If you’re still looking for classes, the History department sent a list of classes with additional seats.
HIST166, sections 1 & 2 – Oral History Workshop
Professors Fullilove and Kozak
Time: WF – 10:50 – 12:10pm
This course introduces students to the practice of oral history, including tools and methodologies, best practices, and hands-on experience conducting, archiving, and interpreting interviews. Participants will conduct interviews in projects on coastal communities in an age of climate change and/or the history of fossil fuel production.
HIST262/STS263: Atomic Africa: A Technological History of the Cold War
Tuesdays 7:10-10:00pm
Professor Twagira
“Atomic Power Programme Moves Ahead: NUCLEAR REACTOR FOR GHANA” In 1962 the Ghanaian Times proclaimed Ghana’s atomic ambitions. Strikingly, it was only two years after the West African nation raised the international alarm against France’s nuclear testing in the Sahara. In the midst of the global Cold War, African activists, politicians and scientists called for an end to nuclear imperialism and struggled for political and scientific sovereignty. It was an era marked by the struggle for decolonization but also by the promise of a new technological age. As African politicians planned for an Africa of the future, they faced intense political pressures from both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. They also formed partnerships with China and Cuba, reshaping the international lines of Cold War cooperation and the nature of “development.” Over the course of the semester, we will examine Cold War stories across the continent including the mining of uranium, the international Congo Crisis, the development of African radiation experts, the use of radio by liberation forces in Angola, the emergence of an African Jet Age, and the building of the Freedom Railway in Tanzania. In addition, we will examine how students, artists, workers, and scientists negotiated the currents of the Cold War and responded in creative ways to produce their own Atomic Africa.
HIST253: Latinx History and Empire
Professor Ulysses
Time: TR 8:50-10:10am
How has Latinx history in the United States been shaped by U.S. imperialism across the Americas? What is the relationship between different Latinx communities in the United States and U.S. empire? What role has U.S. empire played in Latinx im/migration, both historically and in our contemporary moment? Does “Latinx” refer to a race, an ethnicity, a culture, or something else entirely? How do we understand Latinidad in relation to other racial formations in the United States and the broader hemisphere? Taking these opening questions as our guides, this survey course will introduce students to Latinx history through a transnational framework by emphasizing the centrality of U.S. imperialism in understanding who Latinx people are and how they have ended up in the United States. The course will trace the histories of U.S. imperialism and Latinx communities beginning in the nineteenth century and extending into the present day. An emphasis will be placed on interdisciplinary historical approaches to the study of Latinidad and Latinxs in the United States as related to U.S. imperialism and colonialism, racial capitalism, transnational racial and ethnic formations, and im/migration. Students will be exposed to the approaches of cultural, social, gender, political, oral, labour, and legal historians, alongside the work of Ethnic Studies, Latinx Studies, and American Studies scholars.
HIST296/LAST296: Colonial Latin America
Professor Lopez Fadul
Time: TR 1:20 – 2:40pm
This course studies the history of Latin America and the Caribbean from pre-conquest times to the emergence of independence movements in the early 19th century. Lectures will explore the key environmental, cultural, economic, political, and religious transformations that shaped colonial societies throughout the region. Beginning with the formation of indigenous and Iberian polities before 1492, we will consider how early modern colonial governance functioned and evolved throughout the period of Spanish and Portuguese rule in the Americas. Through an array of primary and secondary sources we will reconstruct the lived experiences of a diversity of actors across the colonial world. We will pay particular attention to the methods and approaches that scholars have used to understand the history of the region.
HIST314/GSAS316: The Political Ascetic
Professor Pinch
Time: W, 1:20-4:10pm
Ascetics have long played a decisive role in Indian politics. Gandhi is the best known exemplar of this fact. But the figure of the “political ascetic” long predates Gandhi. This seminar examines the philosophical, religious, and historical underpinnings of the political ascetic in the long sweep of Indian history, which thereby affords a revised understanding of the recent Indian past — including agrarian (or kisan) asceticism, Gandhian post-modern asceticism, Ambedkar’s Buddhist-dalit asceticism, and Savarkar’s Hindu nationalist asceticism.
HIST368, Energy Legacies and Ecological Futures
Professor Fullilove
Time: WF 1:20 – 4:10pm
Rooted in a history of energy production, this course explores the possible futures of aging fossil fuel infrastructure: a primary political, economic, and ecological crisis of the 21st century. Students will consider multiple prescriptions for remediation, public access, community, ecological restoration, landscape architecture, and adaptive re-use in historical perspective.
In addition to engaging scholarly literature on energy, sacrifice zones, and discard studies, this course will have a site-specific focus on a single shuttered coal- and oil-fired power plant in the Long Island Sound (Manresa Island), currently slated for conversion into a public park with the support of a philanthropic 501(c)3. Site visits and archival investigations will explore the environmental legacies of aging infrastructure and its industrial byproducts.
HIST380/DANC380: Transforming Bodies: Movement and Agency in West Africa
Mondays and Wednesdays 4:40-6:10 pm in 160 Cross Street (Dance Studio)
Professors Saaka and Twagira
Dancers in West Africa embody human agency and transform historical worlds. As one elder farmer proclaimed: Our ciwara have power[!].” Masked ciwara dancers on the Mande Pleateau call upon the collective labor of farmers to produce rural life, and more recently, have responded to transformations of the agricultural landscape. They emphasize the power of the human body over agricultural machines. Elsewhere in West Africa, the Atsiagbekor dance energized and celebrated Ewe male soldiers by acting out scenes from the battlefield. The dance movements were also secret codes used during battle to give instructions. How and when to fight, defend, or retreat depended on this embodied communication. The accompanying loud drum music served an added purpose of instilling fear in enemy ranks because it created the impression of a mighty army on the march. Still performed, the dance now symbolizes Ghanaian cultural heritage and helps to shape local historical memory.
In this course we will examine the body as an active agent in West African social and political life. We will study the historical and contemporary meanings of laboring bodies through dance and everyday movement, such as women’s pounding of fufu or stirring of toh for daily meals. We will also reflect on the ritual enactment of enslavement or colonial rule as a means to subvert old power structures. The body in these cases was a tool for resistance. We will also unpack multiple interpretations for specific women’s embodied protests such as “sitting on a man.” Collective body movement was powerful, but individual bodies might also enact healing or express religious devotion. Spirit possession, for example, marked the body as a site for human interaction with the supernatural. In this and other examples, the body is an archive in motion and subject to social renewal. By taking the body and movement as a lens, we will explore shifting histories of labor, performance, gender, politics, aesthetics, and religion from the pre-colonial era to the contemporary moment. We will also learn new ways to creatively move and narrate the African past and present.