Visions/Revisions: Issues in Women’s History. Rona Holub – Yearlong. This seminar surveys path-breaking studies of US and Global women’s history and related subjects. 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 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. Pricilla Murolo – Yearlong. This 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.

Public Stories, Private Lives: Methods of Oral History. Mary Dillard – Fall. Oral history methodology has moved from a contested approach to studying history to an integral method of learning about the past. This is because oral histories allow us to gain an understanding of past events from a diverse array of vantage points. Methods of recording oral history also allow the possibility of bringing private stories into the public. In contrast, public history in the form of monuments, museums, and World Heritage Sites are consciously preserved in order to emphasize particular aspects of a national, regional, or local past, which its protectors deem to be important. Who owns this history? Is it Civil War re-enactors who dedicate their weekends to remembering this war? Is it the African Americans who return to West Africa in search of their African past or the West Africans who want to forget about their slave-trading past? What happens when the methods for interpreting public and oral histories combine? This course places particular attention on the importance of oral history in tracing memories of the past. We will discuss how Africanist and feminist scholars have used oral history to study the history of underrepresented groups. We will also investigate how methods of oral history and public history can be used in reconstructing the local history of our surrounding community (i.e., Yonkers, Bronxville, Westchester).

In combination with In/Migration: How Immigrants and Migrants Changed New York City from a Small Trading Post to an Emerging World Metropolis, constitutes a yearlong research seminar for Women’s History Graduate Students

In/Migration: How Immigrants and Migrants Changed New York City from a Small Trading Post to an Emerging World Metropolis. Rona Holub – Spring. The question is: Who Created New York City? The answer is: slaves, immigrants, migrants-its people! This course traces the development of New York City beginning with its first inhabitants, the Lenape. It then follows its growth from a small trading post at the tip of Manhattan into a great commercial and cultural center. We explore the national and global dimensions of its transformations including a special emphasis on the factors that push people out of one place and pull them into another what they find when they arrive in their new environments and especially how they struggle, negotiate, and figure out how to survive there. We will unpack how people exert power and how they deal with power exerted over them in their we will and examine the social, political, economic, and cultural history of the city through a wide range of readings that include primary source documents and historical scholarship. We will also experience the rhythms of this famous metropolis on its streets as we attempt to understand the complex relationship between the city’s social history and its built environment through field trips (attendance at these is required). The class focuses on those groups of migrantsand immigrants who entered into and lived in the city from the early 1600s to the 1920s. Our historical explorations 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. Although the course covers a particular time period, students may do conference projects that cover years not specifically addressed in the course.

In combination with Mary Dillard’s Public Stories, Private Lives: Methods of Oral History, constitutes a yearlong research seminar for Women’s History Graduate Students

Leisure and Danger. Persis Charles – Yearlong. The interaction between work and play has taken various forms in history. Our project in this course will be to examine the changes and continuities in the idea of leisure. Beginning in early modern Europe, we will trace the concept up to the present, concentrating on Europe and America, and reflecting on such subjects as travel and the pursuit of the exotic, theatricality, consumerism, luxury, and display. In the nineteenth century, leisure became democratized and an anxious debate grew louder. What were the implications of making leisure available to masses of people? From romance novels to cheap liquor, from shopping to the cinema, new avenues of leisure aroused both fear and excitement. Moralists felt a need to police both public and private space and to reassert the primacy of work, thrift, and duty. We will study them and the various forms of accommodation and resistance that met their efforts. Class, ethnicity, gender, and geography all acted to structure people’s access to leisure. We will look at struggles over race, gender, and popular culture, the way certain groups became designated as providers of entertainment, or how certain locations were created as places of pleasure. To set the terms of the debate, we will begin with some eighteenth-century readings about the theatre and the market, the salon and the court. Readings will include work of Montesquieu, Flaubert, Wilde, Wharton, George Eliot, and Fitzgerald. In addition, we will read works of nonfiction that show how leisure helped to create new forms of subjectivity and interiority. Students will be encouraged to work on conference topics linking leisure to a variety of subjects, such as childhood and education, or the construction of racial identities, or the changing nature of parenthood as birth control became more and more widely available, to name just a few areas. Potentially this course, through the study of complex oppositions like need and desire, purpose and aimlessness, the necessary and gratuitous, can give us a sense of the dizzying questions about life’s very meaning that present themselves when we aim at a life of leisure.

Women in Film: History and Feminist Film Theory. Kathryn Hearst. This seminar uses feminist film theory to analyze cinema from its silent origins to the present.  Gender, class, and race offer contextual ways to look at the representation of women and men in film.  The class will explore how film is a unique medium, different from literature, photography, and fine art.  We will examine how film can provide a way to look at the history and culture.  We will learn how to read films and discuss explicit and implicit meanings embedded in movies.  A variety of film genres will be analyzed from the silent screen to classic Hollywood, the woman's film, film noir, auteur film, masculine film, fantasy and horror, feminist film, including gay and documentary works, Afro-American film, and finally, global feminist cinema.