Women, Gender & Sexuality

In recent years, gender has become increasingly central to historical scholarship of every period and region, and courses in this thematic area examine the ways in which gender has shaped of social and political hierarchies within and across specific societies and times. At Stony Brook, faculty in American, European, Latin American, and Asian history do gender-related research and teach courses in this field, allowing many opportunities for comparison across cultures and times. This field is especially popular among graduate students, many of whom also complete the Women’s Studies Certificate program while completing their doctorates. Topics might include: technologies of reproduction, discourses of sexuality, the intersection of class, race and gender in social movements, the sexual division of labor, and the family.

Women Gender & Sexuality Blog

History 532 — Gender, Religion and Modernity

Friday, February 6th, 2009

This is one of the theme seminars in the Doctoral program of the Department of History.  It is open to all doctoral students and MA students in the History program.  All others, including MAT students, must have the instructor’s permission to enroll.

The readings will include a mixture of thematic, theoretical and geographically focused texts.  Most of our readings will derive from European history and from the Christian experience, modern and early modern, but there will be several readings that focus on East Asia, North America, Latin America, Russia (my area of specialization), Islam and Judaism.  Students from all of the department’s fields of concentration are welcome to enroll.

Each week will have a body of common readings that will form the basis of our discussion.  In addition, each student will select one week’s theme and develop a bibliography of supplementary readings that connect that theme to the student’s area(s) of interest.  That bibliography will form the basis of a historiographic or bibliographic essay (approximately 15-20 pp.) that each of you will write, due on the final class meeting.  You are encouraged to work with your advisor in developing the bibliography.

There will be at least two other-and much shorter-writing assignments, in which you will be asked to apply some of the ideas raised in the readings to brief documents that I will distribute in class.

BOOKS:

Natalie Davis, WOMEN ON THE MARGINS

Marilyn Westerkamp, WOMEN AND RELIGION IN EARLY AMERICA

Miriam Peskowitz, SPINNING FANTASIES: RABBIS, GENDER, AND HISTORY

Calum G. Brown, THE DEATH OF CHRISTIAN ENGLAND

Irene Silverblatt, MOON, SUN, AND WITCHES: GENDER IDEOLOGIES AND CLASS IN INCA AND COLONIAL PERU

Carolyn Bynum, FRAGMENTATION AND REDEMPTION; ESSAYS ON GENDER AND THE HUMAN BODY IN MEDIEVAL RELIGION

Posted in Women Gender & Sexuality by Gary Marker on February 6, 2009 at 3:32 pm |