Preserved plant specimens, Museum of the Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Photo by Clare Griffin.
Russian Expansionism: Propaganda and History
During the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war the Russian government has repeatedly justified its actions with references to Russian and East European history, including premodern history. Medieval Kyivan Rus’, the hetmanate of Ukraine, the takeover of Central Asia, and the colony of Russian America have all been woven into Russian propaganda. This course takes contemporary Russian propaganda as the starting point to look at the real history of the Russian Empire to better understand why the twenty-first-century Kremlin finds premodern history so useful.
[Last taught: second-8-week course, Fall 2022]
[Last taught: second-8-week course, Fall 2022]
| russian_expansionism_f22.pdf |
Texts and Contexts
Texts and Contexts is a combined literature and history research methods course.
Historians and literary scholars both deal with texts. The ways in which they have done so have often been similar, and even rely on a shared base of methods and theories about how to find and read texts, and how to understand those texts in the context in which they were produced, used, and understood. One part of this course will provide a basic introduction to the ways in which humanities’ scholars locate and deal with primary and secondary texts, including how to use libraries, find archival materials, and read primary and secondary sources. Then the course will move on to the theories that scholars have employed in dealing with such texts. This part of the course will consider a range of theoretical approaches to reading both historical and literary texts and what they reveal about the research processes of each discipline. The course will also devote time to how and why scholars and students should select certain theories to help them approach texts. Assignments will include short practical skills exercises, short weekly theory application papers, annotations for theoretical readings, a research project, and a final paper. In the final paper, the students will have to apply one theory to the analysis of a literary text or a historical source.
[Last taught: Fall 2021]
Historians and literary scholars both deal with texts. The ways in which they have done so have often been similar, and even rely on a shared base of methods and theories about how to find and read texts, and how to understand those texts in the context in which they were produced, used, and understood. One part of this course will provide a basic introduction to the ways in which humanities’ scholars locate and deal with primary and secondary texts, including how to use libraries, find archival materials, and read primary and secondary sources. Then the course will move on to the theories that scholars have employed in dealing with such texts. This part of the course will consider a range of theoretical approaches to reading both historical and literary texts and what they reveal about the research processes of each discipline. The course will also devote time to how and why scholars and students should select certain theories to help them approach texts. Assignments will include short practical skills exercises, short weekly theory application papers, annotations for theoretical readings, a research project, and a final paper. In the final paper, the students will have to apply one theory to the analysis of a literary text or a historical source.
[Last taught: Fall 2021]
| syllabus_hst274_wll274_f21.pdf |
History of Magic
Belief in magic and divination has been common to many societies. This course introduces students to the long history of magic, starting in the ancient world and working through medieval and early modern magic to end with modern forms of magic including stage magic, drawing comparisons between different societies on the basis of similar beliefs and practices. This is a primary source focused course, drawing upon documents that have been published as well as online materials. The historiography of magic will be introduced in lectures, whilst essential readings will be taken almost exclusively from historical documents on the practice and the prosecution of magic. Students will learn to read these documents in a sensitive and culturally relativistic way, producing source analysis papers in which they will develop their skills of close reading and analysis of historical documents.
[Last taught: Fall 2021]
[Last taught: Fall 2021]
| hst125_f21.pdf |
Global Histories
Globalisation is a common term in current affairs. In its popular usage, it is a recent development that integrates the human world in an unprecedented fashion, and a process in which there are winners and losers. Yet many historians would disagree. Various points in history - the Mongol Empire, the European invasions of the Americas - have been presented as the 'real' start of globalisation. Various groups, nations, and regions, have been proposed as the winners or losers of globalisation. This class takes a long-term view, beginning with Ancient World Systems, proceeding through the Medieval Global and Early Modern Globalisation, to get to modernity and claims of Westernisation and Easternisation. Particular attention will be paid to views of Central Asia, to analyse how this region has been written into or out of global histories.
[Last taught: Spring 2020]
[Last taught: Spring 2020]
| syllabushst424_524_s20.pdf |
| further_readings_.pdf |
Cannibalism and Civilisation
In the early modern world, people were often concerned with differences between groups of humans, and what the limits of humanity were. One key part of such debates was the accusation of cannibalism: claiming another group to be cannibals was the ultimate weapon in declaring them uncivilized and even inhuman. Such accusations reveal historical ideas about how humans should behave. They also display views on the human body, as accounts of cannibalism were often concerned with the bodies of the eaters and the eaten. This course will examine textual and visual representations of cannibalism from around the world from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, to take a global view on how considering cannibalism can help us understand the history of human behaviour and human bodies.
[last taught: Fall 2023]
[last taught: Fall 2023]
| c_cfall22_-_revised_schedule.pdf |
Representations of Nature in the Early Modern World
This course examines how the arts and the sciences collaborated to gain insight into nature in the early modern world. Early modern naturalists and artists faced a natural world in flux, one that they sought to describe in detail as new realms of natural history emerged, facilitated by a conjunction of sweeping geographic exploration and the invention of new scientific instruments. Exploration, trade, and colonial expansion lead to encounters between different peoples that challenged perceptions of the limits and forms of human beings, nature, and the world. This course takes a thematic approach, informed by a close examination of visual and textual sources to see how questions of creation, morphology, scale, growth, and deformity, were investigated in the early modern world, and how we can retrace their scientific and artistic logic today.
[last taught: Fall 2018]
[last taught: Fall 2018]
| hst240syllabus2018.pdf |
Introduction to the History of Science and Technology
This course takes a long and a broad view of the history of science and technology. Starting in Ancient Babylon, we end on Twitter, having considered astronomy and astrology, magic, the space race, and much besides. The course sets modern science in the context of much earlier developments, many of which look very different to science today, and yet were vital to its emergence. For every period, source, and phenomenon we consider, we will question how and why it should be considered scientific. Students will be expected to approach each period with the aim of understanding why certain practices made sense to historical figures, even if they do not make sense to us.
[last taught: Spring 2021]
[last taught: Spring 2021]
| hst123s21.pdf |