Fall 2023 Graduate Courses

Instructor: Christopher Morris
Monday 6:00pm-8:50pm

This course is a basic introduction to the discipline of history and is required for all History M.A. and Ph.D. students. No prior knowledge of historiographical issues is expected or required, and the course therefore should be accessible to students regardless of their field of interest or concentration.

History is not just a craft or a hobby; it is a way of thinking. It is an intellectual endeavor. This class is designed to make students think, not just about the past, but about how historians think about the past. This we will do by jumping into some of the ongoing debates among historians over what it is they do and how they ought to do whatever it is they do. We will consider broad philosophical problems, survey some of the social theories underlying (explicitly and implicitly) much of modern historical thought and review recent trends in the discipline. We will discuss literary theories that question the whole enterprise of historical research and writing as it has been practiced over the last century. As historians, you will not want to take any of this lying down, so to speak, but will want to engage these important matters of life and death (for the discipline of history) thoughtfully and enthusiastically.

The course will be divided into four or five sections, in which we will read about and discuss what it is historians do or think they do or say they ought to do. And then we will explore some examples of history theory and method applied to a particular topic. Historians disagree rather widely on what it is they do and how they do it. Some, you may be surprised to learn, don't believe the past is knowable at all. Others think it can be known and known quite precisely. Some think the best histories tell good stories. Others think stories are for novels and history is about analysis and explanation. It's enough to keep a good historian awake at night in existential insomnia. My intent is to give the class a few sleepless nights.

Instructor: Evelyn Montgomery
Wednesday 6:00pm-8:50pm

This course will explore the theoretical, methodological, and practical issues of bringing informative, collaborative historical interpretation to the public. Readings, discussion and site visits or guest speakers will explain the practice of history in museums, archives, historic preservation, and online outreach. Texts include An American Association for State and Local History Guide to Making Public History (Bob Beatty, ed.), Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner Cities (Andrew Hurley), and readings on oral history, interpretive writing, nostalgia and public memory, and historical relevance for the modern learner.

Assignments include a resume written after review of the job skills required in the current public history job market, a review paper comparing a traditional and a recent piece of public history writing, evaluation of an exhibit visited by the class, and an analysis of a building, landscape, or artifact and how it could be interpreted to educate the public.

For the final project, students will use the knowledge they gained from an academic research project they have done in the past. They will adapt that knowledge to formats appropriate for public history communication: an exhibit plan, a lecture for a casual audience, a grant application, and an educational component for children.

Instructor: James Sandy
Wednesday 6:00pm-8:50pm

This reading colloquium focuses on the established and expanding scholarship concerning America's Vietnam War, its generational impact, and its long cultural legacy. Assigned readings include foundational works on the war and its causes alongside contemporary works focusing on the war's cultural and societal consequences.

Instructor: Dr. Kenyon Zimmer
Wednesday 6:00pm-8:50pm

This reading colloquium focuses on recent historical scholarship dedicated the interconnected topics of mass incarceration and mass deportation in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States. The assigned readings include major works in the emerging fields of carceral history and the history of deportation, as well as even newer works that combine both perspectives to study immigrant detention.

Tentative reading list.

• Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007)
• Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (2017)
• Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (2017)
• Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (2016)
• Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (2017)
• Robert T. Chase, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners' Rights in Postwar America (2020)
• Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2003)
• Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (2006)
• Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (2017)
• Ethan Blue, The Deportation Express: A History of America through Forced Removal (2021)
• Elliott Young, Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World's Largest Immigrant Detention System (2021)
• Jessica Ordaz, The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity (2021)
• Kristina Shull,  Detention Empire: Reagan's War on Immigrants and the Seeds of Resistance (2022)

Instructor: Paulina Hartono
Tuesday 6:00pm-8:50pm

This course introduces students to major debates and questions within the field of Science and Technology Studies as it pertains to modern East Asia. We will look at global histories that describe how modernity was predicated upon scientific and technological progress, while also interrogating what it meant to be “modern” and on what terms in China, Japan, and Korea.

Instructor: Dr. Kenyon Zimmer
Wednesday 5:00pm-5:50pm

This one-hour course is required for all incoming History PhD students and is also open to other students enrolled in the History MA and PhD programs. It will introduce students to skills and information needed to succeed as both graduate students and as eventual professional historians both within and outside of academia, including how to apply for funding, how to write a teaching statement, and how to compile a CV and a resume.

Instructor: John Garrigus
Thursday 6:00pm-8:50pm

The term “Age of Atlantic Revolution" refers to the interrelated political upheavals of the years 1648-1815. These events transformed societies around the Atlantic world, most famously in England’s Glorious Revolution (1688-89), the American Revolution (1774-83), the French Revolution (1789-99) and the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). Some scholars define the Age of Revolution to include nonviolent transformations like the Industrial Revolution and British abolition of the slave trade (1807).

The goal of the semester is for each student to research, write, and present a paper about an aspect of the Age of Revolutions. The paper will be based on original primary source research and should be about 20 pages long, not including notes and bibliography.

We’ll begin the semester reading 4 recent books and a handful of articles about this period. This 5-week survey will provide students with basic background information, familiarize them with historiographic traditions, and introduce new research approaches. In weeks 6 through 10, students will define their research in consultation with Professor Garrigus and draft a preliminary introduction to their paper. They’ll present that introduction to the class. In weeks 11 through 15 students will write their papers and present them to the class in the final meeting.

Instructor: Dr. Patryk Babiracki
Thursday 6:00pm-8:50pm

In this research seminar students will examine the mechanisms of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe since the gestation of Stalin’s new empire during WW II through the end of the Cold War. We will focus on the complex relationships between empire, various communist states and societies by interrogating three main themes: 1) the transformations of East European institutions, the tension between the “Sovietized” model and the national variants, control and governance; 2) the Cold War as experienced in communist societies in the USSR and the Soviet sphere of influence; 3) Cross-border traffic and interactions within and across the region as a challenge to the official vision of rational, industrially-driven modernity. Students will have the opportunity to engage critically with a sample of classic and recent scholarship on the subject, and to work closely with primary source documents, as well as to think about the parallels between the present Russian efforts to build empire and the Soviet imperial project during the Cold War. The class will meet in person during the first three weeks and then students will pursue independent research projects, leading up to presentations and fifteen-page research papers.