Department of History

Summer Session I (May 28 – July 4)

TuTh 1:30-4:55

This course explores the significance of Central Asian peoples, goods, and places in historical perspective. Specifically, this course will investigate transnational relationships, overlapping peoples and regions, and historical interdependencies on the eastern front of Central Asia, where Central Asia meets China. We will explore the famous “silk road” of the early common era as one manifestation of this history. We will go backward and forward through time to uncover other manifestations of enduring connections between China and Central Asia. We will look at Xinjiang and Tibet, in the western borderlands of modern-day China, as well as parts of modern-day Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, and Iran.

(Urumqi, People’s Republic of China, 2004 [Source: Wikimedia Commons])

From ancient times to the present, we ask the following question: what forces have brought this region together over time, and what forces have pulled it apart? Students will be responsible for completing three quizzes and two response papers.

Tu Th 11:30AM-12:50PM

Popular perceptions and representations of Islam and Muslims are often founded on ignorance and outright prejudice. Fundamental to these understandings are narrow and highly politicized notions of history, frequently accepted uncritically.  Accordingly, this course seeks first to introduce analytical approaches crucial to developing nuanced understandings of historical and contemporary depictions of Islam and Muslims. In addition, the course provides a broad outline of the history of Islamic Civilizations from Iberia and North Africa to South and Southeast Asia, and from the Mediterranean to Sub-Saharan Africa, and a basic understanding of key religious and secular institutions that characterize Muslim societies. While the course is broadly chronological, we will also examine key topics in detail, including the life of the Prophet, conversion and the global spread of Islam, colonialism and imperialism, radical militant and progressive Muslim politics, media representations, and Islam in the West. The course is not comprehensive, but seeks to provide a basic understand of the history of Islam from Muhammad to the present, and a solid empirical and methodological foundation for further inquiry.

Thurs 2:30-5:20

During the last several centuries, the global imperial ambitions of Europe (and more recently, the US) have remade politics and culture across the world. This course considers people and places linked together by Empire from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. In a context provided by historical and theoretical readings, we will explore the experience of colonialism through a variety of literary representations: novels, short stories, poems, memoirs, letters, music, films, graphic novels and other genres. These sources provide detailed, often personalized, accounts of the experience of the political, economic and cultural domination that colonialism entailed, and the forms of resistance it produced. The colloquium will examine the transformational historical trends of imperialism, anti-colonialism, decolonization and postcolonial migration through units exploring colonialism’s impact on education and identity, cities and mobility, and ideas about race and liberty. We will trace the dialogue between history and representation through looking at specific people, places and texts from Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean and metropolitan Europe, as well as recent imperial adventures of the US. Over the course of the semester, students will develop, research and write a term paper on a topic of their interest related to colonial or postcolonial history.

The postcolonial nation-states of South Asia were created as independent entities following World War II, after almost two centuries of British colonial dominance. This course examines political, social, cultural and economic developments in the region from the mid-twentieth century to the present. The focus is on the states carved out of British India in 1947 – India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – but we will also consider Afghanistan, Nepal, Myanmar/Burma and Sri Lanka (plus Tibet, currently an Autonomous Region of China, and smaller states such Bhutan and the Maldives), and South Asian migrants in Asia, Africa and the Americas. The course is organized around key themes in the history of the contemporary subcontinent, including the legacies of colonialism and nationalism; ethnic, caste, class and religious conflict; rural poverty, development and environmental change; urbanization and the growth of cities; radical right- and left-wing movements related to regional autonomy claims and extremist religious politics; economic globalization and labor migration; media and popular culture; and global security and new forms of imperialism. This structure will allow us to draw thematic connections between different regions and states in South Asia while examining closely a wide range of specific topics. These might include: nuclearization of India and Pakistan, socialist development projects, radical militant Hindu and Muslim politics, dalit social justice movements, conflict over and militarization of Kashmir, labor migration to the Persian Gulf, the U.S. War on Terror, the rise of Maoist anti-state resistance, globalization of the Bombay Film Industry (‘Bollywood’), rise of IT and call center industries; and others. The overall goal of the course is to introduce key themes and developments in postcolonial South Asia in a connected and global framework, and to provide students tools to develop informed analysis of topics of interest in contemporary South Asia.

This course will provide an advanced introduction to South Asian history and historiography from the early modern period to the present. We will cover major works on key themes, including precolonial cultural relations, colonialism and imperialism, the politics of religious identity, anti-colonialism and nationalism, decolonization and partition, and postcolonial developments. Readings of classics of the field – drawn from various schools of historiography – will be supplemented with selections from relevant primary sources. This is not a survey course, and does not attempt to be comprehensive. No prior knowledge of the field is prerequisite, and the course will begin with a rapid thematic survey of South Asian history. This course is jointly designed for History PhD and MA students for whose research and teaching a knowledge of South Asian history will be useful, and for MAT students who intend to teach South Asian and global history at the advanced secondary level. Requirements include preparation and participation, a series of short response or feedback papers, project presentation, and either a topical historiographical essay (for HIS 536 students), or a lesson plan (for CEG 536 students).

Spring 2012 Course Descriptions