Graduate Courses

The landmarks of Soviet historiography from Leon Trotsky to the latest academic fad, in loose chronological order. Weekly book reviews, no papers.

Spanning the 17th through the 20th centuries this course sets out to explore the way Europeans, Americans and Israelis have imagined and represented Biblical Israel.  Among the topics we will address are: Spinoza’s heresy, the Enlightenment Bible, the politics of archaeology, histories of Ancient Israel, Christian and Jewish representations of Jesus and the Holy Land, Israelite-Sephardic authenticity and Masada and the Zionist imagination.

• For 280B, use class number 24511
• For 285B, use class number 21606

This course is part 1 of a two-part course, with the second half to be taught by Mark Csikszentmihalyi (EALC) in the spring of 2019.  Every three weeks this course will examine an important tomb site whose manuscripts, layout, and other tomb contents have provided important evidence for the reconstruction of life in early China.  In the fall semester, the tombs whose site and contents will be reviewed will including Liye (Hunan), Zhangjiashan, the tombs of Zhang Anshi (Shaanxi, in Xi'an) and Haihun hou (Jiangsi), Fuyang (Anhui), and Zhangjiashan (Hubei, near modern Jingzhou).  Students will have the opportunity to explore how an object's medium affects its reception, also to compare received texts to those that have been scientifically excavated.

We will be reading the emerging scholarship on World War One in the Ottoman Empire in light of a) the larger concerns of scholarship on World War One in European and Russian historiography, and b) the existing patterns and disjunctures in Ottoman and Modern MIddle East/Balkan historiography. Topics will include constitutionalism, Balkan Wars, ethnic/confessional conflict, genocide, peace settlements, and divergences and convergences in the "post-Ottoman" space. A paper involving a critique of historiography and/or a research paper based on primary sources will be required, depending on whether students take the class as a 280 or 285 (in consultation with the professor).

This class will introduce graduate students to a variety of techniques and theories used in teaching history at the university level. It will examine readings dealing with a range of classroom situations, opportunities, and challenges, with the goal of enabling future college teachers of history to understand the learning process of their students and to develop and improve their own teaching skills. The course will have two primary goals: (1) to train graduate students to work more effectively as graduate student instructors in history classes at Berkeley; and (2) to introduce students to techniques of designing and running their own classes that they will use when they become independent instructors and, ultimately, professors of history in their own right.