Classes

Professor Sidney Chalhoub. This course will analyze major themes in the social and political history of Brazil from Independence (1822) to the present. Themes to be addressed are the following: Independence, colonial legacies and national identity; state formation and the...

Professor Tamar Herzog. This course is an introductory survey of colonial Latin American history, spanning the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Organized chronologically and thematically, it will examine developments in Spanish and Portuguese America by reading...

Professor Kirsten Weld. As the adage goes, “All wars are fought twice: the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” This seminar interrogates the relationship between history and memory by analyzing how modern societies have chosen to remember – and to...

Professor Tamar Herzog. This is a conference course on the history of law in Europe (including both England and the Continent, as well as Europe’s overseas domains) from the fall of the Roman Empire (5th century) to the establishment of the European Community (20th century)...

Professor Sidney Chalhoub. For a long time, the writing of history focused mainly on kings, politicians, landlords, slave owners, capitalists –that is, on those with the means to write letters, autobiographies, official documents. In the past decades, historians have...

Professor Sidney Chalhoub. Slavery and emancipation were major issues in nineteenth-century Brazilian history. In the 1870’s and 1880’s, with the drama of emancipation unfolding, yellow fever meant death to European immigrants and a major obstacle to achieving a social...

Prof. Alejandro de la Fuente and Prof. Emmanuel Akyeampong - This seminar surveys the booming historiographies of slavery and the law in Latin America, the United States, and Africa. Earlier generations of scholars relied heavily on European legal traditions to draw sharp...

Prof. Alejandro de la Fuente and Prof. Tamar Herzog - The Latin American History Seminar and Workshop is a yearlong research seminar and workshop that meets every other week to study a central question in Latin American history (in the fall) and provide opportunities for...

Prof. Tamar Herzog - This course examines some of the main debates in Colonial Latin American History. Among other things, we will discuss issues such as conquest and resistance, the construction and administration of differences (such as race, ethnicity, gender, religion)...

Prof. Tamar Herzog - This course is an introductory survey of European Early Modern history, from the fifteenth to the late eighteenth century. Organized chronologically and thematically, it examines developments from the late Middle Ages to the Age of Revolutions, including...

Prof. Kirsten Weld - Surveys the complex, mutually constitutive, and often thorny relationship - characterized by suspicion and antagonism, but also by fascination and desire - between the United States and the diverse republics south of the Rio Grande. Examines public...

Professor Kirsten Weld. Latin America's "dirty wars" generated intense struggles over historical memory. Course focuses on Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and comparatively examines how societies reckon with bloody recent pasts that are anything but settled...