Graduate Courses

The Middle Ages: An introduction to the history and historiography of Europe and the Mediterranean c. 300 – c,1500, emphasizing broad patterns of change and key interpretive debates. Themes include the end of the ancient world and the character of early medieval societies; political transformations east and west over the central Middle Ages; economic expansion and urban development; changes in ecclesiastical institutions and religious cultures. Students should expect to read and analyze c. 500 pages of monographic scholarship per week, preparing cogent notes and argument summaries. Requirements also include active, critical, and courteous participation in discussion; several presentations across the term; and two short essays akin to those expected of medieval history students in their third-semester screening examination.

For 280B, please use Class Number 22740. For 285B, please use Class Number 14926. In its ten pages, Immanuel Kant’s 1784 essay “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment” built a startlingly durable framework for thinking about the meaning of the eighteenth century. This class will investigate its key-terms – reason, the public, the state, religion, freedom, machines, mankind, human nature, progress – to reassess what Enlightenment was, both for Kant and for those who saw themselves involved in its intellectual, political, and religious projects. Readings for the course will include key authors like Spinoza, Diderot, Rousseau, and Kant, a wide range of contextual studies of eighteenth-century political and intellectual history, and a few influential contemporary perspectives on the still exigent question: what is Enlightenment?

This reading seminar focuses on major issues in American colonial and revolutionary history.  We will read a combination of classic works in this very rich and distinguished scholarly field, paired with recent scholarship addressing some of its timeless subjects in new and innovative ways.  Many of the readings will be grouped around issues under the broad umbrella of political economy, but as we move through the course there will be plenty of room to explore the ways other topics, such as religion and culture, sex and gender, race and ethnicity, war and violence, science and intellectual history, are woven into the fabric of early American history.  Assignments include frequent brief response papers, occasional classroom presentations, and an end of semester review essay, that will be worked through several drafts.

This course will survey major trends in the literature on Latin American history and historiography since independence. Our readings and discussions will tackle the topics of revolution, nation-building, science and technology, gender and sexuality, race and citizenship, labor, commodities, political culture, Cold War politics, violence and memory. Assignments include weekly reading notes, two turns as presenter and discussion leader, and a final review paper on any topic in modern Latin American historiography.

This course will focus on Zhangdi's reign in the Eastern Han capital of Luoyang, undertaking the sort of fine-grained research that went into Chang'an 26 BCE. The course reading will center on 3 topics: 1) urban form, 2) archaeology, 3) circumstances surrounding the composition of the Hanshu.

For 280H, please use Class Number 14903. For 285H, please use Class Number 14893.

The transfer of power from European colonizers to African leaders was a “tangled and controversial” process. In some colonies it was done in a precipitate manner while in others like Angola, Mozambique, Algeria, Namibia, Kenya and Guinea Bissau, decolonization was preceded by protracted armed struggles. This seminar will focus on the diverse dynamics which shaped the nationalist and decolonization processes. Differences in colonial systems, the nature of African political consciousness and mobilization, the role of the elite, peasantry, gender, ethnicity, race, religion, economic rationalization/ pragmatism, imperial revisionism and international pressure will be discussed in an effort to explain the diversity of trajectories that characterized the end of empire in Africa. A long paper (25-35 pages) and periodic oral presentations will be required. The seminar is also offered as a 285H. This option requires participation in the first six weeks of the seminar. For this group, the balance of the semester will be devoted to the preparation of their research paper whose final draft will be presented to the larger class.

This research workshop guides graduate students through the process of framing, researching, and writing an original, article-length paper in the field of environmental history, broadly construed. Students from all fields are welcome, but the workshop will be especially helpful for those working on topics that directly engage the historical relations among capitalism, law, and nature since 1492 and the Columbian Exchange. These include the changing place of non-human animals in society and the social imaginary; the rise and crisis of “cheap nature” and the distinctive modes of governance to which cheap nature gave rise; law’s role in naming, claiming, and ordering the natural world; anthropogenic environmental change; the advent of industrial, urban, and suburban ecosystems; the making, unmaking, and privatization of various commons; and the discursive (including legal but also literary, visual, and scientific) construction of distinctive spaces such as “the wilderness,” “the high seas,” “the hinterland,” and “the rust belt." For any topics or subfields in which I have limited or no expertise, I will consult with the relevant colleagues in History and other departments. The first two weeks of class will be devoted to reading articles on select themes in environmental history as a means of modeling a range (by no means exhaustive) of research and narrative strategies. We’ll then discuss how to refine your research topic and write a brief research prospectus. From there, class will be run as a workshop in which we’ll read and comment upon each other’s prospectuses and drafts.

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.