Nadine Roth

This course examines the ways in which artists, filmmakers, and/or writers have responded to the social complexity of urban life and the difficult task of finding points of connection within the diversity of the city. How is the order and the disorder of urban space represented in their work? What intellectual frameworks do they call upon to find meaning in unfamiliar settings? How do these assumptions shape what is seen and unseen within the city? And most importantly, what do these city texts reveal about the potential for building new forms of belonging and community within the urban environment?

The Second World War was the most destructive in human history and has become a touchstone for historical understanding in the postwar period. This course seeks to examine not only the strategic decisions of major belligerent states (Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan, Britain and the United States), but also the transformative power of the war in societies across the globe. Course topics will include the experience of soldiers and civilians, the mobilization of populations within far-flung empires, the use of new weapons and occupation strategies, and the critical social and political consequences of the war on populations across Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and the Middle East.

How is history written? This course offers a survey of the major theories and practices that have defined history as a scholarly discipline, and as a way of writing, over the last fifty years. Students are introduced to the major theoretical and narrative perspectives that have shaped historiography: to the kinds of historical questions that drive the research agendas of contemporary historians; and to the kinds of historical literature historians write, including analytical, narrative, scholarly, popular, and experimental. How do historians find and interpret their sources? How do they engage with existing scholarship while still striving to push their discipline forward? What methods do they apply to communicate the results of their research to other scholars and to a wider public readership? Students will learn to evaluate a wide array of different historical sources (including written documents, material artifacts, oral histories, and visual culture). They will also gain experience in meeting the challenges of writing their own works of historical scholarship, producing an original piece of written history by the end of the semester.

Prerequisite: Reserved for Junior standing or above.

This course explores the development of port cities on both sides of the Atlantic as vital nodes of economic and cultural exchange from the early modern period of European colonization to the contemporary era of globalization. Tracing the entangled histories of the Atlantic World, students will explore the emergence of new colonial cities and the transformation of established urban centers as a function of new patterns of commodity circulation, labor migration, and cultural influence. Special attention will be given to changes in the built environment in response to shifting technologies and political contexts and to the spatial, racial and gendered restrictions that characterized these new urban forms. Case studies will be drawn from a wide range of cities, including Rio de Janeiro, Liverpool, Havana, Seville, and Lagos.