Spring 2026 Graduate Courses

History 5081 Storytelling for Social Justice (Name changing to Public History for Prison Abolition, effective SP26)

Instructor: Cook, DeAnza

Days/Times: Online, TR, 2:20pm – 3:40pm

Description

How do storytellers craft captivating narratives about tough topics most relevant to social justice issues? This seminar equips students with tools for creating community-engaged scholarship by exploring storytelling models championed by Black feminist scholars, community-based artists and educators, as well as oral historians, transformative justice activists, and imprisoned intellectuals.

Special Comments

This course is open to both graduate students and upper-level undergraduate students (Prereq for undergrads is any 3000-level History course or permission of instructor)

History 7000 Studies in Early American History to 1877 

Instructor: Newell, Margaret

Days/Time: W, 5:00 pm – 7:45 pm 

Topic: Native American and African American Citizenship

Description

Graduate readings in selected topics in Early American history to 1877

Prerequisites and Special Comments: 

Graduate standing or permission from instructor 

History 7230 Studies in Medieval History 

Instructor: Tanner, Heather

Days/Time: R, 12:45pm - 3:30 pm 

Topic: Medieval Women's History

Description

This course examines the rich and varied traditions surrounding women in medieval European cultures—and explores how and why those traditions evolved over time. From the foundations of Roman law and medieval medicine to the powerful influence of Christian scripture, ideas about women in this era were anything but uniform. While Christian ideals formed a common thread across Europe, how those ideals were interpreted, enforced, and lived varied widely from one region to another. Through close readings of primary sources and scholarly articles, we’ll dig into the cultural forces that shaped these differences—examining how women’s roles and status were influenced by marriage customs, inheritance laws, literature, and religious practices. A central focus of the course is female agency and their roles in governance, religious life, and the economy.

Course Assignments will include: leading one class session; weekly written responses to the assigned reading; and a final historiographical essay.

Prerequisites and Special Comments: 

Graduate standing or permission from instructor 

History 7240 Studies in Early Modern European History 

Instructor: Bond, Elizabeth

Days/Time: W, 10:00 am – 12:45 pm 

Description

This early modern Europe reading seminar explores Microhistory as a methodological approach in cultural, social, and world history. Discussions will include questions of scale in historical inquiry, making sense of absences in the archive, writing the histories of those who authored no records of their own, and the challenges and affordances of studying unusual cases.

We will begin with classics in the field, including Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms and Natalie Zemon Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre so that students have a firm foundation in the historiography of Microhistory.

A tentative list of the assigned books includes the following: LuAnn Homza’s Village Infernos and Witches’ Advocates: Witch-Hunting in Navarre, 1608–1614 (2022), Karen Harvey’s The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth Century England (2020), Sue Peabody’s Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies (2017), Danna Agmon’s A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French India (2017), and Emma Rothschild’s An Infinite History: The Story of a Family in France over Three Centuries (2021).

Students with a wide variety of interests are encouraged to enroll and to be actively engaged in shaping the assignments toward their research and teaching interests and needs. Please feel free to email me with any questions.

Course Assignments will include: leading one class session; weekly written responses to the assigned reading; and a final historiographical essay.

Prerequisites and Special Comments: 

Graduate standing or permission from instructor 

History 7500 Studies in International History 

Instructor: Marino, Julia 

Days/Time: M, 5:00 pm – 7:45 pm

Topic: U.S. and East Asia Relations, 1945-Present

Description

This graduate seminar examines the history of U.S.–East Asia relations from 1945 to the present. We explore key moments from occupation and Cold War alliances through trade frictions, the 1980s "Japan panic," post–Cold War realignments, the Asian financial crisis, China's accession to the WTO, and nuclear diplomacy. Technology will also serve as central theme as we cover the history of semiconductor supply chains, electronics manufacturing, and the development of green industries. The course will also follow how ideas about Japan and China have circulated in the media and popular culture, fueling anxieties and shaping public policy. 

History 7575 Theories of War and Strategy 

Instructor: Grimsley, Mark

Days/Time: R, 12:45 pm – 3:30 pm 

Description

Prerequisites and Special Comments 

Graduate students only 

History 7650 Studies in World History

Instructor: McDow, Dodie and Van Beurden, Sarah

Days/Time: F, 10:00 am – 12:45 pm 

Is it possible to decolonize a collection? It turns out that the ways that we know about the world--from the early modern period to the present--are grounded in collections. From the African objects at the Parisian Musée de l’Homme that inspired Picasso and Klee to Darwin’s taxidermied finches, collections have been ways of possessing, encapsulating, theorizing, and colonizing the world. Imperial collections are inseparable from both epistemic violence and the violence of dispossession. The practices and ideologies of collecting shaped taxonomies and knowledge systems and were thus intertwined in the emergence of nineteenth century academic disciplines (natural history and ethnography) and museums, as well as political processes of nationalism and colonialism. 

We will explore this global history by scrutinizing practices of collecting and the transnational networks they created. Can the colonialist nature of knowledge be challenged by paying attention to indigenous knowledge, vernacular understandings, and processes of appropriation? When we view collectors broadly, we see processes of worldmaking that constructed the self even as it imagined the other. We will trace the changes in collecting from the early modern period to the present in order to consider the structure, content, and meaning of these practices. 

These questions are vital because, in the past two decades, a deep scepticism about the knowledge and exhibition practices connected to colonial collecting has emerged. The consequences of collecting now stand at the heart of some of the fiercest debates about decolonization. This course, a global history of collecting and empire, will be a chance to consider this vital history and then address the vexing problem of decolonizing collections and knowledge practices.

Possible Readings  

Eunsong Kim, The Politics of Collecting. Race and the Aestheticization of Property.Duke UP, 2024

Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1994)

James Delbourgo, Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum (Harvard, 2017)

Susan A. Crane, Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 2000)

Robert Kohler, All Creatures: Naturalists, Collectors, and Biodiversity, 1850 - 1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006)

Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting” in Cultures of Collecting, Elsner and Cardinal, eds. (London : Reaktion Books, 1994): 7-24.

Anthony Shelton, “The Collector’s Zeal: Towards an Anthropology of Intentionality, Instrumentality and Desire.” In P. ter Keurs (ed.), Colonial Collections Revisited (CNWS, Leiden: 2007): 16-44.

Zachary Kingdon, Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa: A Study of Trans-Imperial Cultural Flows (Bloomsbury, 2019)

Tony Bennett, Fiona Cameron, Nélia Dias, Ben Dibley, Rodney Harrison, Ira Jacknis, and Conal McCarthy, Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government (Duke University Press, 2017)

Luise White, "The Traffic in Heads: Bodies, Borders and the Articulation of Regional Histories." Journal of Southern African Studies 23: 2 (1997): 325-38.

Chip Colwell, Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native American Culture (University of Chicago, 2017)

Paul Basu, “Object Diasporas, Resourcing Communities: Sierra Leonean Collections in the Global Museumscape.” Museum Anthropology, 34: 1 (2011): 28-42.  

Sharon Macdonald and Jennie Morgan, “De-growing museum collections for New Heritage Futures” International Journal of Heritage Studies 26 (1) (2020); 56-70. 
Sean Mallon, “Agency and Authority: the Politics of Co-Collecting” in: Curatopia: Museums and the Future of Curatorship, ed. Philipp Schorch and Conal McCarty (University of Manchester Press, 2020): 279-195.  

S. Das and M. Lowe, “Nature Read in Black and White: decolonial approaches to interpreting natural history collections.” Journal of Natural Science Collections, 6 (2018): 4-14. 

History 7700 Graduate Readings in Environmental History 

Instructor: Curtis, Kip

Days/Time: R, 12:45 pm – 3:30 pm 

Topic: Overview of the field of environmental history and its current inflection point

Description

Over the past four decades, environmental historians have reimagined human history within the context of nature and the environment. Scholars influenced by a sudden upsurge in environmental awareness in the 1960s and 1970s began rethinking history from an ecological perspective. They asked whether including nature – by which they meant both physical nature in all its multiple diversities and the many ideas, cultures, religions and so on by which humans have come to understand that physical nature – might shed new light on historical causes. The resulting scholarship has changed the way we think and write about the past and has spawned one of the most exciting and innovative fields in historical studies today. This seminar is designed to be a survey of the major themes, ideas, interpretations, and revisions that have emerged in the field of environmental history. It will suggest that the field is at an inflection point and guide students to begin thinking in terms of an environmental history 3.0 being developed right here at Ohio State University. Students will be encouraged to develop a specific focus on the themes, periods, or regions that are of most interest to them.

History 7711 Graduate Readings in the History of Medicine and Health 

Instructor: Otter, Chris

Days/Time: M, 10:00am – 12:45pm

Topic: Body and Mind in Health and Disease 

Description

This graduate seminar is designed to familiarize graduate students with some of the most important works and intellectual trends in the history of the body and mind, broadly conceived, with particular focus on the history of health and disease (including mental health). The focus is global in geographical range and pays particular attention to the early modern and modern periods. Some of the topics for this class will include the deep history of infectious disease; differing conceptions of the body in different medical conditions; the history of the human sensorium; the body at various stages of the life cycle; race, sex, and sexuality; changing conceptions and experiences of mental health; the history of death; the history of disability; the emergence of the so-called “diseases of civilization”; invisible illnesses; and the history of environmental and occupational health.

History 7900 Colloquium in Historiography and Critical Theory 

Instructor: Anderson, Greg  

Days/Time: T, 2:15 pm – 5:00 pm 

Description

This is the History Department's required foundation course for advanced study in the discipline. It offers a broad introduction to contemporary ways of exploring and interpreting realities past and present. To do this, it combines an overview of the evolution of history as a discipline with discussion of the currents of social/critical theory which have shaped the more influential modes of historical analysis along the way. The course focuses in particular on historiographical and theoretical developments of the past fifty years or so. And to support Department’s express commitment to anti-racism, it foregrounds theoretical currents that seek to expose forms of systemic racism, both in conventional modern historical practice and in the modern capitalist world as a whole. Ultimately, the class aspires to help students prepare themselves for the job market, both as critically self-aware citizen-historians and as critically informed evaluators of the thought and work of others.

Aims

• To gain a richer, more informed understanding of the practice of history by studying the discipline's historical evolution to the present day.
• To recognize that “theory” is fundamental to the practice of history, since it shapes all the questions we ask and all the answers we produce, whether we know it or not.
• To become especially familiar with major interpretive approaches employed by historians in the later 20th and 21st centuries, along with the theoretical rationales and assumptions which underpin those approaches.
• To become more sensitized to the intimate connections between the kind of world we live in and the kinds of histories we produce.
• To become more critically self-aware and self-consciously anti-racist in our own historical practice and interests, while expecting the same of others.

History 7910 Prospectus Writing and Professional Development

Instructor: Smith, Stephanie

Days/Time: ONLINE, R, 3:55 pm – 6:40 pm 

Description

This seminar is dedicated to researching and writing your dissertation prospectus. Throughout the semester we will focus on the craft of historical writing, strategies, and the practicalities of launching a research project. As we move through the class, you will analyze various issues, including your topic/questions/significance; your argument/thesis; historiography; method and theory; primary and secondary sources; organization; timetable; research plan; funding; writing an abstract, and your bibliography. We also will consider such matters as grammar and style. By the end of this course, you will have produced a dissertation prospectus that you will present to your committee members.

In preparing your prospectus you will draw particularly on three areas of support:

• First, your fellow students are a valuable source for feedback. In this course you will help each other launch your projects.
• Second, I will read your drafts and offer advice.
• Third, your advisor and members of your dissertation committee are the experts to whom you will turn for substantive advice about archives, resources, and the feasibility of your project.

Assigned Readings

TBA

Assignments

TBA

Prerequisites: Graduate Standing

History 8210 Seminar in Ancient History 

Instructor: Sessa, Kristina

Days/Time: M, 2:15 pm – 5:00 pm 

Description

This course is designed as an intensive writing seminar. Any student working on a premodern topic (i.e., anything before 1800) may enroll, with no geographical limitations. Students will work mainly independently on their own writing projects, with the goal of producing an article and/or dissertation chapter at the end of the semester. There will very few assigned readings, and no theme. All in-class conversations will focus on the writing process.