Courses

This course surveys the enduring and complex intersections of religion and politics in the modern United States. Starting in the Early Republic period, but with particular focus on developments in post-1890s America, the course will explore the many ways that these two entities—religion and politics—have acted upon and shaped each other across time, all with major implications for the life of the nation.

Be it in relation to the military and war or to the inner workings of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish community; with respect to civil rights, human rights, and worker rights, or to Cold War development, capitalist expansion, and the culture wars: this course will probe multiple terrains—some conspicuous, others less so, on which the relationship between faith and politics determined the United States’ course both at home and abroad in global contexts. Along the way, it will pause to assess the meanings of these encounters as they (re)defined the nature of church-state relations and ties between the “sacred” and “secular” in modern society, and categories of “religion” and “politics” themselves as they pertain to the American experience.

This course introduces graduate students to the major themes and historiographical questions of law, religion, and secularization with a focus on the United States in the context of the Modern North Atlantic World from the late 18th Century onward. Both religion and law have distinctive vocabularies, concepts, and traditions, and this course aims to examine and encourage historical writing that appreciates both fields equally.

Readings will address the question of toleration and religious liberty in the British Empire, in the American colonies and the arguments over the historical significance and meaning of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution in order to make sense of the amendment's invocation in later debates; the problem of evolving definitions of terms, such as religious and secular, public and private, and the significance of the rise of federal power and imperial power within US; the different paths the US and European nations took in regards to religious disestablishment. Students will read historical case studies that examine judicial decisions, statutory law, legal treatises, and institutional practices.

Students will be asked to read, respond to, and discuss common texts weekly, but individual research interests will guide further readings and writing.

A colloquium to acquaint graduate students with significant scholarship on early modern Europe, in its political, social, cultural, and religious contexts. Students will lead class discussions, write book reviews, and produce a historiographical essay on a topic of their choice. Reading ability in languages other than English is desirable but not required.

This course will introduce students to the study of nationalism in a broad theoretical context. Then we will turn to specific case studies (consisting of classics and more recent approaches to nationalism, national history, and national identity. Topics will include civic and state-oriented views of nationalism, as well as ethnic-group / movement-centered ideas and books.

Toward the end of the course, we will critically examine ideas such as “national indifference” and “transnationalism” (current fashionable words in historians’ discourse) to see where nationalism studies has gone and where it might be going. Though the professor is a historian of modern Europe and many of the case studies will come from this context, the course will be designed so that students of other regions can benefit from the approaches, problems (both practical and theoretical) as well.

This seminar introduces graduate students to the modern history of Latin America, from independence to the end of the Cold War era. We will question the idea of “Latin America” as a teaching category of analysis in relation to the “West” and the “Global South” by studying a selected number of themes that have shaped our understanding of the region. These will range from liberalism and rising notions of state formation to competing interpretations of anti-imperialism, mestizaje, revolution, populism, conservatism, Catholicism, feminism, the Global Sixties, and the Cold War. We will make an effort to examine various countries in the region, but the bulk of our discussion will primarily revolve around some of the most exciting scholarship recently published on the modern history of the continent.

We will read and discuss the methodological differences in this expanding literature; learn about the selected case studies, thematically and chronologically; question the limitations that continue to center a US-based position in the study of Latin America; and place our discussions in conversation with key primary documents, including manifestoes, speeches, iconic films, and literary texts that represent competing ideological perspectives as well as various points of view on class, gender, ethnicity, and race. In addition to discussing divergent methodologies, scholarly turns, and historiographical interventions, the seminar will also take a pedagogical approach with an emphasis of “how to teach Latin America."

This is an introduction for graduate students and advanced undergraduates to the study of race, gender, labor, sexuality, and other aspects of social history in the Iberian Atlantic world from 1492 - the early 19th century, with some comparison to the rest of the Atlantic. We will read classic and recent texts that explore the ways that conquest and colonization manifested, with special attention to Atlantic slavery, resistance, and interactions between native populations and European colonizers. We will also pay attention to new methods, including digital humanities and archival practices.

Expectations include active participation in weekly seminar meetings, a variety of brief writing assignments, and a major paper that could be research- or analysis-based, on the student's topic of interest. Advanced undergraduates require instructor's permission and some background in the subject and historical methods.

Medieval religious professionals — Rabbis, Priests, and Imams — often found themselves engaging with the beliefs and texts of religious others, whether opponents within their own faith traditions or outside it. Moreover, a vast literature of religious polemic and apologetic survives from this period in many languages. This course will explore a number of such works, as well as influential recent scholarship on apologetic and polemic. Students will write a twenty to thirty page research essay.

Between 1200 and 1600, the worlds of European scholarship, politics, literature, and devotion were transformed by major developments in communications technology, from the invention of paper and the mass-production of manuscripts to the emergence of new formats like the pamphlet and broadside and the invention of printing with movable type. This course, co-taught by a medievalist and a Renaissance historian, will consider the technological and cultural developments of these centuries as a coherent whole, examining the emergence of new media and new modes of communication alongside related historical phenomena like the growth of cities and towns; the development of new institutions (the university, the chancery, the court); the revival of travel and new voyages of discovery; the growth of vernacular literatures and the revival of classical ones; advances in scientific knowledge; religious reform movements, and developments in warfare, diplomacy, and state formation.

Key concerns will be the changes in written culture that preceded Gutenberg from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries; and the notion of a "printing revolution" and the evidence scholars use to argue both for and against such a model. Students will read both primary sources and secondary historiography, examine manuscripts and early printed objects in Rare Books and Special Collections, and pursue their own research. The course is open to graduate students in history, literature, and other fields focused on either the medieval or the early modern periods. Knowledge of Latin is helpful but not required.

From the rise of ISIS to the recent legal wrangling over religious exemptions to the contraception mandate under Obamacare, it is clear that religion and politics remain deeply intertwined in the contemporary world. This has yielded a robust scholarly and theoretical literature exploring the past and present role of religion in public life.

This course introduces graduate students to the key texts in this literature, which will be of use to those pursuing historical work on the relationship between religion and politics—particularly in the early-modern or modern era. Intentionally broad in scope, the course is designed to speak to graduate students with a variety of geographical, temporal, and confessional specializations. As such, it will focus less on substantive historical questions and more on the development of the conceptual tools needed to guide further historical study.

We will read classic works of theory by philosophers and theologians, as well as more recent works by historians and scholars from cognate disciplines who have made key contributions to the field. Themes to be explored include secularization, political theology, totalitarianism, religious freedom and human rights, the role of gender and colonialism, and the relationship between religion and law. We will read works by Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Kantorowicz, Eric Voegelin, Marcel Gauchet, Jürgen Habermas, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Saba Mahmood, Joan Scott, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, and Robert Orsi, among many others.

In this team-taught graduate seminar, we will explore the formations of empires and the everyday lives of colonized peoples from the late nineteenth century to the present. Its geographic span will be wide. We will pursue imperial power as it stretched across the globe, observe colonial contests over that power, and witness its collapse and renovation in the late twentieth century. We will examine different approaches to imperialism, colonialism, and globalization, including cultural, political, economic, and intellectual histories. This course will also serve as an introduction to a wide variety of historical methods. Students will be expected to write a substantial research paper based on primary research.