Fall 2007 & Spring 2008 Courses

Course descriptions are immediately following. There may be periodic changes and additions, particularly to Spring 2008 courses, so please check back frequently.

To view courses for 2006-07, click here.
  

Course Offerings

GHIS 5113
Immigration and Race Politics in the USA
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Victoria Hattam
We are living through the third great immigration wave in American history. How are demographic changes over the last forty years affecting the contours of cultural and political life? How do immigrants position themselves in terms of race? How does the state classify immigrants groups? What are the future possibilities of forging robust political alliances between immigrants and African-Americans? Drawing on recent work across the social sciences as well as extensive primary sources, the course examines the politics of immigrant and racial difference in 20th- and 21st-century United States. Special attention will be given to Jewish immigration in the early twentieth century and Mexican immigration across the 20th century. Crosslisted as GPOL 5311.

GHIS 5115
Historical Roots of a “Fiasco”: Iraq
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Eli Zaretsky
The American invasion of Iraq has been described as a fiasco. In Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Thomas E. Rick supports this view by characterizing the administration’s actions as the errors or bad intentions of the political right: e.g., the neoconservatives and the cabal around Bush. By contrast, this course explores the weaknesses and failures of American liberalism and the political left in providing the opening for the Bush presidency. The model for this approach is Marx’s explanation (in his Eighteenth Brumaire) of Louis Napoleon’s coup d’etat in 1851. Other readings include both long-term critiques of American liberalism, such as those by Richard Slotkin and Patricia Seed, and more focused studies of the post-1989 period. Cross-listed as LHIS 4568 and GSOC 5044.

GHIS 5118
Becoming Other: Mimesis, Alterity, and History in Time- Based Media
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Orit Halpern
This course explores how genealogies of time-based media might serve as critical tools to think about difference. Our focus in the course will be twofold. First, we explore methodological approaches to the history of technology, media, and subjectivity. Some questions we investigate are: How can we expand our conception of “media”? How would we approach a history of the senses and perception? How would one even historicize the very idea of time? Second, we inquire into the ethical possibility such historical inquiry might offer for rethinking subjectivity, difference, and politics. Some of the questions we investigate: How might we consider these new historical forms of inquiry as modes of thinking about difference? How do different accounts of mimesis, performance, and temporality specific to time- based media help us think about subjectivity, politics, and aesthetics? How can these historical approaches complicate our thinking about nature and culture, machines and organisms, ourselves and others?

GHIS 5120
The History of Race and Slavery in the New World
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Robin Blackburn
This course furnishes an overview of successive forms of racial oppression in the history of the Americas, with a special focus on the rise and fall of black slavery in the New World covering all parts of the hemisphere, and the whole period 1492–1888. It looks at the ideologies that inspired colonial conquests and settlement in the New World and at the shape of early colonial society. It seeks to explain why Europeans brought African captives to the Americas, to explore the dynamic of the slave plantations and their link to the development of capitalism. It also looks at the growth of a new social world in the wake of the Atlantic boom of the 18th century and of the revolutionary struggles to which this gave rise in Haiti and elsewhere. Special consideration will be given to the ethnic identities that emerged in the later colonial period and at the relationship of newly independent American states to slavery and race. Slavery was destroyed in the course of a momentous series of wars and revolutions whose course and connections will be considered. Black anti-slavery and white abolitionism became significant and innovative social forces. The experience of slavery itself gave rise to a powerful African-American cultural legacies, but the course will also seek to explain why the suppression of slavery was succeeded by new forms of racial oppression. Cross-listed as LHIS 4565.

GHIS 5123
Radicalism and Its Discontents: The 1960s–Present
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Eli Zaretsky
This course is a history of the Left since the 1960s including the women’s movement, gay liberation, ecology, European social democracy, Solidarity and the Samizdat, anti-globalization, global feminism, Mideast democracy movements, and the Chinese “new left.” Cross-listed as GLIB 5515, GPOL 5020, and LHIS 4515.

GHIS 5125
America’s Empires: The Historical Perspectives
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Oz Frankel
Empire is a keyword of our time. It has been in frequent use since the American invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq—either to celebrate or to castigate U.S. foreign policy—but even before 9/11, thinking of the United States in terms of empire informed the study of American history. This seminar addresses the utility and feasibility of empire as a term of analysis in U.S. history. It takes an expansive view of empire that includes diverse systems of domination and inequality, inside and outside the formal boundaries of the US, and aspects of private well as public lives. The emphasis is the social, cultural, and daily dimensions of imperial power rather than diplomacy and strategy. Examples, from the conclusion of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, include western expansion, post Civil War Reconstruction, race and domesticity, and the global process of “Americanization,” in other words, the transnational presence of the United States as a model for social relations, political structures, and popular culture. Cross-listed as HLIS 4567 and GSOC 5043.

GHIS 5127
U.S. Immigration and Changing Patterns of Integration
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Aristide Zolberg
This course deals largely with social change and covers population history, with the contribution of immigration to pop change, starting with the slave trade in colonial times, then with immigration policy, but also changing notions of citizenship and membership. I call this “Shifting boundaries” and changing strategies of integration. Lastly, it deals with ongoing normative debates on immigration. Cross-listed as GPOL 5021.

GHIS 5128
Globalization and Anticapitalism in Historical Perspective
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Robin Blackburn
This course presents an account of the origins and development of globalization, of the social and political traditions that have contested capitalism, and of the new forms of collectivism in the modern world. The legacy and debates of nineteenth- and 20th-century socialism, liberalism, and anarchism are reconsidered in the light of the experience of the 20th century. The ideas of Marx and Proudhon, Engels and Bakunin, Kautsky and Lenin, Bauer and Bernstein, Trotsky and Luxemburg, the Fabians and the syndicalists, Mao and Fidel Castro, Keynes and Beveridge, Polanyi and Bookchin, and Fanon and C.L.R. James are scrutinized and shown to have continued bearing on the new forms of capitalism and collectivism in the 21st century. The calculation debate of the thirties and forties, which pitted Mises and Hayek against Oskar Lange and Maurice Dobb, are reexamined. The legacy of struggles for universal social security in the advanced countries are presented for the light it can shed on inequality and insecurity in the modern world. The question is posed as to how today’s new social movements and anticapitalism measure up to new forms of corporate and financial power. The role of money managers and institutional funds in globalization is explored. The potential of consumers’ campaigns, cultural contestation, social trade unionism, environmentalism, and pension fund activism are assessed in terms of their capacity to strengthen democracy and mount an effective challenge to capitalist power. Cross-listed as GSOC 5032.

GHIS 5131
Poetry and Protest: Local Cultural Identities in a Global World
Not offered 2007–08. Three credits.
Eiko Ikegami
Arts, poetry, and cultural practices often express sentiments of protest. The term poetry is used as a metaphor for various forms of aesthetic practices manifested in such forms as fiction, stories, poetry, performing arts, music, and fashion. Poetry can be a form of expressing protest in a variety of ways; direct expressions of political contention are only one way of connecting the dimensions of aesthetics and politics. Consequently, this seminar explores the dynamic relationships between poetry and politics from a variety of sociological viewpoints. Drawing from cases in various areas such as East India, Latin America, the Middle East, and Europe, this course explores the dynamics of forming local cultural identities expressed in the medium of popular cultural practices and aesthetics against the contexts of global and regional cultural intersections. The focus of our exploration lies in the dynamic cultural interactions between local and global in the formation of identities.

GHIS 5135
Fascism and Theory: Latin American and European Approaches to Totalitarianism and Populism
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Federico Finchelstein
This graduate seminar examines theories of fascism, totalitarianism and populism from a historical perspective. The approach is topical and transnational rather than national; however, it emphasizes specific European and Latin American cases (Argentina, Germany, France, Spain, Italy) as well as sources and theoretical readings that include Hannah Arendt, Georges Sorel, Gino Germani, Antonio Gramsci, Jorge Luis Borges, and Georges Bataille. In addition, the seminar addresses the most recent analytical studies on these questions. Cross-listed with GPOL 6422.

GHIS 5139
Markets in History: Interdisciplinary Approaches
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Julia Ott
In this course, students develop a systematic method for exploring the historical relationships between capitalism, politics, and culture in the United States and assess what recent investigations of historical markets have contributed to social inquiry. Topics include the social construction of value and credit, the negotiation of risk and failure, exploitation and market resistance, systems of production and consumption and their relation to political and social identities, the institutional logic of corporations, the interactions between economic theory, financial logic, and political ideology, and the ability of markets to traverse national borders and transcend national histories. Readings include Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, Michel Abolafia, Walter Johnson, William Roy, Sidney Mintz, Jefferson Cowie, Michael Perelman, Roland Marchand, Marc Granovetter, and Lizbeth Cohen. This course is cross-listed with The New School for Social Research; open to juniors and seniors only. Cross-listed as LHIS 4570.

GHIS 5153
Politics, Religion, and Society: The Islamic World, 1800–1950
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Neguin Yavari
This course, a modern history of the Islamic world, traces the evolution of Islamic societies when the rule of the caliphs, along with the legal and theological affiliations that had served as primary markers of identity since the 10th century, had ended with the Mongol invasions of the 13th century. In the 16th century, the Islamic world was decidedly polar in its formation, with Sunnism and Shi‘ism emerging as umbrella institutions appropriating virtually all types of ideological as well as intellectual dissent. Sufi orders gave birth to powerful kingdoms, Turkic rulers prevailed, Iran became Shi‘i, and religious and ethnic identities were conflated with political and national ones. Against this backdrop, Western encroachment, the genesis of resistance to the colonial order, and the primacy of sovereign states subsumed Islamic politics in the 19th and 20th centuries. Topics include understanding the political culture of Islam in the temporal context of modernism, and the Islamic public’s response to the social and economic changes that ushered in the modern world; how secularism found expression in the political vocabulary of the Islamic societies, and what it meant; how Islamic modernists challenged their ancien regime, and more broadly, how modern Islam appropriated its past; the influence of modern Islamic movements on social mores and political expectations, on such issues as identity, gender, and civic and political engagement. Cross-listed as LHIS 4503.

GHIS 5233
Gender, Politics, and History
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Elaine Abelson
This course explores aspects of women’s history and the history of gender in the United States over the past two centuries. The course stresses the themes of difference among women and between women and men as a means of examining the social construction of gender and the logic of feminist analysis and activity. Students learn the major themes in gender history, develop critical and analytical skills, and appreciate current and on-going theoretical (and controversial) debates. Students analyze key conceptual and methodological frameworks as gender, class, sexuality, power, and race. Readings use primary and secondary material. Students complete two papers and participate in student-led discussions. Cross-listed as GSOC 5021 and LHIS 4500.

GHIS 6005
New Approaches to American Economic and Business History
Not offered 2007-08. Three credits.
Julia Ott
Recently, scholars in the humanities have renewed their interest in economic behavior and institutions, while social scientists have turned their attention to the cultural contexts of markets. All emphasize that power relations, social norms, and historical precedent shape and constrain the economic behavior of both individuals and institutions. This seminar evaluates recent scholarship on the historical relationships between capitalism, politics, and culture in the United States. Through theory and case studies, the course exposes students to a variety of approaches. Topics covered include the social construction of value and credit, the negotiation of risk and failure, exploitation and market resistance, systems of production and consumption and their relation to political and social identities, the institutional logic of corporations, interactions between economic theory, financial logic, and political ideology, and the ability of markets to traverse national borders and transcend national histories.

GHIS 6133
Historiography and Historical Practice
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Oz Frankel
This course focuses on U.S. history to examine current permutations of historiographical interests, practices, and methodologies. Topics include identity politics, the culture wars, major trends and controversies in American historiography, the multicultural moment in historical studies, the emergence of race and gender as cardinal categories of historical analysis, the preoccupation with popular culture, the impact of memory studies on historical thinking, the recurrent agonizing over American exceptionalism, and recent attempts to globalize American history. Also examined are the intersection of analytical strategies borrowed from the social sciences and literary studies with methods and epistemologies of historicization that originated from the historical profession. This course should be taken during a student’s first year in the Historical Studies program. Cross-listed as GSOC 6054.

GHIS 6134
Historical Methods and Sources I: Latin American History
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Paul M. Ross
Historical Methods and Sources consists of a pair of linked seminars designed to orient students to historical inquiry and equip them to undertake the writing of an MA thesis on a historical topic. Historical Methods and Sources I aims toward three specific learning outcomes: to develop fluency in several current models of historical practice; to develop the practical skills necessary for locating and interpreting primary historical sources; and to compose a proposal for an MA thesis that will be completed during the second semester of the two-semester sequence. With these goals in mind, the midterm assignment is a 10-page “document collection” essay requiring students to collect, paraphrase, and contextualize five historical documents gathered from New York City libraries or archives. The final paper is a thesis proposal—a 15-page document sketching out the student’s topic and preliminary hypothesis, as well as the student’s sources and their locations. Weekly readings from the instructor’s area of expertise (Latin American history) are chosen to illustrate essential genres of historical writing (e.g. cultural, social, political, diplomatic, women’s history) and theoretical perspectives (e.g. Habermasian histories of public spheres, Foucaultian histories of crime and punishment). The course is not intended to be a survey of the historiography of Latin America, but it will provide a sampling of important trends in the recent historiography of Latin America. Please note: the written work in this class will deal with topics from students’ own areas of interest, and will not necessarily correspond to the course’s thematic emphasis on Latin America. This course is the first of a pair of seminars (with a single course number) meant to be taken during a student’s second year in the Historical Studies MA program. This course is also a requirement for PhD students who enter the joint doctoral program in Historical Studies without having been in a master’s program at The New School for Social Research. Students register for the fall and spring sections of the course separately. The fall section of the course is a prerequisite for the spring section. The course is open to Lang seniors with the instructor’s permission, and can serve as a venue in which senior history concentrators develop their thesis topics. Cross-listed as GPOL 6134.

GHIS 6242
Chapters in the History of the Book
Not offered 2007–08. Three credits.
Oz Frankel
This seminar takes as its starting point the current hype over the “new media” and collateral prophecies regarding the imminent death of the book, and proceeds to examine the essential features of (and key episodes in) the history and sociology of the book, print, and reading in modern Europe and the United States. Since the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, books and print culture have been central to the shaping of Western culture and society. Nevertheless, only recently have scholars begun to explore critically and historically this crucial facet of modern life. The seminar follows the role print and books had in the emergence of the modern marketplace and public sphere, and alternatively, their employment as tools of transformation during periods of social and political strife (e.g., the French Revolution). The material aspect of the production of books, their design as artifacts, and their dissemination are also investigated. Case studies from both sides of the Atlantic include the business of street pamphleteers in 18th-century Paris, the reading of handbills and banknotes in 19th-century New York City, and the 20th-century Book-of-the- Month Club. Other themes are the rise of authorship as a profession, the relationship between books and their readers, publishing and state authority, and the effects of Western-based print culture on other lands. Finally, we try to assess the durability and vulnerability of books, print, and information in the virtual spaces of the new technologies of communication.

GHIS 6267
Change and Continuity in the United States: American Political Development in the 20th Century
Not offered 2007-08. Three credits.
David Plotke
This course analyzes American political development from the turn of the 20th century to the present. What are the main continuities in American politics? How should we understand the origins and consequences of major phases of political change? These questions guide studies of important moments of conflict and transition. We examine Progressivism in the early 20th century, the New Deal, the post-WWII expansion of American international power, the political and cultural battles of the 1960s, and the rise of conservative political forces from the 1970s and 1980s through the end of the 20th century. We consider two recurring issues that have been the subject of sharp political conflict—the purpose and limits of economic regulation, and the size and composition of immigration into the United States. In assessing U.S. political development we are interested in relations between political and economic reorganization and popular movements. And we place political and social developments within the United States in comparative context. Cross-listed as GPOL 6222.

GHIS 6455
Politics and Political Theory in the United States: Power, Participation, and Choice
Not offered 2007-08. Three credits.
David Plotke
In the last half-century, political scientists, political theorists, and public figures in the United States have made a number of contributions to contemporary thought about politics. These contributions have come both from political science and from politics in the United States (most but not all of the participants have been U.S. citizens). The authors range widely in their political views and aims. They share a preference for democratic political arrangements, though their views of democracy and its advantages vary greatly. They also share a temperament that might be described as analytical-empirical—linking general claims about the dynamics of political processes with relevant empirical work.

We will consider the following subjects and authors: power (Dahl, Gaventa); political and social choice (Arrow, Riker, Olson); participation and representation (Pitkin, Mansbridge); protest and civil disobedience (King, Jr., Malcolm X, Rawls); equality (Hochschild, Okin, Young); and justice (Rawls, Walzer). We will examine the relations between these efforts and politics in the United States in the last half-century, with a focus on this question: under what conditions do people manage to create theoretically original and practically significant works about politics? Cross-listed with GPOL 6455.

GHIS 6802
Anthropology as a History of the Present
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Ann Stoler
In 1950, the don of British anthropology, Evans Pritchard, warned that anthropology would have to choose between being history or being nothing. What did he mean by that statement? How prescient was he in charting the direction that anthropology would take in the 21st century? This course explores the changing form and content of historical reflection in the making of anthropology as a discipline, a set of practices, and mode of inquiry. It starts from the notion that anthropological knowledge is always grounded in implicit and explicit assumptions about the ways in which the past can be known, how people differently use their pasts, and what counts in different societies as relevant and debatable history. We will look at how different understandings of the relationship between history, culture and power and the concepts that join them—habitus, structural violence, cultural debris, imagined community, social memory, genealogy, tradition— have given shape to critical currents in ethnographic method and social theory. This course is required for MA and PhD students in Anthropology. Cross-listed as GANT 6050.

GHIS 6815
Politics of the Image in the Muslim World
Not offered 2007–08. Three credits.
Faisal Devji
Images lead lives and suffer deaths: They are produced, circulated, and destroyed not only by people but also together with them. Images represent people to themselves as well as to others, and their existence is entwined with the lives of those who make, use, and abandon them. The world of images is therefore a political world with its own modes of friendship and enmity, survival and destruction, even escape. In this course, we look at the lives and deaths of images in the Muslim world, a place whose politics is generally confined to books, ideas, and a limited repertoire of actions. And yet the production, proliferation, and profanation of images in this world is far more extensive than any book, idea, or political act. Does this world of images possess its own politics? Does it allow us to look at politics differently? Does the circulation of images define the limits of the Muslim world or does it breach those limits? We explore these and other questions by discussing themes like idolatry and iconoclasm, representation and modernity, dictatorial and revolutionary aesthetics, the image as commodity, and the spectacle of violence in several parts of the Muslim world.

GHIS 6841
The Idea of the Left
Not offered 2007–08. Three credits.
Eli Zaretsky
The idea of a left—a general idea, as distinct from that of any particular left—emerged at the time of the French Revolution; took shape in the writings of the utopian socialists, anarchists, and liberal democrats; and reached its classical formulation in the work of Karl Marx. In the early 20th century, the idea was distinguished from the idea of revolution. At the same time, liberalism and the left became indispensable to one another: liberal or social democrat regimes needed a left to give them steel, the left needed liberalism in order to breathe. In the 1960s, the idea was redefined once again or, from another point of view, forgotten. In this course, we concentrate on the 19th-century origins of the idea, but always bearing this long arc in mind. Readings include texts by Owen, Fourier, Proudhon, and, especially, Marx. Cross-listed as LHIS 4505, GLIB 5504, GPOL 6323, GSOC 6120.

GHIS 6990
Independent Study
Fall 2007, Spring 2008. One to six credits.
This is a student-initiated course that gives students the opportunity to pursue advanced research on a specific topic with the guidance of a faculty member. Permission of the instructor required.

GHIS 6994
Inter-University Consortium
Fall 2007, Spring 2008. Three credits.
Ellen Freeberg For PhD students enrolled in courses at other universities in the NY area through a consortium arrangement.

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This page was last updated October 15, 2007.