Seminar Topics - Fall 2025
The following courses are seminar topics for Spring 2025. Topics will vary semester to semester. A course may be repeated if the selected topic is different.
History 300: Senior Seminar
Section 1: Karl Marx and Marxism in US and World History
Instructor: Dr. Andrew Hartman
This section of History 300, the senior research seminar, will explore the ideas of Karl Marx and how they have helped shape, and how they have been shaped by, a variety of historical contexts. The focus of the readings will be on the history of the United States, but students will have the opportunity to explore research topics in a variety of other world historical settings. We will examine how various movements, activists, politicians, intellectuals, labor organizers and more have used the ideas of Karl Marx as inspiration for changing the world, or as a model for what not to do. Lots of people since the nineteenth century have looked to Marx and Marxism as a guide to a world after capitalism. But plenty more have interpreted Marx and Marxism as a threat to a capitalist order they have wished to protect. We will examine all these various ways of thinking about Marx across the last 150 plus years. Students will have freedom to choose engaging, relevant, and significant research topics. Email me at ahartma@ilstu.edu if you have questions about the course.
Section 2: More than Voting Rights: Women's Activisms in the 20th Century
Instructor: Dr. Kyle Ciani
Campaigns to gain voting rights are certainly critical movements and the broad outlines of these efforts are typically mentioned in courses. However, activism by and for women in the 20th century is far broader than suffrage, and this seminar will delve into these efforts. Women established organizations to secure peaceful resolutions of armed conflict and reduce gun violence, to seek access to educational opportunities, property ownership, economic independence, reproductive health, marriage equality, child and elder care resources, and protections from sexual and physical violence and to allow for the full participation in one’s cultural traditions. Resources in archival repositories across the world have digitalized materials, making these sources more available for research. Students will learn how to access and use these primary materials, how to develop an inclusive bibliography that pays attention to the topic’s historiography, and how to connect with the under-studied themes within those sources. While the course readings will focus on activisms in the Americas, students can research a woman’s activist topic in any part of the world; however, they need to be fluent in the written and oral language of the region and primary sources must be accessible to them throughout the semester.
Section 3: Reconstruction
Instructor: Dr. Ron Gifford
This course will provide an opportunity to analyze primary sources in relation to one of the most important eras in U.S. History. While Eric Foner provided in 1988 the most memorable comprehensive synthesis of the period, there is still room for interpretation, as you will see in the discussion of historiography since the 1990s. Students can choose to write about emancipation, race, labor, republicanism, the role of the executive, violence, corruption, agency, the freedmen, and hundreds of other topics wherein we see the country grappling with the outcome and meaning of the Civil War. Whether or not Reconstruction was revolutionary, counter-revolutionary, a missed opportunity, or a success is still to be decided. We still see Reconstruction playing a role in our lives today.
Section 4: Migrants, Refugees and Global Nomads: Changing Patterns of Human Movement in the Modern Era
Instructor: Dr. Janice Jayes
Who gets to move and whose movements are controlled? Why have states attempted to regulate human movement and how have individuals circumvented state controls? Whose values and biases do these systems of regulation reflect? This class will examine the 19th and 20th century origins of the current frameworks for regulating human movement and also view the current global “crisis” through this historical context.
Section 5: Inventing History
Instructor: Dr. Lindsay Stallones Marshall
In this senior seminar, we’ll explore the mechanics of historical memory. Whether we do it professionally or don’t even realize we’re doing it, we all construct histories that shape how we think about the past. Why do we remember the past the way we do? Why do we remember different pasts? What does the history profession have to do with it? Exploring the role of archives, museums, monuments, and even textbooks, we’ll investigate the process of how people construct, reconstruct, and deconstruct our understanding of the past. This class will include visits to the archives at Milner Library and the McLean County Museum of History.
Section 6: Monsters and Monstrosities in Medieval Europe
Instructor: Dr. Kathryn Jasper
This course explores how people in medieval Europe (ca. 200-1200) made sense of inexplicable phenomena. Documents and imagery from the Middle Ages reveal a fascination with monsters, ghosts, revenants, and other mysterious beings. These sources also reflect social anxieties about morality and humanity and record contemporary reactions to the monstrous ranging from wonder to persecution. Class discussions will focus on analyzing and interpreting medieval sources and introduce students to the historiography of monstrosity.
History 307: Topics in Non-Western History
Section 1: Africa
Instructor: Dr. Adedze Agbenyega
Africa’s contribution to global history is still misunderstood by many. This course looks into the diversity of the continent and its interaction with the rest of the world from the dawn of humanity to the present. It challenges how people perceive Africa and highlights Africa’s contributions through global connections of peoples, ideas, and resources. Topics to be discussed will revolve around, slavery, colonialism and conquest, economic, intellectual and political power, circulation of communities, cultures and innovations, science, technology, health, and Africa in the world today.
Section 2: “It’s the end of the world as we know it…” – Comparative Eschatology
Instructor: Dr. Patrice OIsen
“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
-T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men” (1925)
Preoccupation with the possible end of the world is not a recent phenomenon, despite the plethora of theories and pronouncements in popular culture at present. Scholars, mystics, poets, songwriters, theologians, and many others have speculated that the end of the world is forthcoming – as well as how that end might take place; this has been for many millennia. Nor Has this been the exclusive purview of the disenchanted, depressed, or sociopathic. As we shall see in this course, eschatology has taken the form of millenarian movements in late 19th century Brazil, it is also present in nuclear wargaming scenarios developed by the RAND Corporation. Thus, for diverse reasons, eschatological thought has been a constant. In this course, we will begin a comparative study as to how and why.
Admittedly, this may be one of the oddest classes you will attend. Our objective here is not a facile indulgence in end times scenario-making. Nor it is to express snarky comments on what they believe, thus reaffirming our own presentist assertions (ah, the woefully misled, misinformed…). At one time or other, several of the movements we will be studying have been mass movements. Individuals have paid with their lives for these beliefs, in many cases. Hence Our class is an exploration in leadership – that is, who is accepted as leader, why are their views upheld, promoted… why do we follow whom we follow? It is also thus an investigation of power: who has the ability (or seizes the ability) to define, revise, or manipulate a people’s past and present – and thus their concepts of a shared future, or the futility of that future? What Coercive means are used to promote a stated belief?
Necessarily, we will be dealing with areas of faith, as well as the boundaries of faith, and of delusion. We shall do so in an atmosphere respectful of diverse faiths and opinions, where reflections of all class members are welcome and supported.
History 402: Seminar In European History
Section 1: Histories of Masculinity in Comparative Perspective
Instructor: Dr. Taylor Soja
What does it mean to be masculine? This reading seminar approaches the history of gender and sexuality by focusing on masculinity and how it was defined, reinforced, challenged, and experienced in multiple historical contexts. We will focus mainly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and largely on European histories – although we will also consider other examples from around the world. Each of our readings attempts to understand how gendered ideas about what it meant to be a man were shaped by institutions such as states, militaries and war, sport, parenthood, and regimes of sexual difference. At the same time, they investigate human experience and what it means to live under the influence of gendered ideologies that define masculinity, manhood, and men themselves in particular ways.
History 417: Topics In 20th Century United States History
Section 1: Karl Marx in America: History and Historiography
Instructor: Dr. Andrew Hartman
This graduate seminar will explore the ideas of Karl Marx and how they have helped shape, and how they have been shaped by a variety of historical contexts with a focus on the history of the United States from the US Civil War to the present. The readings will focus on two interrelated topics: the thought of Karl Marx and various Marxists; and the history of the modern United States. We will examine Marx’s ideas about capitalism, democracy, imperialism, history, and slavery, and how his attention to events in the United States, especially the Civil War, shaped his world-changing philosophy. We will also investigate how various movements, activists, politicians, intellectuals, labor organizers, feminists, and more have used the ideas of Karl Marx as inspiration for changing the world. But given that the United States is arguably the most anti-Marxist nation in world history, we will also explore those who read and wrote about Marx as a model for what not to do. Lots of people since the nineteenth century, in the United States and elsewhere, have looked to Marx and Marxism as a guide to a world after capitalism. But plenty more have interpreted Marx and Marxism as a threat to a capitalist order they wished to protect. We will examine all these various ways of thinking about Marx across the last 150 plus years. The final project will be an historiographical essay about atopic related to the course subject matter. Students will be free to choose engaging, relevant, and significant historiographical paper topics. Email me at ahartma@ilstu.edu if you have questions about the course.
History 496: Philosophy Of History And Historiography
Section 1: Philosophy of History and Historiography
Instructor: Dr. Nathan Kapoor
This seminar will examine the philosophical bases for historical study with a review of the development of historical knowledge and the historical profession. Students will read a wide array of monographs based on theory, historical methods, and powerful narratives.