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.
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.
The European Enlightenment
Upper-Level Seminar
What was the Enlightenment? More often invoked than understood, the European Enlightenment can seem like a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Although a product of pre-revolutionary Europe, it has become a symbol of modernity. Though secular, its exponents thought natural science compatible with the existence of God and even (certain forms of) religion. Even as the world became increasingly connected, Enlightenment thinkers posited that European culture was different than–and superior to–any other. And, in the bitterest irony of all, its writers produced powerful new theories of natural rights during the high-water mark of the Atlantic slave trade. Despite or because of these complexities, the Enlightenment remains a crucial chapter in the intellectual history of Europe, and an unavoidable legacy for anyone interested in secular traditions of Western thought. Combining intellectual history, the history of knowledge, and the history of the book, this seminar will take its measure. Sources to be read include Spinoza, Leibniz, Bayle, Madame du Châtelet, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Cugoano.
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.