This course explores how art and architecture have profoundly shaped visual experiences and shifting understandings of the past and present. Featuring different case studies, each section includes work with original objects, site visits and writings about art.

Brain implants, embryo selection, self-driving cars, nanotechnology, robot nurses, virtual teachers, cognitive enhancing drugs and artificial general intelligences are among the technologies that might have a large impact on our economy over the next few decades. This seminar uses the tools of microeconomics to explore the potential effects of these and other possible technologies and to explain how economic incentives shape the types of technologies businesses develop. Prerequisite: ECO 250.

This is an advanced research seminar in which students work closely with archival materials from the Sophia Smith Collection and other archives: The history of students of color at Smith College. Draws from readings about African American, Latinx, Asian American, Indigenous, international and other students of color in higher education. Explores the Smith College archives for documents, ephemera and oral histories.

Cultural and social interpretations of the fundamental event in modern history. The staging of politics from the tribune to the guillotine. History as a literary art in prose, poetry, drama and film. Focus on Paris 1787–95. Enrollment limited to 18.

Contemporary debates among European historians, artists and citizens over the place of memory in political and social history. The effectiveness of a range of representational practices from the historical monograph to visual culture, as markers of history, and as creators of meaning.

The Mediterranean world from the fall of Rome to the age of conversion. The emergence of the Islamic world, the Byzantine state and the Germanic empire. Topics include the monastic ideal, Sufism and the cult of saints; the emergence of the papacy; kinship and kingship: Charlemagne and the Carolingian renaissance, the high caliphate, and the continuation of the Eastern Roman Empire; literacy and learning. The decline of public authority and the dominance of personal power in societies built on local relations.

Topics Course. Enrollment limited to 18: This colloquium explores the history of human mobility from, to, and within the Global South, emphasizing the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We examine a range of migrant groups who crossed oceans and borders for temporary sojourns or permanent settlement, by choice or by force. We ask how mobility has shaped the human experience in distinct ways depending on migrants’ age, social class, race, gender, and sexuality.

A woman behaves badly. A man’s honor is attacked. Race barriers are contravened. Criminals get violent. When these things happen, scandals ensue. This course surveys changes in American society and culture from the eighteenth century to the present through the lens of the sensational and the scandalous. The course focuses particularly on issues of corruption, gender, sexuality, race, media, and violence. Examining scandals allows us to better understand popular norms about power, politics, and society. Enrollment limited to 40.

Topics Course. Enrollment limited to 18: This colloquium focuses on the history of borderlands in the Global South. We read case studies about how borders were made and maintained as well as how ordinary people lived in borderland places. This class emphasizes the spatial dimension of history, asking: How is power created or contested by dividing territories? What opportunities do the borderlands offer for making a living, resisting state projects, or forging hybrid identities? We use the lenses of gender, race, and nation to scrutinize differentiation within frontier societies.

Digital history is a growing field of historical scholarship that uses computational and quantitative methods to make the past more accessible and comprehensible to a broad public. It focuses on the use of digital media and tools to engage with a variety of audiences about the past. Students will develop skills in digital history capacities such as corpus linguistics, mapping, network analysis, text mining, digital archives, and topic modelling. Using these tools, students will collaborate to create meaningful, interpretive works of history. Enrollment limited to 18.