PROSPECTUS - SPRING 2009
100-level, 200-level, 300-level, 400-level
106 - EARLY MODERN EUROPE TO 1799 (9:30 MWF)
Course Description: This survey course will examine the society, culture, and politics of Europe from the Renaissance through the French Revolution.
Instructor: Regina Sweeney, Associate Professor of History. Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley. Professor Sweeney teaches courses on early modern and modern Europe, France, and women’s history. Her research on French cultural history focuses on gender, music, nationalism, and war.
Availability: This course is taught every year.
107 - Modern Europe, 1789-2000 (3 TF)
Course Description: What does it mean to be "modern?" The course will examine the changing relationship between state and society, the growth of nationalism, the industrial revolution, liberalism, imperialism, socialism, secularization, urbanization, warfare, gender roles, the arts, and much more.
Instructor: Karl Qualls, Associate Professor of History. Ph.D., Georgetown University. His interests include post-World War II reconstruction, Stalin and Stalinism, comparative revolutions (political, social, and cultural), dictators, and more.
Availability: This course is taught every year.
117-01 - AMERICAN HISTORY TO 1877 (8:30 MWF)
Course Description: This course will introduce students to the history of the North American territory that would eventually become the United States, from roughly the beginning of the 16th century to 1877. It will include a wide variety of topics: North American Indian life prior to 1492; first contacts between Europeans and native peoples; the birth and growth of European settlements; the introduction and perpetuation of slavery in North America; the move toward revolution against Great Britain; the growth of practices of industry by an emerging middle class; the creation of the middle class family, with its attendant gender roles; the rise of regional conflicts that ultimately led to the devastation of the Civil War; and the attempt to reconstruct a nation in its aftermath. Ultimately, the course aims to give a brief and general understanding of how a diverse group of peoples came together to produce something we call the United States, and the practices of inclusion and exclusion that building a nation entailed.
Instructor: Christopher Bilodeau, Assistant Professor of History. Ph.D., Cornell. He teaches courses in the fields of colonial North America and American Indian History. His research and teaching interests include European (especially English and French) contact with Indians on the borders of North American empires during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the Atlantic World; the role of violence in colonialism; and the history of religious missions.
Availability: This course is taught every semester.
118-01 - AMERICAN HISTORY SINCE 1877 (10:30 TR)
Course Description: This course surveys major developments in US History since Reconstruction with an emphasis on the intersection of politics, culture, and economics.
Instructor: Matthew Pinsker, Pohanka Chair for Civil War History. DPhil., Oxford University. His research interests include U.S. political history, the Civil War era, and Abraham Lincoln. He teaches courses in U.S. political, legal and diplomatic history. His research focuses on the career of Abraham Lincoln, partisanship in the Civil War era, American constitutionalism, the Underground Railroad and the history of U.S. campaigns and elections.
Availability: This course is taught every semester.
118-02 - AMERICAN HISTORY SINCE 1877 (11:30 MWF)
Course Description: This course surveys major developments in US History since Reconstruction with an emphasis on the intersection of politics, culture, and economics.
Instructor: Kim Rogers, Professor of History. Ph.D., University of Minnesota. Her teaching interests center on recent U.S. history, African-American history, and gender and family history. Research interests include biography and autobiography, oral history, and life-course analysis. Professor Rogers’ most recent book is Life and Death in the Delta. She has also published a book entitled Righteous Lives: Narratives of the New Orleans Civil Rights Movement, and has edited collections of essays on oral history interviewing, and trauma and autobiography.
Availability: This course is taught every semester.
122-01 - MIDDLE EAST SINCE 1750 (9 TR)
Course Description: This course will cover bureaucratic-military reforms of the 19th century in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, European imperialism, regional nationalisms, contemporary autocratic regimes, and the politicization of religion.
Instructor: Itzchak Weismann. Visiting Professor of History. Ph.D., University of Haifa. Professor Weismann's research deals with currents in modern Islamic thought, including fundamentalism, modernism, and Sufism. His most recent book is The Naqshbandiyya: Orthodoxy and Activism in a World-Wide Sufi Tradition.
Availability: This course is taught every year.
131-01 - LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY II (9:30 MWF)
Course Description: This course will focus on the social, economic, and political developments of Latin America after independence, from consolidation of the new nations during the late nineteenth century to the 1980s. The course will view Latin American history from a global perspective.
Instructor: William Visser, Visiting Assistant Professor of History. Ph.D. George Washington University. His research interest revolves around the macro-economic history of Latin America, especially Venezuelan and Brazilian.
Availability: This course is taught every year.