Instructor: Patrick Whitmarsh
Meeting time: Thursday, 3:00-5:00

This seminar explores the idea of the road in postwar American literature and cultural history, paying particular attention to how this idea changes along with shifting dynamics of race, gender, and class.  In addition to its relationship to cultural and national identity, students will examine how the road redefines notions of space, place, and belonging in the second half of the twentieth century. ... Read more about HIST-LIT 90AT: The Postwar American Road Narrative

Instructor: Kathryn Brackney
Meeting time: Monday, 3:00-5:00

In the first half the twentieth century, Europe was the site of two wars that depleted the world’s population, dislocated millions, and stripped once diverse regions of the continent of their minority populations. Even as Europe started to rebuild itself in the 1950s, progress occurred under the shadow of two hegemonic superpowers in possession of weapons capable of incinerating not just both sides of the Iron Curtain but the entire planet.... Read more about HIST-LIT 90DZ: Too Soon? Comedy in Europe’s Tragic Twentieth Century

Instructor: James Mestaz
Meeting time: Tuesday, 3:00 - 5:00

Water is life, but is it a human right? Water governance is a contentious issue globally because humans rely on water for nearly every productive activity; moreover, it is often scarce and not distributed equally. To better understand the persistence and escalation of struggles over water access around the world, this course uses a multidisciplinary approach ... Read more about HIST-LIT 90EA: Water Justice and Resistance in the Americas

Instructor: John Boonstra
Meeting time: Wednesday, 12:45 - 2:45

Questions of empire are fundamentally intertwined with questions of gender. This course will focus on the imperial and intercultural contact zones of the Mediterranean—at once connecting and dividing Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa—from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. With an interest both in men’s and women’s experiences and in representations... Read more about HIST-LIT 90EB: Gender and Empire in the Modern Mediterranean

Instructor: Thomas Dichter
Meeting time: Thursday, 3:00 - 5:00

The United States currently keeps more people behind bars than any other country. While the US’s emergence as the leader in incarceration rates is relatively recent, the prison has loomed large in American public life for 200 years. In this class, we will approach the prison not as a marginal phenomenon, but as an institution central to American culture. Readings include ... Read more about HIST-LIT 90CF: The American Prison & the Literature of Punishment

Instructor: Jonathan Square
Meeting time: Tuesday, 3:00 - 5:00

This course examines the politics of fashion among people of African descent during slavery and the period immediately followed emancipation. Fashion is generative, yet underutilized analytic to explore the experience of the enslaved and their descendants. Geographical breadth is crucial to examining the African Diaspora in its full complexity; therefore, course material ... Read more about HIST-LIT 90CU: Fashion and Slavery

Instructor: Briana Smith
Meeting time: Monday, 3:00 - 5:00

In this course, we will examine the history of Berlin from the "rubble years" after World War II, through the aftermath of German unification in the 1990s from the perspective of the history of everyday life. Our discussion of diaries, primary source documents, historical studies, literature, films, art, and music produced in divided Berlin will reveal how the divided city shaped individual... Read more about HIST-LIT 90DG: Everyday Life in Cold War Berlin

Instructor: Beatrice Wayne
Meeting time: Tuesday, 9:45 - 11:45

What is the role of the student in the struggle for global justice? Do students bear particular responsibility in addressing global inequalities? How does student activism differ from other forms of activism, and how do they intersect? Has student activism changed over time, and have different student movements across the world exhibited different characteristics? ... Read more about HIST-LIT 90DH: Students at the Barricades: Student Activism in Global Perspective

Instructor: Ellen Song
Meeting time: Thursday, 9:45 - 11:45

Speculative fiction, especially science fiction, is known to be a predominantly white genre; data from one source, the sci-fi trade journal Locus, indicates that less than 5% of SF and fantasy books published are by writers of color. This course examines in an intentionally multi-ethnic framework speculative fiction written by African American, Asian American, and white authors alike in ... Read more about HIST-LIT 90DI: Speculative Fictions in Multiethnic America

Instructor: Chris Clements
Meeting time: Monday, 9:45 - 11:45

This course will explore various forms of Native American cultural and political production in the twentieth century. Drawing on fiction, film, historical documents, documentaries, photographs, nonfiction, and memoirs, this class will explore the ways in which Indigenous people have articulated both belonging and separateness from the United States. In addition to its focus ... Read more about HIST-LIT 90DJ: From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock: Native America in the Twentieth Century

Instructor: Catherine Nguyen
Meeting time: Wednesday, 3:00 - 5:00

The seminar works through Asian American literature by focusing on the genre and form of comics and graphic novels.  Through these illustrative and textual works, we will explore the Asian American experience of immigration and racial difference as well as the construction of Asian American identity and representation through possible works, such as Adrian ... Read more about HIST-LIT 90DK: Asian/American Graphic Novels

Instructor: Jennifer Brady
Meeting time: Thursday, 9:45 - 11:45

This seminar focuses on the United States before 1865. Poised halfway between our current moment and the seemingly archaic, superstitious fervor of the Salem Witch Trials, America in the antebellum era was in the process of fitfully, at times reluctantly, becoming modern. We will focus on strange objects, photographs of dead children, the spectacles created by P. T. Barnum, ... Read more about HIST-LIT 90DO: Old Weird America

Instructor: Drew Faust
Meeting time: Monday, 3:00 - 5:00

This course will explore speeches across the sweep of American history, examining them both as windows into their own era and as texts created to inform and persuade.  We will ask who speaks and how and the ways that has evolved over time, and we will seek to identify the enduring and changing elements of effective oratory from Jonathan Edwards to Frederick Douglass to J.K. ... Read more about HIST-LIT 90DR: American Speeches

Instructor: Mark Sanchez
Meeting time: Monday, 12:45 - 2:45

This course will focus on Asian American history from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Our aim will be to engage the longer history of Asian migration and labor in the United States. As such, we will focus on topics prior to the Immigration Act of 1924 (also sometimes known as the Asian Exclusion Act). We will explore how empire, capital, and labor informs the transnational movements ... Read more about HIST-LIT 90DT: Asian American History

Instructor: Devin McGeehan Muchmore
Meeting time: Wednesday, 12:45 - 2:45

This course introduces students to twentieth-century U.S. LGBTQ history through a deep engagement with one of its signature methods­—oral history. Oral history has been an essential method for queer historians because personal narratives shed light on the experiences, perceptions, and desires of sexual and gender minorities who too often appear in textual records only as ... Read more about HIST-LIT 90DU: Queer Oral Histories

Instructor: Steve Biel and Lauren Kaminsky
Meeting time: Thursday, 3:00 - 5:00

When, in his 2019 State of the Union address, President Trump said, “We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country,” he invoked American rhetoric that reaches back to the European revolutions of 1848. The first so-called Red Scare, precipitated by World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, ... Read more about HIST-LIT 90DV: Red Scares

Instructor: Andrew Pope
Meeting time: Tuesday, 3:00 - 5:00

The course examines the intertwined histories of race, gender, and sexuality in the American South from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 through the present. We will consider how struggles for gender and sexual freedom are linked to race in the modern South. The course proceeds along two tracks: first, we gain knowledge about the lives of women, trans people, and gay people... Read more about HIST-LIT 90DW: Queering the South: Race, Gender, & Sexuality in the American South

Instructor: Arianne Sedef Urus
Meeting time: Wednesday, 9:45 - 11:45

This course examines how the right to natural resources became contested in North America following European conquest and westward expansion, with a particular emphasis on the period before 1865. Sometimes these contested resources have been clean air, soil, and water, while at other times they included fisheries, forests, agricultural fields, animal pastures, or oil. From ... Read more about HIST-LIT 90DX: Environmental Justice in North America

Instructor: Ernest Mitchell
Meeting time: Thursday, 12:45 - 2:45

This course examines the early 20th century expansion of U.S. military influence in the Atlantic and Pacific, and how this expansion shaped and was shaped by theories of race. Beginning with the Spanish-American War (1898), we will follow a series of U.S. interventions in the Atlantic (Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Puerto Rico, ... Read more about HIST-LIT 90DY: Race and American Empire