AMH 5930 – Power and Policing in Cities
Dr. Lauren Pearlman
Description:
This seminar investigates one of the most powerful forces shaping urban environments. We will look at cities in different hemispheres (with a focus on North America) to explore how urban spaces are policed (a term that we will define broadly to include political, social, economic, and gendered policing efforts). We will read works by scholars who look at issues of urban policing and examine how they frame arguments about cities in different geographic regions. We will examine the ways that different structures and agents (city planners, policy makers, police, growth machines) attempt to police urban spaces and how residents find creative solutions to fight back against government policies, local police, and private organizations that encroach upon their rights. Over the course of the semester, we will cover issues such as conquest, riots and rebellions, violence and security, capital accumulation, migration, quality of life campaigns, and incarceration. Sample questions include: how do various groups define and control territory? How do they make and mark space? What is the role of the various militias, “para- militaries”, mercenaries, and guerrillas in the history of colonial/neo-colonial control of cities? How has neoliberalism changed the policing of cities? How do city dwellers resist policing efforts? We will pay special attention to the relationship between the control of space and the exercise of power and keep a sustained focus on those who find ways to rebel against the borders and boundaries imposed upon them by the state.
Note: Students will be required to work on a semester-long research paper or equivalent project on a relevant topic. You will also edit the work of your peers, meet individually with me, and come together in class to discuss writing activities. When you begin to teach, you will be faced with editing your students’ papers and dissertations in a constructive way. Moreover, editing the work of peers is something you will spend a good deal of time doing as an academic. Therefore critiquing your fellow students will be an integral part of the course. This is an exercise in collegiality. It will allow you to grow accustomed to taking into account other people’s opinions on your own thinking and writing at an early stage in the process.
AMH 6198 – Graduate Readings in Early American History
Dr. Jon Sensbach
Description:
This course will explore political, social and cultural developments n early America from the period of colonial contact through the American Revolution. We will examine the complex cultural interchange and contest for power among European, African and Indian peoples while paying close attention to historiographic developments in the field over the last twenty years. Among the topics the course will explore are the impact of European colonization on indigenous people; the creation of an “Atlantic world” and its relationship to global and continental approaches to early America; the rise of free and slave labor systems and the evolution of both racial ideology and African‐American cultures; the role of religion in colonial life; gender and women’s history; the imperial struggle among competing European nations; and contested meanings of freedom during the era of Revolution.
EUH 5934 – Apostasy and Self
Dr. Nina Caputo
Description:
Through much of history, people changed religion because a ruler or head of a kinship group did so, whether as a result of military defeat or as a form or alliance. Late antiquity saw the emergence religious conversion as a means of expressing religious, political, intellectual, or social identities. When we talk about conversion today, we usually mean the self-determined conversion of an individual from one form of orthodoxy to another. As a rule, this kind of spiritual or intellectual transformation is radical and complete, a casting off the old and replacing it with a new self, often sealed with a change of name. And since late antiquity, conversion is also the stuff of stories, whether written or oral. This course will examine the conceptualization, representation, narration, and reception of converts and conversion in Europe from the middle ages through modernity, ending with Trotsky and Malcolm X.
HIS 5939 – Second-Year Seminar
Dr. Jack Davis
Description:
Think of this course as a workshop on the basic mechanics of the history profession: research, writing, and critical thought. The central idea behind the second-year seminar is to properly hone the skills necessary for successful completion of graduate school’s most demanding writing assignments. The PhD dissertation, as the MA thesis or non-thesis paper, is a mere embarkation point into the larger profession, which requires the practitioner to undertake long- and short- forms of writing. Keeping to a strict word limit is arguably more challenging than prolixity. The 17th-century French mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal once wrote a fellow clergyman, “I only made this letter longer because I had not the leisure to make it shorter.” A century later, Ben Franklin offered his own version of the same idea, apologizing in a letter, “I have already made this paper too long, for which I must crave pardon, not having time to make it shorter.” Less apologetic but more briefly, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make shorter.”
The final assignment for the course will require you to complete a long paper of original research. Leading up to that point, you will undertake a number of one- and two-page writing assignments. Shorter papers will enable a focused evaluation of your work, evaluation undertaken by your professor and classmates alike, and, if we achieve our goals in this seminar, advance your skills as a researcher, writer, and thinker before tackling the final assignment.
LAH 5934 – The Modern Caribbean
Dr. Lillian Guerra
Description:
By nature, a graduate seminar seeks to generate discussion and debate on a variety of approaches to the research, study and writing of history. This class provides opportunities for specialists of Latin American history to gain comparative knowledge of Caribbean history and historiography. First launched in the 1940s and 50s professionally and conceptually by anticolonial intellectuals (many of whom hailed from the Caribbean itself, such as Eric Williams and C.L.R. James), scholarship on the Caribbean has since become a central axis for studying a wide array of historical realities and systems. These include the roots of European-led capitalism in the system of slavery, the slave trade and colonialism as well as radical thought and political change. In the last thirty years especially, historians have increasingly identified the Caribbean as a critical space for the development of revolution and ideas of freedom, unshackled to the eurocentric premise that Liberalism first emerged among white intellectuals and anti-monarchists in Europe or among the mostly pro-slavery or slave-owning elites who launched anti-imperialist revolution in the Thirteen Colonies.
As this course’s list of selected works for assignment reflects, scholars of the Caribbean have generally adopted interdisciplinary approaches to analyzing the past as much as the present. Increasingly committed to accessing the unwritten, undocumented, destroyed or deliberately forgotten archives of slaves, people of color and the Caribbean’s other marginalized majorities, historians have adopted and incorporated both the methods and theories of other disciplines, especially literature and anthropology, since the 1970s. Today, historians of Caribbean societies shaped by contemporary authoritarianism, US military interventions or twentieth-century dictatorships are beneficiaries of these efforts. In the absence of open access to state archives (or, in some cases, the archives themselves), we have broadened the definition and scope of our approaches to primary sources—becoming detectives, journalists and midwives to a past whose resilience in everyday life has made its importance impossible to deny.
Key historians of slavery in the Caribbean included the wide-ranging, prolific and legendary Stuart Schwartz as well as the pioneering, methodologically eclectic historian of Puerto Rico and the broader “imperial zone” of the Caribbean, Francisco Scarano. We are honored to welcome both of them to our class this semester and to read works they have selected for discussion with them personally.