This course examines questions of social class within the Mount Holyoke community, at critical intersections with race, gender, and disability. Drawing upon readings in anthropology and film studies that critique the notion of a homogeneous 'community' and offer alternative theoretical models, students will focus reflexively on three projects.

Introduces the analysis of cultural diversity, including concepts, methods, and purposes in interpreting social, economic, political, and belief systems found in human societies.

Introduces the analysis of cultural diversity, including concepts, methods, and purposes in interpreting social, economic, political, and belief systems found in human societies.

For many the 'discovery' of America opened the modern era. Its closing may also have been foretold in Latin America's confounding of diverse theories of modernization and development in recent times.

Material culture studies examine relationships between people and objects. Tangible artifacts like furniture, clothing, ceramics, tools, and buildings give insight into communties' identities, aspirations, and struggles. This course approaches early American and indigenous histories through objects, and considers how interdisciplinary methodologies can reveal alternative understandings of the past.

This course looks at the scientific content and intellectual context of Darwin's theory of evolution - his facts, metaphors, hypotheses, and philosophical assumptions. Readings from Darwin and his sources, and examination of the organisms he studied. A background in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history or whole organism biology is recommended.

This course explores relations among Germans, Slavs, and Jews in Central and Eastern Europe before, during, and after the First and Second World Wars. Emphasis lies on tracing continuities and ruptures in nationalist and racist ideologies and policies, from late imperial Germany and Austria through the interwar republics and then on to the Third Reich and the post-Nazi regimes.

This course uses archival records, fiction, film, life histories and outstanding recent scholarship to investigate African women's actions in a century that encompassed women's loss of power and authority despite their continuing centrality in food production. We study the erosion of women's autonomy and the loss of women's work of governing at conquest, in the early colonial period, and as a consequence of Africa's subordinate place in the world economy.

What knowledge will allow us to realize the potential of education to facilitate progress for Africa, and how do we generate that knowledge? The historical component of this course explores the deliberate use of education to hold people in servitude as well as African experiences of empowering education, and asks why the immense efforts expended on education in recent decades are not yielding prosperity for the citizens of African nations.

An analysis of the modern Mexican nation-state organized around three major themes: the conflictive yet symbiotic relationship with the United States, from the war of the 1840s through NAFTA most recently; the succession of reformist and revolutionary upheavals in 1810-1821, 1856-1867, 1910-1917, the 1930s, and again today, seeking to resolve both problems of the colonial past and new conflicts traceable to the very reforms generated by earlier political and social struggles; and the meaning of Mexican nationality from different ethnic, gender, and class perspectives.