Courses
This course explores the global history of political struggles over the production, circulation, and consumption of illicit drugs from the early modern period to the present.
This course explores the contested politics of Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan from the early twentieth century to the present.
This course explores the history and politics of Islam in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas and reconstructs the novel connections that have linked Muslim communities across the globe in modern times.
HISTORY 1C explores the making of our modern world. It investigates the interconnected histories of revolution, war, imperialism, migration, race, slavery, democracy, rebellion, nationalism, feminism, socialism, fascism, genocide, anti-colonialism, neoliberalism, and populist authoritarianism. Analyzing memoirs, novels, films, and other sources, we examine how key political ideas have transformed societies, cultures, and economies across the globe from the late eighteenth century through to the present.
This course explores the history of resistance to the Russian state, from peasant, Cossack, and Bashkir rebellions in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, the emergence of the intelligentsia and revolutionary terror in the nineteenth century, the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the politics of opposition and personal autonomy under Stalinism, to the wars accompanying the break-up of the USSR, and to the practices of dissent in Putin’s Russia and their regional effects.
Why do we categorize some acts of violence as terrorism? How do people who engage in such violence legitimize their actions? What are the effects of terror on politics, society, and culture? This course explores these questions around the globe from the nineteenth century to the present.
More than 100 million people across the planet have been forcibly displaced from their homes in recent years. How do we account for this crisis? And how might we imagine altering its trajectory?
“When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.” The writer Edna O’Brien’s portrait of Irish life encapsulates a history shaped by colonialism, famine, forced migration, and enduring political struggle. This course explores the global story of Ireland, a small land of 4.8 million that since 1800 has produced a diaspora of some 10 million people worldwide. Colonized and colonizers, freedom fighters and slave-owners, the starving and the wealthy, pious and irreverent – the Irish reveal their past through historical records, poetry, short stories, novels, film, and television.
Can historical thinking produce more humane forms of politics in the present and alternative visions for the future?
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