HIST339

Description

The content of this course will vary by instructor. TOPIC FOR FALL 2025: Armenia: Nation and Diaspora What does it mean to be Armenian? And how is Armenianness imagined in diverse ways by Armenians inside and outside of the imperial/nation state model? Beginning with the ethnogenesis of Armenians and premodern identity formation in the Transcaucasia, students will study the ancient Armenian Kingdom, the history of Armenians in Asia Minor, and Ottoman Armenian communities. The course will include little known premodern Armenian diaspora communities in Aleppo, Jerusalem, and India embracing diaspora as feature of Armenian identity and a contributor to Armenian resilience. Students will learn how the violence of the Armenian Genocide in 1915 expelled Armenians from their homelands in Asia Minor generating new waves of diaspora in the Middle East/North Africa, France, and America. The modern segment of the course will cover Armenia from the Russian Empire to the Armenian Republic and include the fall of the Artsakh Republic in 2023. The course concludes with the history of Worcester's Armenian community and a class field trip to the Armenian community of Watertown, Massachusetts. Assignments are a midterm exam, small papers, and a final creative project. FALL 2024 TOPIC: WOMEN & GENDER IN AFRICA This course challenges traditional divisions of knowledge about women and gender in Africa bycentering major concepts, questions, and analytical tools used by scholars in an interdisciplinarystudy of African societies. Debunking longstanding, erroneous Eurocentric ideas about Africanwomen and men, we will focus on how African peoples have understood gender, sex, sexuality, and,to a lesser degree, race as categories of knowledge. Each week, we will examine case studies offeminist and non-feminist conversations across African regional boundaries and periods (i.e., fromthe pre-colonial to the post-colonial period). Key themes to be explored include gender norms andgender complementarity, Islam and women/gender, same-sex love, prostitution, and feminism andmasculinity in Africa. One of our charges this semester will be to cast theory into practice as wecollectively craft our own conversations across ever-shifting African-gendered differences. SPRING 2024 Topic: "Empire to Empire: Late Ottoman and British Palestine" This lecture-discussion course examines the history of Palestine from the mid-19th century until the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, covering the final decades of Ottoman rule in the region and the subsequent period of the British mandate. The course weaves together modern Jewish history, Palestinian history, the histories of the Ottoman and British empires, Middle Eastern history, and the history of modern nationalism. The course will emphasize the close reading of primary source texts and will introduce students to new historiography on the region. This course may be repeated for credit two times.