FIRST SEMESTER 2010-11
GRADUATE LEVEL COURSES
Consult BannerWeb for registration codes.

AMS/HST 433/533 Oral Tradition: History and Practice – T R 2:15-3:30
Dr. Nishani Frazier

Traces the use of oral tradition in historical writing and introduces theory and practice of oral history as a methodology basic to historical research.

HST 436/536 / POL 440/540 Havighurst Colloquium: The Gulag in History and Memory (4 credits) – M W 12:20-2:00
Dr. Stephen Norris

This course will introduce students to the history and literature of the Gulag. The camp system started after 1917 by Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik Party expanded significantly under Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin. During the 1930s and 1940s, millions of Soviet citizens were sent to labor camps. After Stalin’s death, writers such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlaam Shalamov, who had both spent time in the camps, wrote about their experiences and ensured that the Stalin era would come to be associated with the Gulag Archipelago (to use Solzhenitsyn’s famous concept). This class will explore the history of the Gulag in the Soviet Union and the ways in which Russians have remembered it. In addition, we will compare the Soviet system to other camp systems that flourished in the 20th Century. This class will also allow students to take part in the Havighurst Center’s annual conference that will be devoted to the Gulag in the Fall of 2010.

HST 442/542 Ancient Jewish History – T R 12:45-2:00
Dr. Kevin Osterloh

What does it mean to be Jewish in the ancient world? Where, and under what social conditions, did Judaism come into being? This course deals with the ancient history of the Jewish people from the Persian through the Greco-Roman periods (539 BCE-200 CE), during which time Judaism – the “way of life” of the Jewish people – first emerged within the broader sociopolitical and cultural context of the ancient Near East. This is a story of how the Jewish people began to define their identity, as Jews, and find their place in a world as politically and culturally complex as our own. In this course we will study how Jews preserved their communal traditions and Israelite legacy through a variety of approaches to foreign cultures and rulers, such as the Persians, Greeks and Romans. Jews survived and flourished in a majority non-Jewish world through a process of “creative communal reinvention” revealed in the architecture, coins, inscriptions and literature of the period, which we will study throughout this course. In sum, this course provides a basic knowledge of ancient Jewish history, essential for understanding both the origins of Judaism and the great significance of the ancient Jewish cultural legacy for later Judaism, Christianity, Islam and western society as a whole.

BWS/HST 495/595 Modern African Environmental History – M 7:00-9:40
Dr. Osaak Olumwullah

Offers a multidisciplinary approach to the social, economic, and political aspects of environmental change in sub-Saharan Africa. Explores the utility of social science and historical analyses for understanding long-term changes in the region’s environment. Concerned with the way the idea of development has been conceptualized and applied in the region in the last 100 or so years. Considers how Africans perceived and responded to environmental crises in the 20th century.

HST 702 Research Seminar – M 12:45-3:25
Dr. Mary Frederickson

Development and presentation of an original piece of research, based on primary sources, in one’s field of emphasis. Required for History MA students.

HST 710 Colloquium in U.S. History – T 9:05-11:45
Topic: American Imperialism
Dr. Amanda McVety

HST 720 Colloquium in European History – T 6:00-8:40
HST 780 Colloquium in World and Comparative History
(Students may register for either course number)

Topic: 19th and 20th Century European Foreign Relations
Dr. Sheldon Anderson

HST 793 Historical Methods – M 5:30-8:00
Dr. Wietse de Boer

An introduction to the practice and the discipline of history, for beginning graduate students. Required of all first-year students, this course will develop practice skills needed by history graduate students as well as addressing problems of evidence and interpretation. The course will also serve as an introduction to the history department and to the approaches to history that historians in it typically practice.

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