Courses

The legacy of comics is ever present in society today. Many graphic novels are present in culture today, from various streaming services to box office sensations and flops to superheroes. For decades, graphic novels have provided critiques of environmental pollution, racism, the urban crisis, xenophobia, and authoritarianism. From rewriting the history of Texas to advocating for labor rights for Latina domestic workers, Latina/o creators have turned to graphic novels as a medium for documenting and disseminating their history.

This course offers a broad overview of and introduction to the production of Latina/o History through Graphic Novels. The course will balance a thematic approach of central themes throughout Latina/o History, such as migration, labor, and social movements, and the methodology and terminology of reading comics. Once the center point of culture wars, graphic narratives are increasingly accepted today as forms that cultivate sophisticated types of verbal-visual literacy that actively critique forms of knowledge and contemporary policies and offer alternative forms of history.

This class will explore how Latina/o graphic narratives have long been an essential source of cultural expression and central to the Latina/o communities documenting their history on their terms. From revisionist accounts to biographies of leaders to instilling superpowers to child migrants and domestic workers, graphic novels offer a compelling perspective into complementary historical narratives.

Food feeds culture. It nourishes societies as well as bodies. No discipline is intelligible without it. It provides economics with products, physiology with sustenance, social sciences with classes, and relationships of power and intellects with food for thought. Food´s also essential in ecology. Our most intimate contact with the environment occurs when we eat it.

From interdisciplinary perspectives, we´ll approach the history of food in all cultures (including, by the way, those of non-human cultural creatures) in all periods that we can say something about, from the origins of carnivorism and cannibalism through famines and fushion to the food-related environmental problems of the future. There may even be time to explore cuisines.

This History departmental seminar investigates how Catholicism was represented in 14 American and European movies debuting between 1928 and 2019. The movies, which we’ll watch, discuss, and write about in the chronological order of their appearance, begin (The Passion of Joan of Arc) and end (A Hidden Life) with martyrdoms. Some are Hollywood entertainments, and others are prized as works of art.

Five questions will occupy our class discussions during the semester: (1) what are your reactions to the film; (2) what’s the film’s context in its ambient culture, both secular and Catholic; (3) how does the film represent contemporaneous Catholicism and does that representation seem accurate; (4) how was the film received, critically and commercially, when it appeared, and how well has it held up; and (5) what, if anything, can the film tell us about the Catholic Church and being Catholic today. Brief readings will supplement each screening.

In addition to watching, reading, and discussing, course requirements include submitting two original questions for discussion before each class, oral midterm and final exams (conversations) one-on-one with me, and a writing portfolio totaling about twenty pages, which will consist of either four, five-page papers or an original research paper of 15 to 20 pages.

Over the last two years, "fake news" has been one of President Donald Trump's most oft-repeated phrases, undermining confidence in the press. In 2016, it was a term used by the media to describe deliberate misinformation spread on social media during the presidential campaign, often comprised of conspiracy theories. So what is "fake news" and how should we understand it, identify it, and make sense of how it is being used?

In this discussion-based course, we will analyze the historical precedents of "fake news." Course readings will take us from the German Reformation, to imperial China, revolutionary France and America, colonial India, through totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, and up to the present day. Each week, we will delve into a different historical event in which rumor, conspiracy theory, or propaganda played a central role. We will dissect the meaning of these terms across time and space and ask how and why they become meaningful in particular societies at particular moments. In the process, we will examine how historians treat deception, misinformation, and forgery in attempting to explain what happened in the past. Finally, we will ask whether "fake news" is a useful analytical category; what does it mean, how can we study it, and how can we handle it in our current society?

Students will leave the course with a mastery of the historical context of fake news, an ability to identify and decode false information, and an understanding of methods for approaching a confusing and contested past. Course materials will include books, articles, podcasts, and films. Students will be evaluated primarily based on class participation, weekly discussion questions, and two essays.

This course investigates global history through the lens of piracy, broadly construed. We will begin with a brief look at the definitions and examples of pirates and piratical activity in the ancient world, examining the ways that the Greeks, Romans, Persians, Egyptians, and others thought about criminality at sea. Thereafter, we will transition to an examination of pirates in the global Middle Ages, with focus on China, East Asia, Europe and Britain, the Mediterranean and Africa. The Columbian Exchange post-1492 brought new challenges and opportunities for pirates, prompting metamorphoses in piracy that we will explore through the modern era.

Our course will finish by examining piracy in the present, interrogating the continuities and changes we have witnessed in piracy over time.

Animals are everywhere in North American history. From the living room to the back alley, animals created history on their own and with humans help. Steeds bore generals into battle while rats bore fleas with diseases that flattened armies. This course will introduce students to animal studies and offer them a sampling of the manifold ways non-human creatures drove economies, shouldered burdens, entered families, and entertained audiences.

The topics covered in the class will include co-evolution, the fur trade, people eating animals and animals eating people, pet keeping, animal symbolism, and endangered species. The course invites students to see North American history anew through the eyes of a racehorse, a sled dog, a passenger pigeon, a grizzly bear, or a field mouse.

This course gives students the opportunity to learn more about how Americans have thought about criminal responsibility and how their ideas have changed over time. Historians contend that the 19th century witnessed a transformation in the understanding of the origins of criminal behavior in the United States. The earlier religious emphasis on the sinfulness of all mankind, which made the murderer into merely another sinner, gave way to a belief in the inherent goodness of humankind. But if humans were naturally good, how are we to explain their evil actions? And crime rates varied widely by sex and race; European women were said to have been domesticated out of crime doing. What do those variations tell us about a common human nature? The criminal might be a flawed specimen of humankind born lacking a healthy and sane mind.

Relying in part upon studies done in Europe, American doctors, preachers, and lawyers debated whether insanity explained criminality over the century and how it expressed itself in different races and sexes. Alternative theories were offered. Environment, heredity, and free will were all said to have determined the actions of the criminal. By the early 20th century, lawyers and doctors had largely succeeded in medicalizing criminality. Psychiatrists now treated criminals as patients; judges invoked hereditary eugenics in sentencing criminals. Science, not sin, had apparently become the preferred mode of explanation for the origins of crime. But was this a better explanation than what had come before? Can it explain the turbulent debates in the late 20th and early 21st centuries over variations in crime rates by race? Can it explain why men, not women, are still more likely to commit murder?