History 5229 Special Topics in Ancient Christianity
Instructor: Harrill, Bert
Days/Time: WF, 12:45pm-2:05pm
This is the graduate section of History 3218: Paul & His Influence in Early Christianity.
Description
Paul is the most powerful human personality in the history of the Church. His letters are the foundations on which later Christian theology is built. This course introduces the critical study of Paul's literary work as primary sources for reconstructing the development of the Christian movement. We explore how the figure changed over time. We look at the significance of Paul's life and the competing ways its story was retold, appropriated, or resisted. The student will study the Pauline literature closely and will read important secondary treatments of Paul, including areas of controversy in the interpretation of his life and thought. The course presupposes no prior coursework on the Bible or in the academic study of religion.
History 5550 Special Topics in Military History
Instructor: Walker, Lydia
Days/Time: W, 9:35am-12:20pm
Topic: History of the International Laws of War
Description
Can—and should—war be regulated and even humanized through law? This course begins with the foundational period of th modern laws of war, beginning in the 1860s in Europe and the United States and carries through the global scope of legal developments since the end of the Second World War when a series of conferences drove the partial transformation of the laws of war into today’s International Humanitarian Law. Key questions include: who has pushed for the codification of laws of war, and why? How/do legal codes shape warfare? What are critiques of and even alternatives to the laws of war? Topics include the American Civil War, colonial warfare, the Nuremberg and Geneva Conventions, decolonization struggles, effects of technological innovation, and contemporary challenges. This is culminates in a final paper and presentation on a topic relevant to the course by the student with the instructor’s approval.
*This seminar is offered to graduate—MA and PhD—students as well as undergraduates with instructor permission. If you are an undergraduate interested in taking this class, please email Prof Walker at walker.1380@osu.edu*
History 7012 Historiography of Modern U.S. II
Instructor: Howard, Clay
Days/Time: Fridays, 9:35am-12:20pm
Description
This course is designed to introduce students to some of the major themes, methods, and texts written by historians who study the United States since 1945. The primary goal of the seminar is to help the class prepare for their general exams, to familiarize them with scholarly questions beyond their own narrower fields of interest, and to help them someday teach recent U.S. history. In order to enable students to better understand the ways that authors build off earlier research, this version of HIST7012 focuses on several themes on the historiography of the postwar period. Themes previously explored in this class include histories of capitalism, labor, the Cold War, cities, the state, race, gender, and sexuality..
History 7210 Graduate Reading Seminar in Ancient History
Instructor: Sessa, Tina
Days/Time: Mondays, 9:35am-12:20pm
Topic: An Introduction to Late Ancient and Early Medieval Hagiography
Description
This course is designed to familiarize graduate students with one of the most important genres of late ancient and medieval Christian literature in premodern Eurasia: the saint’s life. Following a brief introduction to ancient Greco-Roman biography and related genres (e.g., aretalogies, the gospels, the apocryphal acts), we shall explore in rough chronological order some of the most important forms of Christian hagiographic writing in Latin and Greek, such as the martyr narrative, the monk’s life, the lives of holy lay people, and episcopal biographies. While the course will focus primarily on the study of primary texts in relation to their historical contexts, it will also introduce students to modern interpretive approaches to late ancient and early medieval hagiography as well as to the various reference tools and skills needed to study what are in many cases “living texts.” Students will be expected to deliver several in-class presentations and produce a final research paper on a related topic of their choice. N.B.: All assigned course readings will be available in English translations, but some research topics require reading knowledge of Latin and/or Greek as well as French, German, and/or Italian (among others). Students will need to work closely with Professor Sessa to choose a topic that best fits their interests and skills.
History 7230 Studies in Medieval History
Instructor: Butler, Sara
Days/Time: M, 2:15pm-5:00pm
Topic: Law and Society in Medieval England
Description
Medieval Englishmen and women were extraordinarily litigious people. They regularly turned to the law to resolve problems that cropped up in their daily lives. This course adopts Daniel Lord Smail’s approach to the law which sees litigants as consumers of justice. Medieval England’s expansive judicial system (which included courts of common law, equity, church, and manor) provided litigants the ability to shop around and find the best court to resolve their grievances. Indeed, it was not unusual for one case to be sued simultaneously in multiple courts! This course will examine what we today would describe as criminal and civil suits. We will examine: property and inheritance, marriage and divorce, gender and family, felony (homicide, theft, treason), raptus (rape and ravishment), assault and misdemeanor, sanctuary, benefit of clergy, and punishment. All readings will be accessible on Canvas.
History 7350 Studies in Islamic History
Instructor: Akin, Yigit
Days/Time: T, 12:45pm-3:30pm
Topic: Power and Politics in the Ottoman and Post-Ottoman World
Description
Graduate reading seminar on a topic in Islamic history, stressing topical coverage and/or historiography. May be repeated for credited when the topic changes.
History 7500 Studies in International History
Instructor: Nichols, Christopher McKnight
Days/Time: W, 12:45pm - 3:30pm
Topic: The United States and the World, from the Founding to the Present
Description
This course is an advanced overview and exploration of the state of the field of the “U.S. and/in the World”/aka American Diplomatic History. The focus is both on the history and on the historiography of the field, with an emphasis on recent work, and with an eye to preparing students to understand, research, and write on specific areas within this dynamic field. We will track two central through-line themes across the history and historiography in this class: the role of ideology and the role of religion in shaping U.S. foreign policy and relations to and with the world broadly. In so doing, however, readings, discussions, and assignments will not be limited to those themes. Another key set of concepts will revolve around understandings and practices of empire in debates over the U.S.’s place on the continent, in the hemisphere, and around the world. The course will investigate the increasingly heterogeneous and global methodologies deployed by scholars in the field, including a focus on law, environment, gender and sexuality, science and culture, immigration and citizenship, war and peace, human rights, slavery and capitalism, policy formation and strategy, transnationalism, and more.
Students with a wide variety of interests, from military history to grand strategy, gender, race, politics, philosophy, economics, religious studies, popular culture, and the environment, including history of science and intellectual and cultural history, comparative studies, and, of course, international and diplomatic history as well as political science, are encouraged to enroll and to be actively engaged in shaping the assignments toward their interests and needs.
Tentatively Assigned Readings:
• Eliga Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (2014);
• Caitlin Fitz, Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions (2017);
• Emily Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (2018);
• Jay Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth Century America (2011);
• Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (2018);
• April Merleaux, Sugar and Civilization: American Empire and the Cultural Politics of Sweetness (2015);
• Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (2009);
• Keisha Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (2019);
• Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (2007);
• Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (2003);
• Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (2009);
• Jacob Hamblin, Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (2017);
• Sarah Snyder, From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed U.S. Foreign Policy (2018);
• Joanne Meyerowitz, A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit (2021);
• Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (2020);
• Nichols and Milne, eds., Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories (2022).
Assignments:
Leading one class session; two book reviews; one op-ed; choice of one op-ed or one draft syllabus; final historiographical essay.
History 7550 Studies In Military History
Instructor: Cabanes, Bruno
Days/Time: W, 5:30pm-8:15pm
Topic: Violence as a Language, from World War I to the present
Description
This reading seminar explores the social dynamics of war violence by studying violence as a form of communication experienced in wartime and/or targeted at the enemy. Special emphasis will be placed on the processes of dehumanization and disidentification, violence as an element of group bonding, crimes of desecration and the deliberate violation of identities, the function and meaning of sexual violence in wartime, and the legacies of violence in war’s aftermath. Building upon historical research on war violence, social sciences, and personal narratives, this interdisciplinary seminar is open to anyone interested in contributing to a discussion on wartime and postwar violence, the history of the body, trauma, and sexual violence in armed conflicts.
Tentative reading list:
John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial, Yale University Press, 2001
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, HarperCollins Publishers, 1992
Anne Berg, Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany, Oxford University Press, 2024
Jacques Sémelin, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide, Columbia University Press, 2007
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, Picador, 2004
Max Bergholz, Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community, Cornell University Press, 2016
Lee Ann Fujii, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda, Cornell University Press, 2011
Abram de Swaan, The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder, Yale University Press, 2015
History 7600 Studies in the History of Women and Gender
Instructor: Soland, Birgitte
Days/Time: M, 7:00pm-9:45pm
Description
Readings course for graduate students focusing on the history of women and gender. The course content will be international, emphasizing cross-cultural comparisons.
History 7906 Professionalization and the Discipline of History
Instructor: Fontanilla, Ryan
Days/Time: F, 2:15pm-5:00pm
Description
This course introduces the professional field of academic history and its culture. This course will provide resources, guidance, and a supportive setting for graduate students to learn about funding opportunities, to write effective grant applications, and to conceptualize historical work for different audiences (peers, funders, and the public).
History 8801 Seminar in History
Instructor: Conklin, Alice
Days/Time: TBD
Description
This research/writing seminar provides an opportunity to begin and complete a major research project (such as an M.A. paper, dissertation chapter, or article) in the field of Modern History broadly defined. Our course will begin by examining a selection of writings selected by seminar members to help us conceptualize a viable research topic, identify appropriate sources, and develop methodological approaches to analyze these materials. The remainder of the course will allow time for research, writing, rewriting, and for engaging with practical issues in academic life. Students will gain the benefit of receiving regular constructive feedback from a supportive and collegial intellectual community.
Course Assignments:
1. 5-10 page, double-spaced prospectus/research proposal
2. Papers 1 and 2 (each approximately 10 pages doubled–spaced): They will constitute roughly the first third and the second third of your proposed chapter/article/thesis.
3. Draft of Paper 3 (approximately 30 pages, double–spaced, made up of Papers 1 and 2 and ten new pages)
4. Three constructive critiques of your fellow scholars’ works and active participation in class discussion
Notes
This seminar is open to graduate students in any field of Modern History, 1700-present. It is not field or theme-defined. Students will write a major research paper/article chapter and in the process practice making their specialized work legible to those working on other topics, cultures, and geographies.