201/202 field seminars vary by quarter.  Here are the offerings for Academic Year 2024-25:

201/202 Fall 24 Seminars

History 201X, World History "The Long Nineteenth Century: Global Crossroads", José Juan Pérez Meléndez

Nestled between revolutions that made the modern world and a world war that called modernity into question, the “long” nineteenth century today figures as a curious by-gone: a time taken for granted among scholars of all areas due to its transitive nature and its uncomfortable distance from our present. Too close to be remote. Too far removed from us to be familiar. Moreover, its most distinguishing traits— intensive flux and radical political change—unsettles the historical imagination in its desperate grasp for patterns and categories. Indeed, examined as an interpretive chronological category, the nineteenth century emerges as a crucible for the problems that plague the present day. Yet, rather than appraise it by function of the degree to which it prefigures contemporary issues, this seminar homes into the complexity of the 1800s. It was then that the nation-state shaped up, corporations got a foothold into legal personhood, empires found a second wind in new configurations, and racialized labor regimes emerged out of increasingly refined international traffics and trades. This was the era of new governmentalities, agrarian settlement, bureaucratization, and the rise of legal normativities. At the same time, the transportation and settlement schemes that punctuated the century also spurred processes of ethnogenesis taken for granted later in time. With these and other dynamics in perspective, this seminar surveys case studies in world history covering a broad span from the era of revolutions to the mid-century imperial reformulations, and from the large-scale regional wars of the 1850s and 60s to the state-led warfare against domestic populations that transformed internal hierarchies and frontiers. Focusing on the Middle East, Africa, the Americas, India, and Europe, the seminar examines how political conflict, legal brokering, commercial innovation, and technological change fed into a great acceleration that ultimately legated an unequal international order, widespread racialization, and sanctioned profiteering to posterity.

201/202 Winter 25 Seminars 

1.History 201I, Revolutions in Modern Latin America, Charles Walker

Course Description: This course examines revolutions in twentieth-century Latin America. We begin by reviewing the concept's development and many meanings.  The concept (Latin revolutio, turn around) has circulated since at least Aristotle and the term appears in French in the 13th century and English in the 14th. We examine major Latin American revolutions (Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua) and key issues and debates within revolutionary movements, specifically race and gender. I will encourage students to write a final paper on some aspect of revolutions: theory, practice, specific ones, women in Cuba, meanings in Late Capitalism, etc.  This course is an approved elective for the DE in Human Rights.

2. History 201Q, Gender, Colonialism, and Nation-Building, Lisa Materson

Course Description:  This year’s 201Q will examine the diverse ways that gender has shaped colonial projects, colonial subjecthood, and post-colonial nation building. Readings will cover North America, Latin America, Africa, and Asia and will explore a range of themes through comparative and transnational frameworks. These topics include knowledge and power, suffrage and citizenship, masculinity, multiracial identities, sexuality and reproduction, anticolonial revolution, and post-colonial reparations.

3. History 202H, Themes in 19th century US History, Rachel St. John

Course Description: This reading intensive course will provide an introduction to the wide range of scholarship on the history of the 19th-century United States. It is intended both to help you prepare for exams and to provide a foundation for teaching, researching, and writing about U.S. history. The course is organized both chronologically and thematically. Some course themes include: slavery and emancipation; labor and economic inequality; capitalism; race and ethnicity; environment and health; gender and kinship; Indigenous power and sovereignty; Civil War and Reconstruction; violence; expansion and empire; and power and politics. The coverage, although extensive, is also necessarily selective. I have selected the readings to acquaint you with some of the main themes and historiographical debates of the field and to provide a variety of approaches, methodologies, and interpretations. Course readings will combine recent scholarship with works of long-standing significance with an emphasis on understanding both historical developments and historiographic debates. This course is an approved elective for the DE in Environmental Humanities.
 

201/202 Spring 25 Seminars (course descriptions forthcoming)

History 202C, Europe, Michael Saler

History 202H, United States, Louis Warren