First-Year Seminars 110GN - South Asian Pasts Through Graphic Novels

If news debates, Facebook posts, and WhatsApp forwards now form arenas for contesting historical claims -- once mainly a preserve of academic histories -- what might supposedly low-brow media such as comics or graphic novels tell us about how history is produced and consumed? This first-year-seminar shall introduce students to key topics in South Asian history through a selection of comics, graphic novels, and primary sources. We shall read comics and graphic novels as narrative histories and speculative accounts of the lives of ordinary people and their experience of world historical events. In placing them alongside primary sources, the course shall encourage students to ask historical questions.

Mount Holyoke first-year students only, by placement.