Global Arc

Who is a Hindu? Or, for that matter, who is a Muslim or an untouchable? Like today, these were vexed questions in pre-modern South Asia. This seminar will think through the history of social inequality and cultural difference in India from the earliest Muslim presence in South Asia until the region's conquest by the English East India Company in the eighteenth century. By juxtaposing modern-day scholarly writing on these subjects with primary-source material that circulated in a popular milieu, the seminar will encourage students to explore pre-modern responses to hierarchy, conflict, discrimination, and persecution.

This course will trace the history of Christianity in Africa from the first to twentieth centuries. We will focus on issues as diverse as the importance of Christians from Africa in the development of central Christian doctrines and institutions, the medieval Christian-Muslim encounter, the modern missionary movement, colonization and decolonization, the role of the church in freedom struggles, and more. We will ask the questions:how does studying the history of Christianity in Africa de-center Europe and the European experience in the history of Christianity? And:What would a global history of Christianity, pre-modern and modern, look like?

The course examines the fundamental changes after the end of the Roman empire in the writing of history. We will begin with Roman historians writing about barbarians, and continue to explore how in later centuries 'barbarian' and Christian men of the pen reinterpreted and continued these histories as cultural brokers, blending older Roman history with biblical narratives or stories and myths taken from their own imagined "primordial" pasts. In doing so we will observe that these histories not only reflect the fundamental changes from the late Roman empire to its medieval successor cultures, but also how they shaped these changes.

This course will explore the history of political propaganda in the context of mass politics, international rivalries, colonialism, and the rise of totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century. We will discuss the use (and abuse) of visual images and verbal messages, channels of delivering them to audiences, and their reactions. The topics for comparative and cross-cultural study of mass persuasion will include avant-garde art and propaganda, the cult of political leaders in totalitarian regimes, propaganda of hate and genocide, new media and terrorism, "weaponization" of information in international politics, and more.

Few political gestures are as ubiquitous or powerful as the appeal to our common "humanity." But a politics based on the human self (or, as it once was, "man") has often been accused of harboring limitations or prejudices that undercut its claim to be universal. More recently, the priority accorded to humans has been brought into question by studies into the cognitive and emotive capabilities of other animals, and developments in computing. In this course, we will examine the emergence of the human self as a master concept of politics, and we will also track the criticisms made by feminists, anti-colonial writers, and animal rights activists.

Catastrophe reveals the fragility of human society. This course examines a series of phenomena--plague, famine, war, revolution, economic depression etc.--in order to reach an understanding of humanity's imaginings of but also resilience to collective crises. We shall look in particular at how political forces such as empire have historically both generated and resisted global disasters. Material dealing with the especially fraught centuries at the transition between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period will be set alongside examples drawn from antiquity as well as our own contemporary era.

This course aims to explain the historical roles of fascism and antifascism in the making of our political world.

This seminar explores the history of Ukraine from the early 20th century through the present day. Though it covers a rather long period, this course is geared towards the contemporary events in the 21st century. We will try to understand how despite a relatively peaceful transition from communism to independence in the 20th century Ukraine became engulfed by a new war with unprecedented destruction. We start this seminar by setting up historical background of Ukrainian territories between the empire in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. We will end the course with discussion and analysis of most recent events in Ukraine.

Studies of war and society rarely address environmental factors and agency. The relationship between war and environment is often either reduced to a simple environmental determinism or it is depicted as a war against nature and ecosystems, playing down societal dynamics. The seminar explores the different approaches to the war-environment-society nexus and highlights how and why the three spheres should be studied in conjunction. The objective is to assess how and why environmental and societal factors and forces caused and shaped the conflicts and how in turn mass violence shaped societies and how they used and perceived their environments.

In 1917, a new socialist state emerged from the ruins of the old Romanov Empire, and the dreams of several generations of Russian radicals came true. This seminar explores the history of revolutionary ideas and movements in Russia from the 1860s, through the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917 and the emergence of new order in the early 1920s. We will read memoirs of terrorists, as well as cult novels of Russian revolutionary youth and political pamphlets of Russian Marxists and Bolsheviks. We will also analyze the role of women in the radical movement and the dynamics of mass political protests among workers, soldiers and peasants.