Professor Tamar Herzog. This course examines how Europeans interacted with those they considered different inside and outside Europe during the Medieval and the Early Modern periods. Reading will alternate between primary and secondary sources.

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). Organized chronologically, it engages with the sources and nature of Law, the organization of legal systems and the relationship between law and society, law and law-maker, law and the legal professions.

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 forget – their histories of war, conquest, violence, and dispossession. We examine cases from across the Americas and diverse strategies of memorialization and redress, including museums, monuments, reparations, and exhumations, to understand how contested pasts generate both political challenges and... Read more about History 1903: How Societies Remember (and Forget)

Professor Sidney Chalhoub. This course seeks to analyze the ways in which Machado de Assis, the most important Brazilian novelist of all times, appropriated the European tradition of the novel of adultery. In doing so, he sought to discuss literary models (realism), scientific ideologies (social Darwinism), gender (he expected the misogyny of readers to fill the lacunae of the narration), and class conflict (characters in dependent relations, women in particular, deploy an array of strategies to deal with the potential violence of patriarchal figures). Readings: selected... Read more about History 1932: Fictions of Adultery: From Flaubert to Machado de Assis

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. Looks at both these countries' dictatorships and their fraught peace processes (including truth commissions, transitional justice, artistic representations, human rights activism, international law, foreign involvement, backlash) in order to probe the stakes and politics of historical... Read more about History 1913: Dirty Wars, Peace Processes, and the Politics of History in Latin America

Professor Kirsten Weld. This course surveys Latin America from its 19th-century independence movements through the present day. How did the powerful legacies of European colonialism, and the neocolonial economic order that emerged to replace it, shape the Americas' new nations? Themes include nationalism and identity, revolution and counterrevolution, populism, state formation, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, social movements, the role of foreign powers, inequality and social class, dictatorship, democratization, and human rights.

Professor Alejandro de la Fuente. This course seeks to explain why social revolutions have taken place in Latin America and analyzes their impact on the region. The objective is for students to gain a critical understanding of the origins, development, and impact of revolutionary movements in Latin America during the twentieth century. We will try to identify: (1) the historical factors that led to revolutions in the region (the so-called revolutionary situations); (2) the strategies followed by different movements and how successful they were; (3) the programs and... Read more about AFRAMER 199X: Social Revolutions in Latin America

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 both secondary and primary sources (available in English translation).

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 question of citizenship rights; the African slave trade; land and labor policies in a slave society; slave emancipation and the crisis of the monarchy; the establishment of the republican regime; gender and the crisis of patriarchy; urban renewal and popular protest; social movements in rural areas; the... Read more about History 1032: A History of Brazil, from Independence to the Present

Professor Alejandro de la Fuente. This yearlong seminar introduces students to current questions and debates in the study of race and ethnicity in Latin America, from the colonial period to the present. Our seminar answers the call, issued by anthropologist Peter Wade (1997), to produce scholarship integrating the study of Africans and their descendants, along with indigenous peoples, as participants in shared processes of racial formation, nation making, and state building. Through the systematic comparison of several cases, the course discusses how ideas of race have... Read more about AFRAMER 219A: Race and Ethnicity in Latin America