematical challenges, students develop their problem-solving skills, and apply them to practical and theoretical questions. For example, how did earlier societies use sticks, stones, or strings with knots to record numerical data and make advanced calculations long before modern calculators and computers? An underlying theme is that numbers, mathematics, and computational methods do not simply exist, but are highly related to the cultures in which they were produced, and the accompanying historical circumstances. We conclude the course by considering the global future of mathematics, and whether it is capable of becoming increasingly diverse. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: CORE STS or Math requirement; Humanities Introductory course.

The term avant-garde frequently appears in artistic contexts, referring to practices and practitioners against conventions and established institutions. How did avant-garde, a military term for vanguard in French, come to be associated with radical artistic experiments? Who were (and are) able to become avant-garde, and how? This course addresses these questions through a survey of European art and design from the 1860s to the 1970s, with a particular focus on Paris. We will discuss the “Impressionist” exhibitions, japonisme, abstract art and the dreams of revolutions and utopia, the invention of the ready-made, the death of art according to Dada artists, and more. This roughly chronological survey will be punctuated by examinations of the ways that social categories of identity, including race, gender, class, and sexuality, shaped membership to the avant-garde. Prerequisite: Writing as Inquiry or Sophomore standing. Fulfillment: Humanities Advanced course; IMA elective; IMB major IMA/B elective.

In this introductory history course, we will examine a range of empires from antiquity to modernity in locations around the world: Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe. How did the concept and form of “empire” inspire and constrain their subjects’ understandings of belonging? How did ethnicity, religion, culture and language create connections or obstacles across imperial regimes? How did empires create and recreate concepts of territorial (or extraterritorial) rule, and how did emperors exercise power across their regimes? And why did this form of power and goverance demonstrate such durability across time and space? To answer these and other questions, students will read a range of primary and secondary sources aimed at exploring the political culture – both local and global in scope – of imperial regimes across time and space. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Core IPC; Humanities Introductory course; Social Science Focus International Relations 200 level course; GCS elective China and the World.

Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Advanced Interdisciplinary Course, other Humanities Advanced Course

This course covers the history of medicine in Europe and North America from the eighteenth century to the present. We will explore how perceptions of illness and health changed over time in relation to transformations in politics, society, science, and technology. Drawing on primary and secondary sources, you will learn how to place medical texts, techniques, and artifacts within their epistemic, historical, and socio-political contexts. Topics will include: the historical development and organization of medical knowledge and its branches; corresponding shifts in explanations of disease; the role of modern institutions and technologies in the study and control of diseased individuals and infected populations; the rise of the hospital; the relationship between medicine, science, and industry; the shifting doctor-patient relationship; the social meanings of illness; and the changing burden of disease. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: CORE STS; Humanities Other Introductory course; Social Science Focus Global Health 200 level.

This course provides an introduction to modern European history since 1900. Following the world wars, Europe’s reconstruction was based on a principle of peace through prosperity and the ideal of an ‘ever closer union.’ In recent years, however, the combined economic and migrant crises, Brexit and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have put this postwar consensus to a test. Analyzing a wide array of primary materials, the seminar familiarizes students with key problems of modern European history. Individual sessions examine fin-de-siècle culture and modernity; imperialism and colonialism; the causes and effects of the world wars; the Holocaust; the Global Cold War; the revolution of 1989 in Eastern Europe; and whether a distinctive European identity has developed since the post-war period that can withstand the entangled crises of the early twenty-first century. Prerequisites: None. Previous knowledge or experience is welcome but not required Fulfillment: Humanities Introductory course.

The study of “witchcraft” and the witchhunts of early modern Europe has brought enormous insight to our historical understanding of popular culture, gender, social conflict, religion, and law. This course examines European ideas about witchcraft in the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries and how the European model of witchcraft became exported to other parts of the Atlantic world (Africa, North America, South America) during the early- modern period of European economic and colonial expansion. In addition, we will explore how non-European concepts of the supernatural, magical, and divine differed from or intersected with European beliefs and assumptions at the moment of cross-cultural encounter. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Advanced course (18-19: survey).

This class will examine the changing nature of death, dying and grief since the late 19th century by focusing on modern wars as instruments of change. As both the number of mortalities and the manner of death changed, so too did private and public ways of dealing with death. Societies around the world modified their understandings of death and created new ways of dealing with the dead, in body and in spirit, as wars became deadlier and dying assumed an increasingly unfamiliar shape. Some of the questions we will consider in this class include: -how is death represented in social memory during and after war? -the changing ways of dying – what is a “good” death and what is a “bad” death on the battlefield and at home? -how has the act of killing changed and how does it influence our understanding of death? -how mourning practices change, both in the private and public sphere, as a consequence of war -how do national commemorative practices interact with our private understandings of death and dying? -in what kinds of spaces do the living and the dead interact? -what elements of modern war foster these changes? Do all wars shape death and dying in the same way? What common features exist and what elements are culturally specific? Pre-requisites: Not open to first-year students. Fulfillment: Humanities 18-19 Topic Course.

This advanced, research seminar course provides an overview of Chinese American history and its relevance for contemporary issues in the China and the United States. There are over 50 million people of Chinese heritage outside of mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and those in the United States have helped shape the course of Chinese history over the last hundred and fifty years. For the China side, this course covers major factors driving Chinese migration during the Qing, Republic of China, and People’s Republic of China periods, and the different impact Chinese migrants had on the economy, culture, and political structures of China. For the U.S. side, this course covers the first wave of Chinese immigration in the 19th century, the rise of anti-Chinese movements, Chinese Exclusion, and the experiences of Chinese Americans during WWII. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Advanced course (18-19:Topics).

Over the course of the twentieth century the infinite void that surrounds planet Earth stimulated the human imagination as never before. For several decades, anticipation of human spaceflight was intimately bound with futuristic visions of technoscientific progress, while space exploration became key to societal self-images. This course charts the rise and fall of the Age of Space from a global perspective. Individual sessions will be devoted to the ‘rocket fad’ of the Weimar Republic, Nazi ‘wonder weapons,’ the so-called Sputnik shock and the American moon landings, UFOs and alleged alien encounters, as well as providing an introduction to the historical origins of techno-nationalism, from the Cold War to today’s Space Race in Asia. This is an advanced undergraduate seminar open to juniors and seniors. Participants should have taken at least one history class and have written a research paper with bibliographical references. Prerequisite: POH OR any HIST-SHU OR any HUMN-SHU course Fulfillment: CORE STS; Humanities Advanced course (18-19: Digital Approaches or Topic)

Whether intelligent life exists outside the confinements of planet Earth is an old question to which an abundance of new answers has been given over the course of the twentieth century, from philosophy, religion and science fiction to anthropology, communication studies and astrophysics. Located at the intersection of European and American cultural history, the history of science and technology, literary studies and film, this class charts the manifold figurations of the alien since its modern invention in 1897. Individual sessions will be devoted to invasions from Mars and Venus, H. G. Wells and Liu Cixin, UFO sightings and alien encounters, but also to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence known as SETI, NASA’s Voyager missions, the making of astrobiology into a scholarly discipline, the so-called Plurality of Worlds, Ancient Astronauts and Rare Earth controversies and many other aspects of modern extraterrestrialism. Ultimately, humankind’s self-understanding as a species is defined, tested and exposed when confronted with radical alterity, be it real or imagined. Prerequisite: any HUMN-SHU OR any HIST-SHU course OR POH. Fulfillment: Humanities Interdisciplinary course or Advanced course; Social Science Anthropology track 300 level.

Examines key themes in the social history of New York City: the pattern of its physical and population growth, its social structure and class relations, ethnic and racial groups, municipal government and politics, family and work life, and institutions of social welfare and public order. Pre-requisites: None Fulfillment: CORE STS; Humanities Advanced course (18-19: Digital Approaches or Topic).

This course provides a brief introduction to the emergence of the modern Middle East and North Africa from 1699 to the end of WWI. Its geographic scope comprises the central provinces and territories of the former Ottoman and Safavid empires: Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Egypt, Levant, and North Africa. The syllabus emphasizes four analytical themes: first, the historical evolution of ""Middle Eastern"" polities from dynastic and religious empires in the 18th century to modern ""nation-states"" in the 20th; second, the impact of industrial capitalism and European imperial expansion on local societies and their modes of production; third, local conceptions of modernity and measures of modernization in responses to European colonial expansion; Islamic and secular reform movements; nationalism and revolution; fourth, the ideological and socio-cultural dimensions of these large-scale transformations, specifically the rise of mass ideologies of liberation and development and the emergence of new issues in the areas of gender, identity, and popular culture. Major historical events include two world wars, creation of “new orders,” (constitutional republics, Islamic regimes or authoritarian states), projects and challenges of postcolonial state-building. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Advanced course; 200 level focus course for the Social Science International Relations track.

This course explores the political, economic, and cultural transformations on the Korean peninsula from late colonial times to the contemporary situation of two Korean nation-states. We will pay close attention to ideological, socio-economic, and cultural differences as well as similarities between both Koreas. We will also consider the ways in which postcolonial competition between the two states affected the lived realities of their peoples in transnational historical contexts. Most audiovisual sources and literary texts are in English, and no previous knowledge of Korean is required. Prerequisite: None Fulfillment: Humanities Advanced course.

History is found in more than books. Objects and places can also be sources of knowledge as well as areas of study in their own right. This advanced course explores the possibilities and limitations of history you can touch, or material culture. Students will read case studies from circa 1500 AD to the present that employ theories and methods of material culture. During weekly labs, students will gain hands-on experience describing, contextualizing, and analyzing human-made and natural objects, images, food, trash, instruction manuals, fashion, and inventories. They will think of objects in terms of their structure, function, assemblage, context, and biography. For their final paper, students will write a chapter for A Material History of Life at NYU-Shanghai, which applies material culture theories and methods to their own lives. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Advanced Course.

In this seminar, students will consider the idea that “noise” has a history, and that its history dates long before the industrial revolution’s ratcheting up of noise levels due to heavy machinery and the reproduction and amplification of sound through electronic technologies. Some noises pierce our ears and disrupt both our hearing and our thinking. In contrast, background noises may be loud, persistent, and even harmful to our ears, but they suffuse our everyday lives so fully that we can ignore them. Despite our daily subjective encounters with noise, can noise have a political meaning as well, one that transcends our individual experiences with din and discord, cacophony and clamor? This course explores noise’s relationship to history and politics. By spending the semester reading, talking, and writing about noise, we will seek to comprehend it rather than contain it. Prerequisites: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Interdisciplinary/Advanced course (18-19: Critical Concept/Topic)

This course will survey the applications of scientific naturalism to the human realm in nineteen-century Europe and America, with a focus on the development of hereditarianism across the social and psychological discourses of the Victorian era (1838-1901). The course will introduce you to the history of what we today call the pseudo-sciences (such as phrenology, Social Darwinism, and eugenics) and explore how naturalistic explanations of crime and degeneracy were articulated and disseminated in the service of racist policies and imperial/colonial agendas. Drawing on primary and secondary sources, you will learn how to evaluate these long-discredited knowledges of the past seriously on their own terms and develop a critical understanding of their epistemic, cultural, and socio-political contexts. Prerequisite: Perspectives on Humanities or any HIST-SHU course OR any HUMN-SHU course OR any PHIL-SHU course OR any LIT-SHU Fulfillment: Core STS; Humanities Advanced course.

Psychology is one of the most popular fields of study in universities today, captivating our curiosity about the human mind. But how did psychology become a key discipline in defining what it means to be human? This course traces the rise of scientific psychology from the 1880s to the 1970s, exploring major psychological systems such as functionalism, psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and cognitive psychology. As part of this exploration, you will engage in hands-on learning by replicating foundational experiments. For example, we will recreate Ebbinghaus’s memory experiments to study the forgetting curve and Skinner’s conditioning experiments to observe real-time behavior changes. By engaging with these classical experiments, you will gain experiential insights into how psychological concepts emerged from practical research, while also exploring their development within broader historical, intellectual, and socio-political contexts. Prerequisite: Perspectives on Humanities or any HIST-SHU course OR any HUMN-SHU course OR any PHIL-SHU course OR any LIT-SHU Fulfillment: CORE STS; Humanities Advanced Interdisciplinary course; Social Science Focus Psychology 200 level.

This is a reading and research seminar with an emphasis on the “new “Cold War history—a scholarly phenomenon emerging in the 1990s, along with the end of the global Cold War and the new opportunities to conduct multiarchival and mutli-source research for scholars of international history. Students in this class will be exposed to various new interpretations, new methods of research, and new ways of thinking associated with the new Cold War history studies. Readings in this class will be focused on the scholarship that has appeared since the early and mid-1990s. Students are required to write several books reviews and a comprehensive review essay, as well as to present and critique the comprehensive review essay in class. The ultimate purpose of the course is to help students take the Cold War as a useful reference to pursue a better understanding of the challenges facing the human race in the 21st century. Prereq: None. Fulfillment: 18-19 Humanities Major Topic Courses; Social Science Focus 300 level International Relations.

In this history seminar, we will explore some of the quintessential concepts of the scientific revolution, the multivalent ways in which these ideas were disseminated, contemporary reactions, as well as the interrelationship between popular culture and scientific processes. Rather than analyzing scientific happenings as though they occurred in a vacuum, there will be a strong emphasis on situating competing ways of knowing within the contemporary social, political, economic, and cultural contexts. While developing their abilities to analyze primary sources and critically engage with scholarship—both orally and in writing—students will question overly simplified linear narratives of scientific and mathematical change, as well as the notion that scientific “advancements” were inevitable. Prerequisite: GPS or Sophomore standing. Fulfillment: CORE STS; Humanities Advanced Course (18-19: topic).