Africa & Making Modern World

Often seen as peripheral to the modern world, Africa and African peoples are often ignored in both popular and scholarly world histories traversing the last several centuries. This course aims to turn these narratives on their head by not only injecting African histories into world historical narratives, but by using these histories to detail Africa’s centrality to understanding the world.

The Historian's Craft

This course serves as an introduction to the study of History and to what historians do. It is a requirement for the History major. At the root of this course is the question of what is history and what it means to study history. Key questions driving the course are: Is history simply the study of the past? What is the past’s connection to the present? Is it even necessary to make such connections to the present and what is lost and gained in making such connections? Normally to be taken during a student's first or second year. Enrollment limited to 40.

Tech of Reading & Writing

Offered as ENG 207 and HSC 207. An introductory exploration of the physical forms that knowledge and communication have taken in the West, from ancient oral cultures to modern print-literate culture. The main interest is in discovering how what is said and thought in a culture reflects its available kinds of literacy and media of communication.

Greek Prose & Poetry Classical

An introduction to different genres of prose and poetry in the Classical period with attention to linguistic differences over time and region. Readings are from works such as Herodotus' History of the Persian War, the poetry of Solon the wise Athenian lawmaker, the philosophical dialogues of Plato, the Athenian courtroom speeches of Lysias, the tragedies of Euripides. Prerequisite: three semesters of Greek or equivalent.

Elementary Greek

A year-long course in the fundamentals of Attic Greek, the dialect of Greek spoken in antiquity in the region of Attica and its capital, Athens, and used by canonical writers such as the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, the historian Thucydides and the philosopher Plato. This course prepares students to read the works of these authors and a wide range of others through a combination of grammatical study, composition and graded reading practice, while learning about the history and culture of classical Greece.

Sem:African Amer Political Th

African American political thought developed in response to the world-destroying and world-constructing forces of colonialism and racial slavery. Across three centuries, thinkers have worked to reconfigure the core projects of Western modernity to account for what has often been ignored: race-making and racial violence, as well as struggles to construct a new politics free from domination.

Sem:T-Internatn-Politics/Data

This course aims to understand the political implications of the Big Data era through a focus on how data has corresponded with power throughout history, from ancient times to today. The course considers how new data sources and technologies have driven significant social change, such as through the development of statistics (“science that serves the state”) for taxation and government census, surveillance practices for policing and national security, classification for anti-poverty programs and data security regulations.

Colq:Gov Lab: Research

This course introduces students to the basic building blocks of political science research, including developing a research question, conducting a literature review, defining concepts, selecting cases and presenting results. While students read and discuss exemplary research in American and comparative politics and international relations, the course focuses on "learning by doing" via a series of short projects driven by students’ interests.

Political Visions of Nature

Upon what visions of nature does modern political thought rest? When one looks back to the history of political thought, does one only find ideas of human dominion over nature or are there also buried alternatives? And what might these diverging pathways have to teach in the present moment? This course surveys the history of Western political thought from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century from the vantage point of the present ecological crises to track and understand these diverging pathways.
Subscribe to