2026-27 Course Highlights

This class explores how and why an uncommon delicacy, originally cultivated in the Middle East as a medicinal, came to dominate global commodity markets and lead to revolutionary transformations in land use, labor, dietary habits, and consumer cultures. As one of the principal drivers of European colonization of the Americas from the seventeenth century onward, sugar created fortunes while also leaving an unparalleled path of destruction in its wake, as enslaved workers were mobilized to undertake the arduous work of growing and harvesting it. In order to populate sugar plantations, Europeans spurred a demographic revolution in the Americas, bringing millions of Africans to colonial shores to grow the crop.

The U.S. Civil War was among the most consequential in world history. It led to the final crisis of chattel slavery in the Western hemisphere, the conquest of millions of acres of indigenous lands, and the dawn of new regimes of racial segregation across the Atlantic World. In this course, we will approach the Civil War and its aftermath as part of an Atlantic revolution. Topics include the pre-war rise of the U.S. as a leader of the proslavery international order; the relationship between abolitionism and settler colonialism; the international revolutionary crisis unleashed by U.S. emancipation; and the hemispheric origins of Jim Crow. Throughout the semester, students will read Atlantic histories of the nineteenth-century United States that situate U.S. social and political history within comparative and transnational frameworks.

This course pairs sci-fi literature and film with philosophy and social theory to explore how the genre grapples with hope, despair, mortality, and the limits of human agency.

What was the relationship between slavery and the industrial revolution? Was slavery capitalist? If slavery was profitable, then why was it abolished? These questions have remained the subject of intense controversy for nearly a century. In this seminar, students will read across disciplines and geographic subfields, putting Black radical historians in conversation with cliometricians and the cotton South next to Brazilian coffee plantations. Throughout the course, we will grapple with the political stakes of these questions and their implications for the modern world.

This course surveys China's turbulent twentieth century through the lens of great trials. From communist show trials to international courts, from struggle sessions to investigative journalism, and from trial by mob to trial by media, students will witness public and private "justice" in action both in and beyond the courtroom and across the long century's radically different governmental regimes. Our view of China will explore both the sweeping events of revolution and individual experiences. There is no prerequisite for this course.

Roman sources often vilify luxury (from the Latin luxus), deeming it an external force that takes over prosperous societies and renders their citizens weak. Popular depictions of Roman notables past and present often highlight their decadence as a key part of their licentiousness. This course wrestles with this tricky concept, disentangling it from narratives of decline and moral turpitude. While denigrated in ancient and modern thought as both a superfluous and corrupting aspect of life-something that distracts from our understanding of more pure "daily life"-luxury played crucial roles in enacting status, reinforcing social relationships, and fulfilling personal desires. Students will learn to interrogate sources for their biases, as well as the lasting legacies of their assumptions, which have given rise to noxious ideologies in our own times.

This seminar explores photography as a medium of anthropological inquiry, cultural representation, and political imagination. Students will engage photography as a research method through a close look at photographic theory, image-making practices, archival images, as well as Indigenous and environmental visual representation.