Current classes
The Coffeehouse from Arabia to the Enlightenment
First-Year Seminar
Centered around a novel stimulant, the coffeehouse afforded a public space where people could congregate to discuss politics and ideas. In this seminar, we reconstruct the progress of the coffeehouse in a quest to understand what made it so special. Through the prism of the coffeehouse we will explore a crucial period in the history of Europe and the Middle East, when interaction and exchange intersected with conflict and competition, and when new forms of sociability were invented at the same time as new forms of commodity extraction.
Early Modern Europe
Survey
From about 1492 to 1776, Europeans initiated a series of political, economic, technological, and intellectual changes that transformed their own societies and the world. This survey examines the revival of classical letters, religious conflict and compromise, new forms of warfare and state power, new commercial and financial entities like the chartered trading company and the central bank, the Atlantic plantation economy, the Enlightenment, and the beginning of an age of Atlantic revolutions.
Reformations: Faith, Politics, and the World
Upper-Level Seminar
By opposing the faith of the individual believer to the authority of the established Church, Martin Luther and his followers sparked a series of transformations that created not just Protestantism in all its varieties but, it has been argued, crucial aspects of modernity. While considering classic interpretations, this seminar probes more recent investigations of the plural Reformations: not just Protestant but also Catholic, and not solely the elite movement of Luther and John Calvin but also the less orthodox Reformation of tradesmen, artisans, and peasants. What was at stake in these sweeping transformations of what it meant to be a Christian? Historical developments to be considered include theological debates about human agency, the changing relationship of religion and the state, female mysticism, religious warfare, and overseas missions.
The Historian’s Task
Upper-Level Seminar
What is the historian’s task? In this seminar we consider a variety of answers to this question by looking at how historians have practiced their craft from antiquity to the present. In the first half of the course, we read historians from across the globe to see how the study of the past has differed across human societies from ancient times until the nineteenth century. What do their approaches have in common, and what distinguishes them? In the second half of the course we investigate the modern historical tradition from the early twentieth century to the present, including the Annales school, economic and environmental history, microhistory, and subaltern studies. Throughout, we discuss the lessons that we can draw for our own practice as historians. Authors to be read include Herodotus, Ibn Khaldun, Ranke, Bloch, Guha.
European Intellectual History
Upper-Level Seminar
Syllabus
The scholars and thinkers of Renaissance Europe set the agenda for much of modern Western thought concerning history, morality, religion, and politics. Our class will retrace the long and winding road from the dawn of the Renaissance to the beginning of the Enlightenment. We will consider how ideas about history, politics, and religion emerged in the context of such intellectual movements as scholasticism, humanism, and the new philosophy. But so too will we discuss the effects of the invention of the printing press, the edition and translation of the classics and the Bible, and the foundation of journals and new meeting-places for public discussion. Authors to be read include Petrarch, Christine de Pizan, Machiavelli, More, Hobbes, and Leibniz.
Making Race in Early Modern Europe
Upper-Level Tutorial
In modern scholarship, racism has most often been portrayed as a child of the European Enlightenment, a set of ideas about embodied human difference and its heritability that arose after the abandonment of the Biblical account of human creation and the rise of a new natural science. This tutorial asks: what racial ideas and practices preceded the Enlightenment? Beginning in the late Middle Ages, Europeans participated in enormous economic and cultural transformations, including increased global mobility and the establishment of new, transoceanic empires. Intensified interactions with people in the Americas, Africa, and Asia shaped European understandings of human difference, as did the burgeoning Atlantic economy and its cruelties. In this tutorial, we will place the emergence of modern racism in a long-term perspective, reconstructing the deep history out of which Enlightenment racial theory emerged. Proceeding both chronologically and thematically, we will consider how the major global transformations of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries shaped European racial understandings with enduring consequence.
Archived classes
Islam in European Culture
Tutorial
From the Crusades to modern colonialism, the history of Muslims and Western Christians has often been recounted as the clash of opposing civilizations, a history of warfare and incompatible values. This tutorial takes a different point of departure, namely the recent scholarly recognition that relationships between Muslims and Western Christians were often rooted in the intimacy of frequent interaction. We will delve into the many ways in which Muslim peoples shaped European culture from the Middle Ages to the present, from one of the first translations of the Qur’an into any language, the Latin version done in Toledo in 1143, to the many goods made by Muslim craftsmen that filled the homes of Renaissance Europe, to the roles of early modern Muslims as captives, slaves, diplomats, travelers, and converts. In the modern period, Muslims continued to inflect European culture both as colonial subjects and as domestic minorities, producing and inspiring art, imaginative literature, and critiques of European power. Our investigation will encompass music, visual art and film in addition to written works. How do we make sense of this intricately interwoven history? And what are its legacies for the present? Sources both primary and secondary will include Lady Montagu, Mozart, al-Tahtawi, Flaubert, Assia Djebar, and Fatima Mernissi.
Global Microhistory
Tutorial
The early modern period, 1500–1800, was humankind’s first truly global era. Its history can be told in terms of transregional trade and flows of capital. Yet what macrohistory cannot reveal is the human texture of global interaction--the many ways in which people from different continents, religions and languages responded to each other as they increasingly interacted. In order to explain what early modern globalization looked like on the ground, historians of our time have attempted to recover individual lives that played out across cultures and religions. They have debated whether intercultural experiences caused people to question their own assumptions or to harden in their beliefs, and whether the transition between religious and cultural environments empowered or entrapped these women and men. Through a series of case studies, we will investigate how people made lives across the early modern world, how historians have written about them, and what these historical experiences tell us about how the modern world was made. In the final unit, we will turn to the nineteenth-century age of empire in order to consider what was peculiar about the early modern period. Readings will combine primary sources with global biographies by major historians of our time.
Europe and the World
Graduate Seminar
Can the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe (ca. 1500–1800) be told as a history of global interaction? In this seminar, we will revisit some of the classic topics of early modern European historiography, including the revival of classical letters, the encounter with the Americas, the new statecraft, the new natural philosophy, and the Enlightenment. But we will do so with a particular eye to accounts that have placed these changes in broader frames of reference, or connected them to extra-European histories. These global angles—comparative and, especially, connective—have been pursued in a variety of domains: from microhistory to the history of objects, the history of science, of religion, of scholarship, and beyond. We will consider their convergences and divergences, paying special attention to the vocabularies that historians have coined to describe the mechanics of cultural interaction, and to the ways in which European history has been written as merely one chapter of a global early modernity. More broadly, we will ask: does economic globalization offer a valid master narrative for interpreting cultural and intellectual processes? What is gained and what is lost when we emphasize movement both within Europe and beyond? Ultimately, we will attempt to define how the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe, which was so generative in the twentieth century, should evolve in response to the intellectual challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first.
Festivities in the Early Modern World
Graduate Seminar
In 1860, Jacob Burckhardt put festivals at the center of his influential study of Renaissance Italy. In the century and a half since, scholars have enriched and deepened our understanding of festivities across early modern Europe and the world during the era of early global interaction (ca. 1400-1800). In this seminar we will seek to establish why festivities were so intrinsic to early modern culture, and what work they did. To what extent was performing a form of knowledge? How did festivity mediate early global interaction? We will consider, moreover, the many ways in which ephemeral events were commemorated in paintings and prints, and to what extent historians can recapture the early modern festivity today. Beyond Europe, we will investigate how the festival cultures of the Americas, of Africa, and of Asia interacted with European festival traditions, whether in Goa, Pernambuco, or Mexico City. Ultimately, we will ask: what might an early modern cultural history focused on festivities reveal?