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Graduate Programs

Graduate Seminars - Fall 2009

*NOTE This List is Subject to Change.

530/History of Science and Technology/Greg Eghigian/M6-9
592.001/Nineteenth-century Proseminar/Lori Ginzberg/T6-9
592.002/Modern History Proseminar/Catherine Wanner/R6-9
597 A/ Historiography of Slavery in Latin America/ Russell Lohse/M9-12

• History 530 – History of Science and Technology: Engineering Society and Citizens

Old Botany Conference Room/Mondays 6:00-9:00 p.m.

Greg Eghigian

gae2@psu.edu

By the mid-twentieth century, political parties, states, commercial institutions, and the human sciences largely shared a common belief - the belief that societies and their citizens could be known, changed, and managed. The 19th and 20th centuries were stamped by a widespread enthusiasm for public projects, ranging from military reform to urban renewal to macro-economic planning to social insurance. Grand things were expected of governments and public institutions, and bold new futures were projected for societies and their citizens.
This graduate seminar will examine the comparative and international history/historiography of the modern human sciences, medicine, and technology from social, cultural, and political history perspectives. We will examine technologies such as cars, money, and barbed wire; sciences such as sociology, criminology, and biology; and medical fields such as psychiatry and hygiene. We will examine not only public projects, but also the moral landscapes surrounding these enterprises: the relationship of science to lifestyle and the emergence of a public space of "the ethical." This seminar will serve as an opportunity for students to familiarize themselves with canonical and recent trends in the history, theory, and social studies of science, technology, and medicine.

Sample readings:
Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century.
Annelise Riles,ed. Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge
Reviel Netz, Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity
Kristie Macrakis, Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi's Spy-Tech World
Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the making of a Mass Public
Greg Eghigian, Andreas Killen, and Christine Leuenberger, eds., The Self as Project: Politics and the Human Sciences

Guest speaker(s):

Michael Adas, and Jesse Ballenger

• History 592.001 – Nineteenth-century Proseminar

415 Weaver/Tuesdays 6:00-9:00pm

Lori Ginzberg

ldg1@psu.edu

This is a readings seminars focusing on a range of topics in U.S. history from the Revolutionary era through the nineteenth century, with consideration of transnational approaches to the topic. The goals are to familiarize students with the key historiographical and theoretical debates in U.S. history, acquaint them with the methods and trends within the profession, enhance critical analysis of works, and help each student frame a research project to be undertaken in the spring semester (with Prof. Dan Letwin). Readings will include both "classic" and newer works, usually consisting of a book and one more articles per week, as well as outside readings geared to particular writing assignments.

Sample readings:
Bederman, Gail, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917
Blight, David, Race and Reunion
Hobsbawn, Eric, Age of Revolution, 1789-1848
Genovese, Eugene, Roll Jordan Roll
Stansell, Christine, City of Women: Sex & Class in New York, 1789-1860
Woodward, C. Vann, Origins of the New South

Guest speaker(s):

Sever facutly members (Sinha, Letwin) will participate in this seminar on occasion and students will be expected to attend outside speakers coming to the department.

• History 592.002 – Modern History Proseminar

123 Pond/Thursdays 6:00-9:00pm

Catherine Wanner

cew10@psu.edu

The readings and discussions in class will focus on the global and the local, emphasizing comparison and difference between times and places over the course of the twentieth century. Our major themes will be political systems, trade and commodities, religion, cultural encounters and the rise and fall of empires and how these themes have evolved and shaped modern history. In addition to select historical texts, we will use some of the most influential theoretical concepts and writings to analyze the most notable developments of the modern period of history and the mechanisms of change that brought them about.

Sample readings:
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) ISBN: 0300070160
Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, (New York, Penguin, 1986)
Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004) ISBN: 0674011686
Stephen E. Hanson, Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), ISBN 0807846155
Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor. Wurtemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory 1871-1918 (University of North Carolina Press, 1997) ISBN 0807823597

Guest speaker(s):

One author of an assigned text, and an editor from Penn State Press

• History 597A – Historiography of Slavery in Latin America

3 Ferguson/Mondays 9:00am-12:00pm

Russell Lohse

krl13@psu.edu

This course will examine the origins and develoopment of slavery in Latin America from the arrival of the first Africans in Hispaniola at the end of the fifteenth century until the final abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888. Although the focus of the course is on the enslavement of Africans, the enslavement of the indigenous peoples of the Americas will also be considered. Special attention will be paid to slavery in Africa, the Atlantic slave trade, and the importance of African ethnicity among enslaved people in the Americas. Key debates in the historiography of slavery will be addressed, including the impact of the Spanish legal system on Latin American slavery, the influence of Iberian racial attitudes on the institution, the role of slave resistance, and the causes and consequences of abolition througout Latin America.

Justification:

In addition to addressing the continuing need for graduate seminars for the department's Latin Americanist students, the seminar will provide a useful comparative perspective for students of United States history and others.