Graduate Seminars

Field Seminars (Hist 201/202) vary by quarter.  Here are the offerings for Academic Year 2025-26. 

FALL 2025

HIS 202H: Readings in Twentieth-Century U.S. History, 4 units, Tsu, Cecilia

This seminar provides an introduction to the historiography of the United States in the twentieth century, focusing on the theme of state and society in modern America. We will cover social, economic, cultural, and political changes related to the growth and transformation of the American state over the twentieth century, primarily on the domestic front but also involving the nation’s expansion abroad. Topics include: labor, immigration, racial formation, the role of government, reform and social movements, foreign policy, gender and sexuality, suburbanization, and deindustrialization. This course is designed for students interested in preparing for comprehensive examinations and researching or teaching modern U.S. history.

HIS 202I: Major Issues in Historical Interpretation: Latin America - Pérez Meléndez, Juan
"The World of the Haitian Revolution: From the Rise of Saint-Domingue to Post-Independent State(s)"

The French domain of Saint-Domingue became one of the most munificent colonies in the world in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Under a brutal regime of enslavement that co-existed with a growing free or freed interracial population known as the gens de couleur, Saint-Domingue’s sugar reigned supreme. Its production sped ahead other colonial commodities produced in neighboring islands, much to the benefit of the French monarchy’s and its aristocracy’s coffers and taste buds. But Saint-Domingue’s economic rise came aground with the convergence of French revolutionary dilemmas and an insurrection among the enslaved started in 1791. This seminar will examine the build-up to that moment, the revolutionary period itself, and the fallout of the Haitian Revolution amid the state-building efforts that followed. Surveying the recent literature on the subject, the seminar will analyze the Haitian Revolution globally and through multiple lenses as the product of eighteenth-century economic developments; as a fundamental counterpoint to the French Revolution as much as an index of political changes in West Africa; and as a multivalent point reference for slaveholding elites across the Americas in the nineteenth century and Black internationalisms in the twentieth.
 

WINTER 2026

HIS 201I — Early Colonial America: Andrés Reséndez 

Syllabus 

M 3:10 pm-6:00 pm, SSH Rm 4202 

Course Description: This seminar will survey some of the key works of the early colonial period in the American continent (circa sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), focusing on selected topics such as conquest, African and Native slaveries, race, gender, extractive economies, the environment, colonial power and defiance, etc. While this early chronology will necessarily privilege the Spanish and Portuguese experiences, we will also consider the activities of England and France in the continent.

HIS 201Q — Marriage and Sex in the United States and the World (focus on 20th century), 4 units: Parker, Traci

Course description forthcoming

HIS 201S — SCIENCE & EMPIRE, 1500–1900 Stolzenberg, Daniel 

This class surveys the intertwined histories of sciences and empires from the age of Columbus to the apogee of European colonialism at the turn of the twentieth century. Reading a combination of secondary and primary sources, we will investigate how empires shaped the development of scientific disciplines; how scientific knowledge and expertise served imperial projects; and how indigenous knowledge contributed to colonial science. The scientific dimension of European imperialism will be a major theme, including the ideological function that the idea of “modern science” played in forming European/Western identity and justifying colonialism. At the same time, we will consider recent studies of science in non-Western imperial contexts, such as the Ottoman Empire, China, and Japan. 

SPRING 2026

HIS 201W — Sources & General Literature of History: Advanced Topics in World History (4 units): Sen, Sudipta

Course description forthcoming

HIS 202H — "The United States and Latin America in the 19th and 20th Centuries"(4 units): St. John, Rachel

This course will cover the historical and historiographic intersections and overlaps between the fields of US and Latin American history. Students may apply the course to either the US or Latin American field degree requirements.

 

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 

His 202C: “Modernity” in Historical Context, Michael T. Saler
 
This seminar will address the closely interrelated concepts of “modernity,” "modernization,” and “modernism.” We will explore the ways in which these terms, originally formulated within a European context, are applicable to global and “planetary” histories, and examine selected issues that are seen to be quintessentially modern. These include: self-reflexive selfhood; the effects of new technologies on perception and the emergence of aesthetic modernism; concepts of rationality, disenchantment and re-enchantment, and the articulation of “postmodernity” as an alleged foil for “modernity."
Readings will include:

Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ed., Alternative Modernities (selections); Jerrold Seigel, Remaking the World: European Distinctiveness and the Transformation of Politics, Culture, and the Economy; Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Planetary Turn; Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time; Marshal Berman, All that is Solid Melts Into Air; Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Attention; Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self; Daniel Rogers, Age of Fracture; Tresch, The Romantic Machine; Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

 

History 202H, United States, Louis Warren

202H  Environmental History 

Wednesdays, 3:10-6:00 p.m. 
This class explores topics in environmental history, including Native American histories, colonization, urbanization, histories of enslavement and freedom, animal histories, climate change, politics, labor and nature.