AFH 5934/EUH 5934 – Africans in Europe
Dr. Nancy Hunt
Description:
This seminar will focus on African experiences in living, arriving, and attempting to arrive in Europe over a long historical duration, touching down on early modern times, the two world wars, and especially since 1989. We will take a deep look at the last decade of Europe’s extraordinary African refugee crisis, and it will do so within longer histories of African migrations and diasporas into Europe.
Since 2010, there has been an explosion of new documentary and analytic materials, much of it very creative and innovative regarding the ways Africans are arriving into Europe, licitly and illicitly. What is striking is how interdisciplinary these materials are, with much hard data — quantitative, legal, epidemiological, and social scientific — created in and near European Union knowledge centers and data banks. Some of you may want to look at tensions within and methods of the European Union. Scholars and artists from the softer social sciences and the humanities have also been producing and documenting the experiences of African migrants entering Europe, from those with ghastly arrival stories to those who are artists, musician, academics, and novelists producing narratives (and songs and films) of diverse kinds.
Our central theme is: Africans in Europe. It involves diverse pasts and presents focusing on diverse moments and historiographies, from early modern times (with a focus on the evidence of paintings); African soldiers’ fraught experiences fighting in Europe during the two world wars; and the presence of Africans in a range of western and eastern European cities from the 1920s through the 2010s. How did they get there? What have they been doing? How should we begin to understand diverse pasts in Europe and Africa? Some may want to investigate how to research and learn from the wide array of forms of knowledge – hard and soft, quantitative and qualitative, policy-driven and aesthetically inspired. A fundamental question will return: when and how is history and historical consciousness useful? And, to accomplish what? Is there evidence of Africans living in Europe with a consciousness of history and pasts?
EUH 4934/WHO 5932 – Graduate Seminar: Digital Methods and Stalin’s Great Terror
Dr. Seth Bernstein
Description:
This is a course in digital history that uses Stalinist policing as a case study for implementing
these methods. It has four main goals:
1. Familiarize students with the basics of digital methods of analysis like text scraping, natural language processing, geographical information systems and (to a lesser extent) network analysis.
2. Learn methods of digital presentation of materials through visualizations and venues for online presentation (e.g., blogs or digital exhibits).
3. Analyze the benefits and problems of digital scholarship and the use of big data.
4. Learn something about Stalinism and Stalinist repressive politics.
Of these goals, the fourth is the least important. I chose it because it is something I study and because there is a wealth of data about Soviet penal institutions available in English translation. In other words, it can provide a base for learning digital methods. The main assignment for this course is a digital analysis, exhibit, or tutorial, accompanied by one or more graphical representations and a detailed explanation. This work can be done on a topic directly related to Stalinist policing but could also be done on a topic that relates more directly to your research interests.
This course does not demand technical expertise and will not make you into an expert on digital history.
LAH 5933 – 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. One of the key goals of the class is to prepare current graduate students to take their doctoral qualifying exams and consequently, to master the “narrative archs” sufficiently that they can go on to teach or research relevant history and themes.
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 euro-centric 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, the Cold War and 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.
LAH 5934/WOH 5932 – Comparative Slavery
Dr. Fernanda Bretones Lane
Description:
This graduate seminar engages with classic works as well as the recent historiography on slavery studies in the Atlantic world to examine the various iterations of the institution between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Though slavery has been a part of human experience for millennia, it is not a static institution. How has it changed over time? How did different societies conceive of, and practiced, slavery? What distinguishes Ancient and Early Modern modes of slavery from colonial practices in the Americas? How did slavery function in different European empires? What explains the endurance of the institution in Brazil, Cuba, and the US South in the nineteenth century? In addition to these questions, we will also interrogate the values and limitations of comparative work, considering methodologies that rely on juxtaposition as well as new integrated comparisons that highlight the ways in which historical actors themselves understood different systems of slavery.