(Offered as HIST 181 and BLST 121 [A])  This course focuses on the long twentieth century in Africa, from the onset of colonial rule in the 1880s to the present moment of global engagement. We have three major questions that we will be pursuing throughout the semester. The first concerns various images of Africa and Africans, conceived in the West and then exported back into African societies. Can we distinguish the image from the reality, the myth from the reportage?

(Offered as HIST 172 and ASLC 172.) This survey offers students a deep historical perspective on today’s China and Chinese society. It examines the matrix of the internal and external forces and movements that have shaped modern China from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. During this period, people in China have experienced the most tumultuous and traumatic events in its transformations toward modernity; few countries have gone through as many dramatic changes as China in the last two centuries.

(Offered as HIST 164 and SWAG 164.) Long before terms such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender were coined, people challenged gender norms and engaged in same-sex sex, love, and relationships. This course introduces students to the dynamic, contested, inspiring, and sometimes quite challenging histories of this wide-ranging group of queer and trans people in the first 250 years of American history. We will learn about the lives, loves, values, and occupations of a racially and geographically diverse group of people.

(Offered as GERM 208, ENGL 275, and EUST 208) This course explores relationships to place, home, landscape, and belonging in Yiddish literature. From the Biblical Exodus to the Displaced Persons camps of post World War Two Europe, Jewish experience has been defined by exile, diaspora, displacement, and migration. A millennium before the “land of Israel” was a political reality, it was a spiritual longing for Jewish communities throughout Europe, for whom life in “exile”, in the diaspora, was an ongoing trial that would only end with the coming of Messiah.

(Offered as GERM 208, ENGL 275, and EUST 208) This course explores relationships to place, home, landscape, and belonging in Yiddish literature. From the Biblical Exodus to the Displaced Persons camps of post World War Two Europe, Jewish experience has been defined by exile, diaspora, displacement, and migration. A millennium before the “land of Israel” was a political reality, it was a spiritual longing for Jewish communities throughout Europe, for whom life in “exile”, in the diaspora, was an ongoing trial that would only end with the coming of Messiah.

(Offered as FREN 323 and EUST 323) "If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial" (III, 2 "Of Repentance"). A Renaissance jurist and thinker, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) is widely recognized as one of the key figures in the history of self-writing and of the essay as genre. This course, however, situates Montaigne beyond these two frames. In the spirit of Montaigne himself, it proposes to attempt, to sample, to taste—in sum, to essay—the Essais (1580-1595).

(Offered as EUST 122 and HIST 122) Readings in European Traditions II will provide an overview of major historical developments in modern European history, including the development of the modern state and society, the transformation of early modern political and social structures under the impact of modern ideologies, revolutions and mass politics, the emergence of nation-states in imperial contexts, the contested definition of boundaries of Europeanness. Limited to 25 students. 

Spring semester 2026. Professor Semyonov.

(Offered as ENGL- 123 and EUST-121) [Before 1800] Over a thousand years ago, a group of peoples began to form themselves into what we now call “Europe,” a geopolitical space that identifies itself as a shared culture. This course reads classic texts from the European tradition in order to study some of the most influential works of Western culture as well as to interrogate and critique the foundations of an idea of the European tradition. We will put philosophy and literature from antiquity and the Middle Ages in dialogue with selected scholarship on the formation of European culture.

Ecosystem ecology provides a framework for understanding the organization and function of the biosphere and insights into the critical environmental issues of our time. Through lecture, discussion, and collaborative work, we explore interactions between organisms and the environment from the molecular to the global scale.

(Offered as ENST 292 and HIST 292) This class will take a historical and comparative approach to the topic of