Graduate Seminar Course Descriptions
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History 299S.02 - Malachi Hacohen
Postwar Europe Politics, Society, and Culture
The postwar years 1945-1968 constitute a distinct period in European history, a time when a divided Europe lost its global hegemony and retreated from its colonial possessions, and two military alliances, controlled by the USA and Soviet Union, dominated much of its foreign politics. It was also a period when unprecedented economic growth created, in Western Europe, an affluent consumer society, and the welfare state and Keynesian economic management provided for a social security network that eliminated poverty and guaranteed stability. The postwar era represented a stark contrast to the preceding epoch of Fascism and World War, and to the succeeding period of student revolution, stagflation, social unrest, and what a prominent Cold War liberal, Raymond Aron, called European "decadence," i. e., reluctance to fight the Cold War.
This course is a readings colloquium on politics, society, and culture in Western Europe during the postwar years. It begins with general readings on Western Europe and establishes the main political, social, economic, and cultural features of the postwar years, then proceeds to the intellectual life of postwar Europe, focusing on Cold War liberalism and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The course also addresses the debate on the welfare state, its problems, and its critics on the left.
History 312.01 - John French
Readings in Modern Latin America and Caribbean History
This graduate reading course reflects a considered up-to-date judgment as to some of the most compelling recent monographs in the twentieth century history of the region with an eye on geographic and thematic balance. The reading for the course consist of eleven books, ten monographs and one work of theory that will be the focus of our substantive first class meeting on 28 August. It will also serve as the prompt for the first class writing assignment due on 22 September in which you will use Sartre to explore Friedrick Katz's monumental biography of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa.
Of the ten assigned monographs, the earliest was published in 1998 while the other nine have all appeared since 2002, with three of the ten appearing in 2007-08. In terms of regional focus, the region will receive balanced attention with three weeks on Mexico , two weeks on Brazil , and two weeks on the Spanish-speaking Caribbean ( Cuba , Dominican Republic ). In addition, we will spend three weeks on Central American ( Panamá , Costa Rica , El Salvador ), one week on Bolivia , and one week on a regional survey of intellectual, cultural, and artistic life since 1950.
The general thematic and topical coverage is as follows: Revolution (Katz, Gould & Lauria-Santiago, Gleijeses); State formation and popular politics (Turits, Gotkowitz, French); War, violence, and massacre (Katz, Gould and Lauria-Santiago, Turits); Different varieties of rural folk (Katz, Turits, Putnam); Urban life and social actors (French, McCann, Franco); Global and the transnational as a research methodology (McGuiness, Gleijeses, Putnam); US/Latin American relations (Katz, McGuiness, Gleijeses); Gender (Putnam); Legal history (French); Cultural and intellectual history (McCann, Franco)
History 359.01 - Dirk Bonker
Readings in Military History: Gendering Military History
This course explores gender as a category of analysis in military history. Our discussions will begin with surveys and programmatic statements about the development, meanings, and boundaries of military history and gender history as academic fields and intellectual enterprises. We will then read outstanding examples of the growing literature that is gendering the study of war, military, and society, with a focus on work done within the context of modern European and U.S. histories. Among our readings are studies of the lived experiences and representations of militarized masculinities in times of war and peace; of the militarization of women's lives and their roles in war preparations and pursuits on the "home front" and in the military itself; of the identity politics and imagery of nations at war; of constructions of citizenship in the crucibles of military service and war; and of the sexual politics of civil defense and military-related prostitution.
History 360.01 - Laura Edwards
Research in North American History
This research seminar is open to students who study any topic in North American history. Students will pursue their own topics and write a paper based in primary (although not necessarily archival) sources. The assumption is that they will come to the course with a general topic and will have done some preliminary research on it. The course is then designed to provide support in the research and writing process, with an emphasis on the particular issues raised in writing about North America . Class meetings will focus on the following issues: 1) central conceptual issues in the field and their relationship to students' research interests; 2) the implications of conceptual issues for the interpretation of sources; 3) the challenges of writing and editing. In many classes, we will discuss secondary works, considering them as models for research and writing. The emphasis will be on the relationship of those books to students' particular projects, with the goal of framing and focusing those projects. In each class we will also focus on issues in interpretation and writing, drawing on the students' own research. We will discuss issues raised by in students' sources and strategies for addressing research questions. We will also consider the more difficult issue of what, in terms of evidence, is necessary to make an analysis convincing. The last classes focus specifically on the writing process, with students reading and editing each other's work.
There will be short assignments for each class, which are meant to provide a platform for discussion of each other's research and writing. Although the assignments are ungraded, they each count toward the final participation grade. Participation is also evaluated through students' contributions in class discussion. To that end, students are expected to do the reading assigned for each class–both the books and the other students' posted assignments on the course Blackboard site. The final research is 80% of the grade; class participation is 20%.
History 361.01 - Susan Thorne
Research in European History: Research in British Archives
The sun never set on the British Empire, which continues to make British archival and other primary sources of interest to scholars working across an enormous expanse of time as well as space. This course will support students engaged in primary research utilizing British source material. In addition to early modern and modern British history, British sources are vital to the study of the British Empire and Commonwealth as well as many topics within colonial American, Caribbean, African, and Asian history, comparative women's history, comparative labor history, military history, intellectual history and the history of science and medicine. Emphasis will be placed on the surprisingly rich British source material available at Duke and at UNC or through Interlibrary loan, on the basis of which each student will produce an article-length paper. Students will also be introduced to the contents of collections not available in the US, enhancing the archival specificity of future grant proposals and the dissertation prospectus.
History 363.01 - Bruce Hall
Research in African and Asian History
Histories without States: Migrants, Merchants and Moral Economies across Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
Transnational histories of commercial and intellectual networks have helped to redefine academic fields that were once dominated by geographically based area-studies approaches. In this course, recent literature on networks of traders, migrants and teachers who travelled and corresponded across Asia and Africa will be explored. The course will be divided into two parts. In the first part, we will devote our attention to discussing the strengths and weaknesses of these new approaches to the writing of African, Asian and Middle Eastern histories. The second half of the course will be devoted to individual research projects that suit student research interests and needs. The course is open to students in all specialized fields.
History 365.01 - Martin A. Miller
Research in Global Connections: World Terrorism and Problems in the Comparative History of Political Violence
This research seminar, open to students in all specialized fields, will be focused on the origins, evolution and development of the role of political violence in Western society over the course of the last two centuries. Our methodological focus will be comparative and transnational, with major attention devoted to events and theories in Western Europe, Russia and the U.S. Readings will include texts written by advocates of terrorism which will be framed in their historical contexts. We will also attempt to confront the ethical dimensions embedded in these texts. Students will conceptualize a proposal for a research paper midway through the term, and the latter part of the seminar will be centered on the completion of these projects.
History 372 - Anna Krylova
Research in Gender
This course consists of two parts. Part One that lasts half a semester and introduces students to resent scholarship, debates, and interpretive methods of gender and cultural history. It draws on field-defining and innovative work of the last decade written by gender scholars including scholars working at Duke History and Literature departments. Part Two is devoted to learning different genres of academic writing and closely working on one of them based on your research interests and needs: research paper, conference talk, historiographical essay, journal article, volume article, dissertation chapter. The goal of the second part of the course is to help the student to work on a project that best fits his or her current academic agenda and research goals.
History 378 - Sumathi Ramaswamy
Empires of Vision
This seminar is concerned with demonstrating that global empires and modern regimes of visuality are mutually implicated, and even constitutive of each other. What specific visual practices and technologies do modern empires cultivate and desire? In turn, how are these transformed through their entanglement in empire building and the consolidation of imperial sovereignty? With a comparative focus on the British and French empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we will explore imperial visual practices related to history and landscape painting; photography; commercial and documentary film; maps and scientific drawings; political prints and advertisements; documentary and commercial film; and object collection, museums and international exhibitions, to understand how the production, circulation, and reception of visual objects and images fundamentally shaped imperial sovereignty and power. We will also analyze postcolonial deployments of such practices to understand if and how imperial visual technologies of rule and governance are recast and challenged, as well as linger on in Europe 's former colonies. Not least, we will rethink existing theories of vision and visuality—informed largely by Euro-American experiences—through the optic and logic of global imperialism. In other words, what might the contours and concerns of a new postcolonial theory of visuality look like?