Course Number:

Credit Hours:

4

Course Title:

Research Seminar in Global Social History

Course Description:

Offers a research seminar addressing major issues in social history at the global level. Topics include family, demography, community, ethnicity, gender, class, race, and nation. Research papers link a selection of these issues across national and continental boundaries. Recently, the seminar focused on issues of gender, colonialism, and postcolonialism. It examined how gender influenced the experience of colonialism (for both colonial subjects and white colonizers), how colonialism operated with respect to gender and sexuality, and how gender differences were manifested within postcolonial contexts. Considers theoretical frameworks for the study of gender, race, class, and colonialism; notions of masculinity and “machismo”; colonial women subjects; sexuality and empire; the position of white European women as colonizers and as feminists; the postcolonial state as a regulator of sexuality and marriage; and the feminization of the labor force in global capitalism.