Seminar Topics - Fall 2026
The following courses are seminar topics for Fall 2026. Topics will vary semester to semester. A course may be repeated if the selected topic is different.
History 300: Senior Seminar
Section 1: American Empire and Its Discontents
Instructor: Dr. Andrew Hartman
Is the United States an empire? Why do some deny its existence? How does the American empire compare to empires of the past, especially European empires? How does a nation founded in resistance to the British empire become one of the most powerful empires in the history of the world? Why have so many Americans supported the imperial project? How does the long tradition of anti-imperialism help us understand the history of US imperialism? This senior research seminar will investigate these questions (and many more) about American empire and those who have resisted it. Students will write their capstone research papers on any topic under the broad tent topic of American empire and its discontents, in any era from the American Revolution to the Global War on Terror.
Section 2: Race, Class, and Inequality in Postwar America
Instructor: Dr. Touré Reed
This seminar will explore some of key political developments and concepts that informed academic and policy discourse on race and economic inequality from the failed Full Employment Bill of 1945, through the dawn of the New Millennium.
Section 3: Medicine in the Civil War Era
Instructor: Dr. Megan VanGorder
This seminar explores how the breakthroughs and shortcomings of Civil War era medical care shaped society in lasting ways. Topics include battlefield care, women’s nursing, the work of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, doctors’ professionalization, veterans’ struggles with pain and addiction, grief and mourning, and Black public health after emancipation. Students will engage primary sources and scholarship to develop original research projects at the intersection of war, race, gender, and medicine.
Section 5: Intelligence and Intervention
Instructor: Dr. Patrice Olsen
This class is designed to introduce students to formal research in foreign intelligence and US interventions in the Global South since 1947. In particular, students will gain a familiarity with the structure and operation of the United States intelligence community. Through extensive case study research, the course’s objective is to provide the opportunity for students to interpret for themselves the operational, political, and socio-economic soundness of particular operations, and their impacts.
Section 6: Monsters and Monstrosities in Medieval Europe
Instructor: Dr. Katie 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 307/407: Topics In Non-Western History
Section 1: Global Africa
Intructor: Dr. Agbenyega Adedze
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 imagine Africa and highlights Africa’s contributions through global connections of peoples, ideas, and resources. Topics to be discussed will revolve around: 1. Slavery, colonialism and conquest 2. Economic, intellectual and political power 3. Circulation of communities, cultures and innovations 4. Science, technology, and health 5. Africa in the world today.
Section 2: The Ottoman Empire
Instructor: Dr. Camille Cole
The Ottoman Empire was one of the longest-lived states in world history, coexisting with the Wars of the Roses but also the French Revolution, and stretching from Vienna to the Indian Ocean. This seminar covers the major developments in Ottoman history and the empire’s relationship to the rest of the world, from the 13th century through the 20th. We will explore topics including the empire’s rise and expansion, Ottoman relations with Europe during the Renaissance, pamphlets and other forms of communication, imperial “decline,” Orientalism, daily life in the provinces, reform and the question of Europe, identity politics including race and sectarianism, and World War I and the Armenian Genocide. We will consider major historiographical debates in the field as well as working with a range of primary sources across multiple genres.
Section 3: Sex, Opium, and Sorcery: A Lifetime at the End of China’s Last Golden Age, 1768–1838
Instructor: Dan Knorr
This class examines the anxieties—inflation, drugs, soulstealers, etc.—that riddled society from the emperor down to the common people as China under the Qing empire transitioned from an age of prosperity to a period of crisis between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We will ask whether people had any premonitions of the challenges to come, how they responded to the crises they observed, and whether there was anything they could have done to escape the disintegration of the political, social, cultural, and environmental orders familiar to them. More broadly, we will consider the historical significance of a generation that lived their entire lives in the shadow of crises they would not live to see.
History 309/409: Topics In United States History
Section 1: U.S. Constitutional History
Instructor: Dr. Stewart Winger
Commentators now routinely say that we in the United States face a “constitutional crisis.” One side claims, for instance, that executive power is being used in unprecedented even “fascist” fashion, the other claims that they are merely recovering the “original public meaning” of the constitution in employing their “unitary executive theory.” Do the historical claims critics and supporters of the Supreme Court hold up to historical scrutiny? How has the way judges, lawyers, and citizens have read the Constitution shifted over time? This course, focused on the first half of U.S. Constitutional history (to 1897) will examine such issues, which are central to understanding Constitutional debates today.
History 402: Seminar in European History
TBD
History 411: Seminar: Topics in Early American History
Section 1: Seminar in Early American Historiography
Instructor: Dr. Matthijs Tieleman
This course examines classic and new debates on early American history. We will explore core topics that were crucial to colonial and revolutionary America, including imperialism, intellectual history, Native American history, Atlantic history, slavery, political history, and economic history, among others. In this graduate seminar, we will also discuss in-depth various historiographical perspectives that have shaped how we understand early American history.
History 421: Seminar: Topics In American Racial & Ethnic History
Section 1: Race and Place in the U.S. Imagination
Intructor: Dr. Lindsay Stallones Marshall
As a settler colonial society, the United States is an invented place. Over the past 250 years, people living on this land have constructed, contested, and re-constructed notions of identity. This seminar will explore how the different ways in which people think about and interact with what is commonly called the natural world have historically shaped notions of race, Indigeneity, and identity.