Women's History Courses
Visions/Revisions: Issues in US Women's History
This seminar surveys path-breaking studies of US women’s history and related subjects, including women’s lives beyond the United States. Course readings, both scholarship and political treatises, exemplify major trends in feminist discourse since the 1960s, from early challenges to androcentric worldviews to the current stress on differences among women. Class discussions will range from fundamental questions—What is feminism? Is “women” a meaningful category?—to theoretical, interpretive, and methodological debates among women’s historians. The course is designed to help advanced students of women’s history to clarify research interests by assessing the work of their predecessors. MA candidates will also use the course to define thesis projects.
Thesis Seminar in Women's and Gender History
Priscilla Murolo, Tara Elise James
This yearlong course is designed for students who are writing MA theses in women’s and gender history. We will discuss the historiographical dimensions of thesis work; assess various research methods, interpretive models, and theories of history; and grapple with practical questions about writing and documentation. Readings include historical scholarship, theoretical works, and research guides. At critical junctures, students will also read and evaluate each others’ work.
Contextualizing Communications: Structure and Representation
Semester: Year
Through communication, we interact with others. Communication is also the mechanism whereby our sense of self, culture, and social and political issues is formulated, challenged, maintained, and/or transformed. Classical, new wave, rap, and folk music all constitute communication forms. Clearly, however, there is a difference among them. Classical music falls within the aegis of “high culture,” i.e., culture mostly accessible to a privileged stratum of society. The remainder belongs to that realm known as “popular,” or “mass” culture. The purpose of this course is to probe into the latter in the context of the United States. Mass communication itself encompasses a vast terrain: with language on one end and extremely sophisticated space and satellite technology on the other. Between these two poles exist diverse cultural forms; e.g., popular fiction (both adults’ and children’s), photography, newspapers, news journals, mass art (including posters), advertising, television, film, radio, videos, and theatre. This course will focus attention on five of these forms: newspapers, television, film, the Internet, and advertising. We will begin with an exploration of the relationship between culture and society; trace the history of the media in the United States, pinpointing its social implications; analyze particular media forms in order to gauge how each produces meaning and assess their possibilities and limits; and examine a diversity of positions regarding media impact. We will conclude the seminar by turning our attention to issues of social and political representation in the media.
A History of New York City
Semester: Year
This course traces the development of New York City from a trading post into a great commercial and cultural center. We will explore the social, political, economic, and cultural histories of the city through a wide range of readings that include primary documents, historical scholarship, and literature. We will also experience the rhythms of this famous metropolis on its streets, in its museums, and through the stories told by its built environment. With special emphasis on the diverse groups of people who built the city, this course will provide an understanding of how and why New York City came to be what it is today and how, as a dynamic organism, it continues to change.
Sophomores with permission.
Revolutionary Women
Semester: Year
From 19th-century struggles against slavery to recent uprisings against apartheid and global capitalism, this seminar explores women’s relationships to revolutions that have shaped the modern world. Although the course focuses largely on U.S. history, we will also consider developments in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Middle East. Topics include: the extraordinary work of revolutionaries such as Harriet Tubman, Aleksandra Kollontai, Yuri Kochiyama, and Rigoberta Menchu; unsung women’s essential contributions to revolutionary movements around the globe; the ways in which revolutions have addressed—or failed to address—women’s demands for equality and self-determination; and the emergence of independent women’s movements within revolutionary contexts. Reading includes memoir, fiction, and political treatises, as well as historical scholarship.
Open to juniors, seniors, and graduate students; open to sophomores with permission.
Whose Body is it Anyway?: A Cultural History of the 20th Century
Semester: Year
This course explores the history of the body as a site and as a means for the social construction of gender, race, sexuality, class, and modern selfhood. We will touch on topics as diverse as prostitution, pornography, and other aspects of the sex industry; medical technologies such as birth control, gender reassignment, and aesthetic surgery; and historic shifts in social categories that we commonly attribute to an unchanging biology of race, sex, disability, and health. Our goal is to understand “body history” in a way that not only illuminates the past but also interrogates the received wisdom that governs how we live our lives. Readings include fiction and cultural theory, as well as scholarship in history, anthropology, sociology, and gender studies. The course is also designed to expose students to the tools and techniques of historical research and writing.
Open to juniors, seniors, and graduate students.