Spring 2024 Graduate Courses
INSH 5602 – Research Seminar: Documenting Fieldwork Narratives Oral History, Ethnography, Archival Practices
This course examines the ethics, politics, and social aspects of three primary areas of interdisciplinary research and knowledge production at the intersection of the social sciences and humanities: oral history, ethnography, and archiving. Oral history is both a process (carrying out an interview) and a product (the recorded interview and its data); both a document (a source for information/data) and a text (a construction of memory and language). It is a form of first person, personal narrative, similar to and different from other forms of first-person narrative, including ethnography, storytelling, and memoir. Ethnography is a mode of witnessing, a method of research, and a form of narrative construction. It delves into issues of participation, power, and perspective; the nature of evidence; the reliability of representation; the relations between description and interpretation, between narrative and theory, and the self and the community. Ethnography foregrounds lived experience and vernacular knowledge as the basis for information and interpretation. Archiving is a critical scholarly mandate to manage and care for a body of information resources in diverse organizational and institutional contexts, and a context for the provenance and future of knowledge production.
Professors Ángel David Nieves and Doreen Lee
M, 4:35pm – 7:30pm
CRN: 34811
HIST 5102 – Theory and Methodology 2: Intro to World History 2
This course provides an introduction to the historiography of the field of World History, with an emphasis on the period after 1950. We will explore the development of this growing field within the academy, and we will investigate some of the major questions historians have been asking in recent world history scholarship. We will also explore a wide variety of methodological approaches to ‘doing’ World History, as well as related approaches such as transnational and international history. Required for first year PhD and World History MA students.
Professor Kris Manjapra
T, 4:35pm – 7:30pm
CRN: 33706
HIST 7221 – Topics in World History
This course is designed to help second- and third-year PhD students prepare for comprehensive exams and/or prospectus writing. Second-year students will work on building reading lists, defining topics, and strategies for getting the work done. Third-year students will craft their dissertation proposals. Much of the course will involve independent and small group work, as well as presentations by students who have already completed their requirements. This class can be taken on top of an existing course load, as assigned readings are contained to reviewing proposals and the books on your own reading lists.
Professor Victoria Cain
T, 4:35pm – 7:30pm
CRN: 36538
HIST 7314 – Research Seminar in World History: Legal History
This seminar explores how legal systems develop, enforce their authority, collapse, and rebuild. Taking a globally comparative approach, we will study legal philosophy and the legal history of societies in the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia to understand their commonalities and differences. We will also consider transnational questions such as the history of slavery and the emergence of international law.
Professor Simon Rabinovitch
W, 4:35pm – 7:30pm
CRN: 34673
HIST 7251 – Topics in American History: The Digital Archive
This graduate-level course will consider the ways that the term “archives” is understood from multidisciplinary perspectives, including library science, digital humanities, and community activists. We will begin with a discussion of the meaning of archives, and cover some of the fundamental practices of digital archives. Topics will include an introduction to digital stewardship, assessment, the role of archives in research, community archiving, reparative description, and digital memory. The course will also explore data modeling practices for archival content. This course fulfills one of the elective credits for the DH certificate.
Professor Jessica Parr
R, 4:35pm – 7:30pm
CRN: 38832