Spring 2025
Olga Dror: “The Vietnam War/The American War”
This is a writing-intensive course that introduces students majoring in history to the craft of the profession through a variety of strategies and techniques, such as lectures, discussions, work with primary and secondary sources, writing laboratories. All these will help students in their successful completion of a research project related to the subject of the course – the wars in Vietnam in the twentieth century.
The course will cover history of the foreign involvements in Vietnam in the twentieth century as well as Vietnamese internal conflicts that contributed to these wars. It will consider origins and development of hostilities, wartime societies, culture, collaboration, resistance, colonialism, nationalism, and the outcomes of the wars. The course will also address effects of the war on the United States as one of the major players in the armed conflicts in Vietnam.
The final product of the course will be a research paper that will bring together students’ skills developed in both parts of the course.
Jessica Herzogenrath: “America's World's Fairs”
During the semester we will explore America’s World’s Fairs, with an emphasis on the fairs held in the United States. World’s Fairs enjoyed the height of their popularity from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, welcoming millions of visitors from around the world. We will examine how World’s Fairs reflected both the values and anxieties of their host cities and country. Potential themes for study include performance, architecture, exhibitions, labor, fair leadership, campaigns to secure the fairs, and participation by different groups of people. Students will identify and analyze primary and secondary materials to develop original research papers in this writing-intensive (W) course.
Jason Parker: “The Global Cold War”
This seminar explores the rise of the superpower conflict from the ashes of World War II in Europe to its spread into the far corners of the decolonizing world. Students will spend the first part of the course becoming familiar with the scholarship on the Cold War and the Third World via classroom lecture and discussion, and the remainder of the semester conducting research in primary and secondary sources to produce an essay of original scholarship on the topic.
Che Yeun: “The Human Body in Modern America”
Our bodies are strange. They can be mundane, boring, familiar -- but also necessary, mysterious, and the cutting edge of research in science and technology. This course investigates this complexity of the human body and its role in modern science, politics, and culture. We will explore how, throughout the modern age, the human body posed ideas and questions about personhood, governance, genetics, race and gender, the natural environment, the relationship between humans and technology, and the rise of artificial intelligence. These inquiries, in turn, transformed how everyday Americans understood modern America itself. What kinds of bodies belong in America? Who has the power to know and define bodies, and who has the power to control them? How are new technologies unsettling old definitions of bodies, societies, and humanity? Applying these broader themes to specific topics of their choice, students will develop an original research paper in this writing-intensive (W) course.