Graduate Courses

We shall read and discuss genuinely excellent English-language monographs on Japanese history from the classical period to the present. The canon, as it were. The top hits, old and new, that deserve (and reward) careful attention. All welcome (auditors, visitors, old and new friends), as long as you read the work resourcefully and are ready for searching conversation. Selective attendance by auditors is fine.

A major and enduring trend in the historiography of late imperial and modern China has been the turn to cultural history. The focus on culture has not excluded attention to the state, economy, warfare or social classes, but rather provided new lenses through which to view them. New attention to material, commercial, print, religious, and physical culture has shifted, and in some cases fundamentally altered, our understanding of the last few centuries of Chinese history. In this course we will engage recent influential scholarship on these and other areas of cultural history, and ask how these applications of the cultural lens has changed the field. A main concern of the course will be preparation for qualifying exams. Requirements: class presentations, two short papers, and one term paper involvingsecondary source research.

The aim of this course is to introduce students to a variety of difficult texts drawn from the medical, legal, commentarial, and apocryphal texts in the received tradition, along with several newly excavated manuscripts. (All of these texts will be punctuated, although disputes over punctuation will inevitably crop up, given the features of early manuscript culture.) Examples from the received tradition will include selections from the Documents (Shangshu ), with two major commentaries, the Shangshu dazhuan 尚書大傳 ascribed to Fu Sheng 伏勝 (Western Han) and the Correct Meanings 尚書正義 compiled by Kong Yingda 孔穎達 (Tang); the Yi Zhou shu with two relatively recent commentaries, those by Zhu Youzeng 朱右曾 and Huang Huaixin 黄怀信; the apocryphal texts indexed by Yasui Kōzan and Nakamura Ch_hati in the six-volume Chōshū isho shūsei重修緯書集成; and some excavated manuscripts, including the Kongjiapo 孔家坡 and Zhangjiashan 張家山 "Pulse Text" strips, and "Wanwu" 萬物. By the end of the course, students should have moved well beyond their knowledge from preliminary courses in classical Chinese, gaining sufficient confidence to tackle difficult texts in the technical and polemical categories.

<p>North Africa has long been considered a space apart in the Western Roman empire, not least because of its long periods of peace and prosperity. As Brent Shawís 2011 book on Sacred Violence stresses, however, peace and prosperity were achieved in a context of strive. What then was going on in this province? What does recent research, including archaeological research tell us? How did this part of the empire transform itself into a Christian part, and what are the repercussions? And how different was Africa? Tracing the history of the region between (roughly) the rule of Diocletian and the end of the Vandals should shed some light on a number of important questions, from rural settlements to the decline of Rome ñ even if, inevitably, the figure of Augustine will tower over all else.</p>

The English Revolution (1640-1660) was an epochal event in British history and European history more broadly. It marked the first time in the western tradition that a representative assembly asserted sovereignty against its monarch and the first time that a European monarchy was overthrown and replaced with a republic. It was also the high-water mark of the European Reformations as for the first and only time a major territorial state was taken over by radical Protestants who sought to push beyond Calvinism. Out of this ferment arose great works of political thought (e.g. Hobbes's Leviathan) great works of literature (e.g. Milton's Paradise Lost), and great religious movements (e.g. Quakerism). Yet for all its importance, historians cannot even agree what to call this event (English Revolution? Civil War? Puritan Revolution? British Revolutions? British Civil Wars? Wars of the Three Kingdoms?) much less agree about its causes and consequences. This graduate seminar explores the critical historiography of the English Revolution (as I prefer to call it!) as well as engaging with many key primary sources in order to help graduate students to understand and investigate this critical historical period. Open to graduate students only, but graduate students from English Literature, Political Science, and other related fields are encouraged to enroll.

This course explores the development of European economies and the creation of new Atlantic economic systems during the era of European contact with and expansion into the "new worlds" of sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas. In doing so, it also attends to distinctive features of economic life emerging in this era - new theories of political economy, experiments in monetary systems and credit networks, radical new forms of slavery and labor commodification, the rise of cultures of consumption - that helped to create the modern world. It is intended for graduate students in history and related disciplines, working in any relevant geographical areas, whose interests pertain to this subject.

In this course, we will survey the new historiography of human rights and identify some of its main problems, in particular its relations to other fields of historical inquiry (the histories of empire, citizenship, humanitarianism, genocide, international law, decolonization, and the end of the Cold War, among others). What kind of historical narratives are emerging if familiar histories are retold in the new idiom of human rights? The course is comparative in scope and chronologically broad, ranging from early modern natural rights theories to the present concern with humanitarian interventions. Readings include: Christopher Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights. Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Rights. Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights. Akira Iriye et al. (eds.), The Human Rights Revolution. Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law. Paul Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights. Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Jeffrey Wasserstrom et. al. (eds.), Human Rights and Revolutions [2nd., revised edition].

<p>History 275B is the foundational course in the history of early modern Europe from roughly 1400 to 1800, or from the Renaissance through the French Revolution. The course offers an intensive introduction to major themes and historiographical debates and aims to develops graduate students' skills in historical criticism. It is intended for graduate students in the history department with EME as their first or second field; other graduate students may take the course with permission of the instructor.</p>

This course is not meant to cover the history of 20th century Europe. Its goal rather is to stimulate conversation on a series of provocative questions relating to the history of the continent in this period. Course readings touch upon following issues: Revolutionary era: 1917 and beyond Enemies of democracy and their programs Leninist and fascist "civilizations." Submersion of the world wars in European collective memory collaboration: "Victims" as collaborators. Collaborators as "democrats." Intellectuals and the Cold War The dialectics of German unity in a divided Europe Revolutionary era: 1989 and beyond Europe unified and divided: the Bosnian crisis Throughout the emphasis is on readability and new questions, rather than on panoramic view or systematic geographic and thematic coverage. Students will write one twenty page paper on a subject of their choice, as well as a number of short reviews.

 This seminar is designed to introduce students to an intensive examination of the major themes and issues concerning the history of the Jews in Germany from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.  German Jews made defining innovations in Jewish life while at the same time, they also contributed to general western culture to a degree disproportionate to their numbers.  No other Jewish community has had such a profound effect on both Jewish and European civilizations concurrently. Among the topics to be explored are the debates over Jewish emancipation, the scholarly and religious life of German Jews, integration into and separation from the mainstream, German antisemitism and Jewish responses, economic transformations, communal organization and family life, Jewish culture in the Weimar Republic, life under Nazi rule, Jewish life in postwar Germany.

"We have lost the Reformation," says the Berlin historian Heinz Schilling. This seminar/colloquium presupposes that, if "the Reformation" has been lost, its counterparts will be found elsewhere and -when. The course responds to the rising interest in the impact of religion on the histories of society, politics, and culture. It is designed for graduate students majoring in the early modern or late modern Europe, US history, or history-related disciplines. There are two principal themes: Part I, the history of interpretations of the Protestant and Catholic reformations; and Part II, the current arguments about the relationships of the reformations to the modern age. In Part I the weight of readings and discussions ranges from the late 18th to the mid-20th century (early modernists may well choose earlier subjects). Possible common readings include texts from the German idealists (Fichte, Hegel, Ranke); American and British romantics (Parkman, Bancroft, Carlyle); continental Roman Catholics (Mohler, Dollinger); liberal Protestants (Macaulay, Ritschl, Weber, Troeltsch, Holl); and Marxists (Engels, Kautsky, Ernst Bloch, Tawney). In Part II the readings will be drawn from leading works written within the past half-century, especially those which deal with the pluralization of ";reformation"; as a historical concept, the convergence of the Protestant and Catholic reformation, and the formulation and critique sociological and anthropological interpretations. Each student will choose a theme for a seminar paper and report on the subject to the seminar during the late weeks of the semester. Students who seek seminar credit (285B) must work in primary sources in the original language(s); other students will receive colloquium credit (280B). Research topics should reflect the students' interests and, where appropriate, be designed to explore possible dissertation themes. The common readings will be available in English, though students are encouraged to read in other languages, and some texts will be distributed in the digital format or hard copy.

In this course we will study the modern history of German Jews through an examination of the perceived physical and psychological nature of their Jewishness. In other words, we will study the Jewish body, as both Jews and non-Jews represented it. What is special about Germany in this regard was the unparalleled access to medical knowledge the Jews enjoyed there. Beginning in the eighteenth century, Jews used medicine to engage with the entire universe of assumptions, both positive and negative that characterized the discourse on the corporeal nature of Jewishness. Beyond this medicine was used by Jews as a tool to fashion modern Jewish ideologies and promote social change. As such, the Jewish body can be used as a meaningful lens through which to observe the German-Jewish encounter with modernity.

No intellectual of our time has generated as many productive controversies as the leading figure of the second generation of the Frankfurt School, Jurgen Habermas. Embodying in his own practice the principles of communicative rationality he so avidly defends on the level of theory, Habermas has responded to an extraordinary number of interlocutors, and in so doing raised the level of intellectual discourse in several different contexts. This course will combine readings of several of his own seminal texts with an examination of the rebuttals and counter rebuttals they have engendered.

This seminar introduces graduate students both to classics in the field of religious history and to recent new approaches to the history of medieval Christianity. Although spanning the entire medieval millennium (500-1500), the course will give most attention to the central and later Middle Ages where the most innovative work on Christian history has focused. Topics include the Christianization of Europe, new religious movements during the central and later Middle Ages, spirituality and religious practices, the definition and persecution of heresy, historical attempts to assess norms of belief and practice, and inter-disciplinary approaches to the study of medieval Christianity.

This writing and research workshop is designed for graduate students interested in producing elegant, article-length scholarly papers based on original historical research within the time frame of single semester. All topics and methodologies in the study of nineteenth-century U.S. history are welcome.

Continuation of 200A. This course presents a general survey from 1800 to the present, with the primary focus on Europe and the US. Topics include: the rise of scientific medicine; the significance of germ theory; the development of medical therapeutics and technologies; the growth of health care institutions; the evolution and specialization of the medical profession.

A one-semester, two-unit course open to both graduate and undergraduate students. There are no prerequisites but enrollment is limited to six and by consent of the instructor. Two sections are offered, Wednesday and Friday. Interested students should contact Les Ferriss at lesferriss@earthlink.net. Under the guidance of the instructor, students will examine and discuss original printed books from the Bancroft collections, ranging from 15th century to the present. The class will also hand-set and print a small book on the Bancroft's iron handpresses. The texts are drawn from the Bancroft's manuscript collections.