Course Description
Readings and discussion of major topics in the theory and practice of comparative history.
Athena Title
COL LOQ IN COMP HIS
Equivalent Courses
Not open to students with credit in HIST 7700
Semester Course Offered
Offered every year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
The goal of this colloquium is to teach students the benefits (and potential costs) of studying the past in comparative perspective. The course is writing intensive, and students will ordinarily write several book reviews and a substantial final historiographical essay. While the thematic and geographic foci will vary by instructor, the expected learning outcome for all sections of 8700 will be a broad familiarity with the theory and practice of comparative history.
Topical Outline
Our overall effort to make sense of the cataclysmic events of twentieth-century Europe has brought home the complexity of the web of relationships in which history, commemoration, memory, literature, and lived experience are enmeshed. In this colloquium we will consider the steps in the process through which a particular understanding of these notable events, and the experience of those who lived them, has emerged. We will proceed from first-hand experience to first accounts to memory to commemoration, then consider the circumstances of "category- creating" interpretations that proved to shape how these problematic events, and the connective tissue linking them, have been understood. -Background, Expectation, and Historical Experience -Experience and Commemoration, Innovation and Tradition -After the Great War: Myth, Politics, and the Shaping of Memory -The Place of "Modernity" -Up Close and Personal -Remembering the Holocaust -The Historical Specificity of Key Categories, 2: The Banality of Evil -Remembering History and Memory as History -Shadows and Traces, Remembering and Reusing -Second paper due -As It Happened: Toward the Anti-Communist Revolution of 1989 -Responses to Historical Experience in the Visual Arts -Review of the Issues in the Course -Preliminary Discussion of Final Papers -Oral presentation on final papers -Final papers due
Syllabus
Public CV