721 - 730 of 788 results for: HISTORY

Intensive exploration of major issues in the history of race and ethnicity in China, Japan, and Korea from the early modern period to the present day.

Graduate colloquium on gender and sexuality in Chinese history.

This course provides a social, political and ecological history of South Asia during the early modern period, roughly from 1500 to 1800 CE. Patrons of the arts and sciences, the Mughals developed sophisticated cultural and political idioms, and a rich historiographical tradition. We will investigate these frameworks with which they sought to understand the diverse worlds of early modern South Asia. We will also study other internal and external actors (like the Marathas, Rajputs, French, Portuguese, and other European powers) that played an active role in the somewhat tumultuous stage of early modern India. By studying how the Mughals saw the world, and how the world saw the Mughals, we will develop a nuanced understanding of one of the richest and most powerful political formations in history, one which has been severely vilified and misunderstood in colonial and independent India. Topics include: the use of land and its ecological costs; the role of Sanskrit, Persian and of vernacular languages in the Mughal court; travels across the Indian Ocean, among others.

Introduces students to the major historical problems and historiographic trends in the study of modern Japan from the Meiji period to the present. Themes include approaches to late Meiji culture and politics, the formation of imperial subjects and citizens, agrarian society and politics, gender in modern Japan, empire and modernity, total war and transwar state and society, U.S. occupation, and postwar Japan.

Graduate historiography colloquium on Japan's early modern / modern transition

(Graduates, enroll in 396F. Undergraduates, enroll in 296F.) Modern science, technology and medicine are global phenomena, and yet scientific knowledge, as the product of human activity, reflects the social, political, economic and cultural contexts in which it is produced, mobilized and used. This course explores the dynamic relationship between science and society in South Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Taking scientific practice as not the exclusive domain of the British colonial state, its European personnel or even South Asian scientists, this course explores the knowledge practices of a range of actors in South Asian societies. We will pursue two questions throughout: How and where did South Asians learn, receive, interpret, practice, and produce scientific knowledge? How did they mobilize this knowledge in their own political and social agendas? In these varied practical, social and cultural projects, science became a force for civilization and enlightenment, political domination and national liberation, and economic development and social transformation. In fact, a 'scientific temperament' has also come to be upheld as the appropriate civic attitude of postcolonial citizens. Through these themes, this course examines the making of the power and cultural authority of the sciences and their practitioners in modern South Asia.

This colloquium will introduce students to the exciting and expanding field of Indian labor history and provide them a comprehensive historiographical foundation in this area of historical research. Seminars will engage with one key monograph in the field every week, with selected chapters of the monograph set as compulsory reading. In these seminars, we will explore the world of the working classes and the urban poor in colonial and post-colonial India, as also the Indian labor diaspora. We will understand myriad workplaces such as jute and cotton mills, small workshops, farms and plantations. We will also explore forms of protest and political mobilization devised by workers in their struggles against structures of oppression and in their quest for a life of dignity. Most importantly, these seminars will train students in the methods deployed by labor historians to access the lives of the largely unlettered workers of the region who seldom left a trace of their consciousness in archival documents. Overall, we will connect the debates in the history of labor in modern India to wider discussions about the nature of capitalism, colonial modernity, gender, class, caste and culture.

This graduate colloquium is a foundational and intensive course in the field of modern South Asian history. It is a course in historiography and weekly discussions will be structured around a key monograph in a specific thematic sub-field. The colloquium will begin with discussions on the impact of the Subaltern Studies collective in shaping the field; and through the quarter we will engage with monographs from various sub-fields such as studies of the transition to colonial rule; the relationship between labor and capital; agrarian history; caste society under colonial rule and Dalit resistance; studies of bureaucratic objects such as the official document; new research in feminist history and the emerging field of trans history.

This course explores key concepts and themes around the temporal cultures of South Asia, with an emphasis on the transition from the middle ages to modernity. We will study the philosophical/scientific understandings of time and history in South Asia, and how the West read (or misread) these temporal traditions. Topics include: the philosophical debates around cyclical and linear time; the development of historical thinking outside Europe; the impact of colonialism on medieval understandings of time and history; the challenges to our sense of 'future' due to the current climate crisis. The goal is to think of South Asia not merely as subject to Western epistemologies and temporalities, but also as an important site where our current concepts and propositions about time and history were developed.