Fall 2006 & Spring 2007 Courses

Course descriptions are immediately following. Click to view the schedule for Fall 2006 classes, including days and times. There may be periodic changes and additions, particularly to Spring 2007 courses, so please check back frequently.

To view courses for 2005-06, click here.
  

Course Offerings

GHIS 5131
Poetry and Protest: Local Cultural Identities in a Global World
Not offered 2006–07. 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 5140
The U.S. and the World: Democracy and Hegemony
Spring 2007. 3 Credits.
David Plotke
This course analyzes and evaluates the distinctive position of the United States in the contemporary world. What are the sources and dynamics of the power of the U.S.? After the economic and political shocks to American power in the 1960s and 1970s, how was the preeminent position of the U.S. reestablished in the last three decades?

Almost two decades after the end of the Cold War, debates about American power and commitments have emerged on many fronts, including relations between the U.S. and international institutions; the problem of terrorism; and international economic relations. Difficult questions arise about the appropriate uses of American military power, for security or humanitarian purposes (Rwanda, Kosovo, Iraq). To assess contemporary American power we draw on studies of international relations, international political economy, and American politics. We focus on recent problems and debates regarding the shape and purposes of U.S. power. Authors include Michael Doyle, Eric Hobsbawm, Samuel Huntington, Paul Kennedy, Robert Keohane, Kenneth Waltz, and Aristide Zolberg.

GHIS 5146
War, Revolution and the Popular Front
Spring 2007. 3 Credits.
Eli Zaretsky
Between 1933 and 1945 the world divided between fascism and The Popular Front (i.e., the alliance of the Soviet Union, the democracies and much of the colonial world). The results were two-sided. On the positive side, the left was transformed from a set of narrow sects focused on revolution to a broad coalition of democratic forces that created new forms of literature, film and personal relations, reshaped liberal and democratic politics, and invented the democratic welfare state, the United Nations and the modern human rights discourse. But there was a negative side. Even as fascism was destroyed, other forms of authoritarianism triumphed, not only in the Soviet Union but in China, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. Thus, the Popular Front is the seedbed not only of the cold war but of the post-9/11 world. Exploring its contradictory character, our readings will include works by Ian Kershaw, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Gary Gerstle, Arno Mayer and François Furet.

GHIS 5147
Lost in Cyberspace? Chapters in the History of the Book and Print Culture
Spring 2007. 3 Credits.
Oz Frankel
This seminar takes as its starting point the current hype over “New Media” and the collateral prophesies regarding the imminent death of the book, and proceeds to examine essential features of (and key episodes in) the history and sociology of the book, print and reading in modern Europe and the US. 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 “market place” and “public sphere,” and, alternatively, their employment as tools of transformation during periods of social and political strife (for instance, the French Revolution). The material aspect of book production, their design as artifacts, and their dissemination will be also investigated. Case studies from both sides of the Atlantic will include the business of street pamphleteers in 18th century Paris, the reading practices of handbills and banknotes in 19th century NYC, and the 20th century “Book of the Month Club.” Other themes under consideration will be 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 will try to assess the durability and vulnerability of books, print and “information” in the virtual spaces of the new technologies of communication.

GHIS 5153
Islamic Societies: 1258-1955
Spring 2007. Three credits.
Neguin Yavari
This survey course charts the history of the Middle East and India from the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258 to the mid-twentieth century and the end of WWII. It examines the interaction of religion and politics, concentrating on several key questions, which were instrumental in the formation of different communities of belief and political ideology in the Islamic lands in this period. Emphasis is on the spread of Islam beyond the Middle East, and the development of new social movements, including Sufi brotherhoods, that were central to this process. Topics also include the rise of geographically confined sectarianism, especially in post-Safavid Iran and the Ottoman Empire, the conflation of national, religious and ethnic identities, Western encroachment, and the genesis of resistance to the colonial order.

GHIS 6005
New Approaches to American Economic and Business History
Spring 2007. Three credits.
Julia Ott
In this course, students will develop their own systematic method for exploring the historical relationships between capitalism, politics, and culture in the United States. Together, we will assess what recent investigations of historical markets have contributed to social inquiry at large.

If we set aside ancient models of homo economicus as a timelessly rational, profit-maximizing actor, how shall we proceed to interpret market actions, arrangements, and institutions? 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 course will evaluate the recent scholarship and expose students to a range of approaches. Topics covered will 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 will include Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, Michel Abolafia, Walter Johnson, William Roy, Sidney Mintz, Jefferson Cowie, Michael Perelman, Roland Marchand, Marc Granovetter, and Lizbeth Cohen.

GHIS 6110
Cities and the Cultures of Construction
Spring 2007. 3 credits.
Carol Breckenridge and Arjun Appadurai
This course will explore the relationship between mega-cities, design and construction in the era of globalization. More specifically, we will seek to conceptualize the idea of the "construction site" with its technologies, practices and goals, its scope and scale. We will also explore, conversely, various practices of urban destruction, demolition and reconstruction. Two key organizing texts for the course will be Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle (1967) and Comments on The Society of the Spectacle (1988). These texts will highlight what it means to view construction sites, in part, as spectacles.

The twenty-first century will be a century of mega-cities and mega construction sites. China, whose urban world could be characterized as one large construction site, is said to be building one hundred cities with populations larger than 10 million each. Osama Bin Laden, whose resources came from one of the world's largest construction families, invested his wealth in the construction of cities in the Sudan before shifting his attention to shaping the landscapes of jihad. And mega-cities like Mumbai are driven by speculation in real estate at various scales, from the gentrification of slums to the "malling" of obsolete textile factories. And, of course, the U.S. interest in Iraq might be described as a war of "mass construction" in which major companies like Bechtel and Halliburton swept in to make millions before the fires of "shock and awe" had even been put out. This course will seek to unearth the dialectic between construction and destruction in today's world-wide urban explosion.

GHIS 6127
Foundamentals of the Sociology of Media
Spring 2007. Three credits.
Paolo Carpignano
The object of this course is to examine the notions of medium and mediation from different perspectives. For this purpose, the course covers three main areas. First, it surveys theories and theoretical approaches to media that, directly or indirectly, have contributed to the definition of the field, such as medium theory, information theory, semiotics, cultural studies, mediology, and others. Second, it critically examines today’s media industry, its institutional apparatus, its forms of production and distribution, and its economic and political power. Third, it relates some media-specific historical and technological changes, such as reproduction, recording, transmission, and networking, to the transformation of social experience. Finally, the course suggests that it is from the combination of these levels of analysis that one can understand the experience of mediation and the mediation of experience. Cross-listed as GSOC 5014.

GHIS 6133
Historiography and Historical Practice
Fall 2006. Three credits.
Oz Frankel
This course focuses on US history to examine current permutations of historiographical interests, practices, and methodologies. Over the last few decades, US history has been a particularly fertile ground for rethinking the historical, although many of these topics are applicable to the study of other nations and societies. American history has been largely rewritten by a generation of scholars who experienced the 1960s and its aftermath and have viewed America’s past as a field of inquiry and contest of great political urgency. Identity politics, the culture wars, and other forms of organization and debate have also endowed history with unprecedented public resonance in a culture that has been notoriously amnesiac. We explore 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 enormous preoccupation with popular culture, the impact of memory studies on historical thinking, and the recurrent agonizing over American exceptionalism and consequent recent attempts to break the nation-state mold and to globalize American history. Another focus will be 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 GPOL 6133, GSOC 6054.

GHIS 6134
Historical Methods and Sources I
Fall 2006. Three credits.
Paul 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 0from 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.
        There are weekly readings, which each student presents to the class once during the semester. We read programmatic and philosophical statements about theoretical problems faced by historians (e.g., William Sewell on culture, Friedrich Nietzsche on the uses and abuses of history); book-length historical monographs (e.g., Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms); and article-length interventions that can serve as models for students’ theses (e.g., Marc Raeff on the “well-ordered police state” in early modern Europe, Alan Knight on 20th-century Latin American populism, E.P. Thompson on time and labor discipline). 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.

GHIS 6134
Historical Methods and Sources II
Spring 2007. Three credits.
Faisal Devji
Historical Sources and Methods II provides a venue in which students write, present, and discuss sources, sections, and drafts of their MA theses. The specific outcome of this course is a completed MA thesis of between 40 and 60 pages, written in the form of a publishable article that incorporates both primary and secondary sources.
        Building on the skills acquired and the preliminary research done during their first semester, students read and discuss texts by contemporary historians (e.g., Dipesh Chakrabarty) early in the course. Later, they read and debate each other's work, and that of visiting speakers, in a detailed and engaged manner.
        Students work closely with the course instructor and an external advisor to write, revise, and circulate various sections of their MA theses. Three pieces of writing from the student’s thesis are presented in class over the course of the semester: an essay on the intellectual problem the thesis means to address, another on a review of literature on the subject; and finally, one that analyzes both primary and secondary sources as part of an original narrative or argument. 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.

GHIS 6155
Globalization and Anticapitalism in Historical Perspective
Fall 2006. 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 GPOL 6005, GSOC 5032.

GHIS 6256
Gender, Politics, and History
Spring 2007. Three credits.
Elaine Abelson
The construction of gender is shaped by concrete historical, social, and cultural factors, and the goal of this course is to integrate history and theory in order to more fully understand the social construction of knowledge and "truth," as well as the categories that govern our understanding of gender.
        The course approaches the history of women from the vantage point of feminist scholarship and theories about gender. We examine the social, economic, and political positions of women (and men) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to explore and evaluate structures of inequality, racial categories, and debates about the nature and role of women in the United States.

GHIS 6487
Theories of Fascism and Totalitarianism (Latin American and Europe)
Fall 2006. Three credits.
Federico Finchelstein
This seminar examines theories of fascism and totalitarianism from a historical perspective. We study the history of these theories in their relation to major historical ruptures, including the Holocaust, the Spanish Civil War, and fascist imperialism. The approach of this seminar is topical and transnational rather than national or regional; however, we do emphasize specific cases that include Soviet communism, Italian fascism, Nazism, and French fascism. The seminar emphasizes differences and similarities among these historical cases in terms of their past, their recent past, and their present. Other topics to be studied include Latin American fascism and Populism, political religions, ideology and violence, and the aesthetization of politics. The seminar stresses the use of primary sources (particularly some major political texts by fascist and anti-fascist intellectuals), as well as the most recent analytical studies on these questions. Cross-listed as GPOL 6422

GHIS 6802
Anthropology as a History of the Present
Spring 2007. Three credits.
Vyjayanthi Rao
In 1950 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 6811
Critical Foundations of Social Theory
Fall 2006. Three credits.
Hylton White
This seminar introduces students to modern social theory, its historical anchorings, and its relations with the anthropological enterprise. It investigates how the concept of society and culture evolved in relation to humanist thought and political economic circumstances as Europeans explored, missionized, and colonized. In capturing various peripheries of knowledge, we ask how anthropological theory and practice has been modeled within and against other natural and social science disciplines. We inquire into key debates and subjects related to the category of man, the social, and the primitive; social theory and state institutions and practices; human nature and diversity; science and colonial governance; Kultur and civilization; cultural evolution and race; objectivity and subjectivity. In charting how society and culture have been theorized and debated historically, we also reflect on forms of anthropological knowledge and ethnographic sensibilities that are relevant today: their meaning and stakes for a present and future anthropology and their connection to other scientific, political, and humanistic endeavors. Cross-listed as GANT 6051.

GHIS 6815
Politics of the Image in the Muslim World
Not offered 2006–07. Three credits.
Faisal Devji
Images lead lives and suffer deaths just as people do. 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 6825
Marx in the 19th Century
Not offered 2006-07. Three credits.
Eli Zaretsky
This course situates Marx against the 19th-century background to which he belongs: the French Revolution, the early emergence of a fully commercial society, the first industrial revolution and the beginnings of labor organization, the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, the British Empire, the American Civil War, the growth of Indian anticolonialism, and the Paris Commune. Readings include the Eighteenth Brumaire, Class Struggles in France, On the Jewish Question, and selections from Capital.

GHIS 6826
Revolution and Empire
Fall 2006. Three credits.
Robin Blackburn
The first wave of bourgeois revolution—the Dutch revolt, the English civil war and revolution of the 17th century, the American Revolution, the French Revolution—all gave a fillip to territorial expansion and gave a new impetus to plantation slavery. A second wave of bourgeois revolution—the 1832 Reform Act in Britain, the 1848 Revolution in France, and the American Civil War—confirmed the impetus to territorial expansion but furnished it with a new political economy.
        This course explores the interweaving of revolution and empire in the rise of the West, looking at empire as an agent of modernity and at the hybrid and contradictory results which have often flowed from imperial modernization. It explores the way in which domestic transformations—the rise of the Absolutist monarchies, the advent of bourgeois revolution—helped to construct empires of a new type in the early modern and modern periods. It studies the political economy of empire and the construction of new identities in the wake of the imperial project. The notion of an Empire of Liberty is examined, as well as the contribution of abolitionism to colonial projects. Resistance and class struggle in the new empires are studied, as are the failure of the empires to achieve the anticipated transformation of colonized lands. The course looks at lessons past imperialisms might have for what seems to many the imperial project of the United States today.
        Authors whose work will be considered include Benedict Anderson, Chalmers Johnson, Niall Ferguson, C.R. Boxer, Patricia Seed, Eric Hobsbawm, Partha Chatterjee, Anthony Pagden, Immanuel Wallerstein, Fernand Braudel, and Ellen Wood.

GHIS 6841
The Idea of the Left
Fall 2006. 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 6842
Marx’s Social Theory
Summer 2006. Three credits.
Hylton White
This course introduces Marx’s critique of capitalist society against the broader backdrop of the development of modern social theory. First we read the young Marx in the context of 18th- and 19th-century thought on civil society. Then we move on to examine Marx’s mature critical theory and to compare it to Weber’s and Durkheim’s accounts of capitalism. We end by looking briefly at selected reconstructions of Marx’s theory in the light of the 20th century and the neoliberal present. Cross-listed as GANT 6076, GSOC 6109.

GHIS 6845
Race and American Citizenship
Fall 2006. Three credits.
Thaddeus Russell
This course examines how American citizenship, from the war for independence to the present, has been defined in relation to ideas of race. In the early republic, how was citizenship created—as both a legal category and a set of cultural norms—and how did it reflect and influence concepts of “whiteness” and “blackness”? During the Civil War and Reconstruction, what was required of ex-slaves to become citizens, and how did they respond to those requirements? What were the privileges of whiteness and what were its costs? For African Americans during the era of segregation, what were the problems of “second-class citizenship” and what were its benefits? In response to the great waves of immigration at the turn of the 20th century and after 1965, how did nativists, liberals, employers, labor leaders, and immigrants themselves re-define “Americanism”? How has the Supreme Court, in cases such as Plessy and Brown, ruled on questions of difference, belonging, and national obligation? What was gained from the civil rights movement’s campaign for “full citizenship” and what was lost? What does it mean to be a “good American citizen” today? Cross-listed as GPOL 5321.

GHIS 6846
Secular Cosmopolitanism
Fall 2006. Three credits.
José Casanova
Course description to come. Cross-listed as GSOC 6106.

GHIS 6990
Independent Study
Fall 2006, Spring 2007. 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 2006, Spring 2007. Three credits.
Ellen Freeberg
For PHD students enrolled in courses at other universities in the NY area via a consortium arrangement.

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This page was last updated June 11, 2007.