This course engages in theoretical and practical aspects of engaging in public histories and curating exhibitions. We will explore various methodologies for creating exhibitions and engage in institutional critique. We will also look at community practice, and museum and historical projects in public contexts. Through readings, discussion, assignments, museum trips, public history tours, and guest lectures, we will critically analyze the role of curators and curatorial practice.

This course provides a comprehensive introduction to America’s criminal court system and all its institutional stakeholders. We will examine America’s criminal court system from myriad of different perspectives: courts as organizations, courts as social arrangements of professionals, courts as providers of social services and courts as consumer institutions – providing the experience of justice to victims, witnesses, defendants and jurors. We will focus on state courts as well as the federal system.

This course explores the history of North America through the eyes of the original inhabitants from pre-contact times up through 1800. Far from a simplistic story of European conquest, the histories of Euroamericans and Natives were and continue to be intertwined in surprising ways. Although disease, conquest, and death are all part of this history, this course also tell another story: the big and small ways in which these First Nations shaped their own destiny, controlled resources, utilized local court systems, and drew on millennia-old rituals and practices to sustain their communities despite the crushing weight of colonialism. 

The decade from the mid-Sixties until the mid-Seventies witnessed the rise of Black Radicalism as a global phenomenon. The emergence of Black Power in the US, Brazil and the Caribbean, the consolidation of liberation struggles in Portuguese Africa and the rise of a Black Consciousness trend in Apartheid South Africa all represent key moments. What led young activists to embrace “Black Power?” What led to the emergence of Marxist movements in Portuguese Africa? What events in the Caribbean gave ascendancy to radical tendencies? And what forces contributed to the decline of these movements? This course seeks to answer these questions.

Capitalism didn't just spring from the brain of Adam Smith. Its logic is not encoded on human DNA, and its practices are not the inevitable outcome of supply and demand. So how did capitalism become the dominant economic system of the modern world? History can provide an answer by exploring the interaction of culture and politics, technology and enterprise, and opportunity and exploitation from the era of the slave ship to the era of the container ship. HIST 0150 courses introduce students to methods of historical analysis, interpretation, and argument. This class presumes no economics background, nor previous history courses.

This course considers the wider area of the American Revolution through the experiences and actions of Indigenous nations. Although the usual story of the American War of Independence is centered on the political standoff between the American colonists and the colonies (and eventual states), the view from Indian country looked vastly different, with divergent allegiances, and experiences ranging from 1760 to 1795, during which the American Revolution was only one conflict.

This class examines and introduces the politics, cultures, histories, representations, and studies of the Native peoples of North America, with a primary focus on the United States, and helps students to develop critical thinking, reading, and writing skills regarding Native American and Indigenous Studies. Although broad in cultural and geographic scope, the course does not attempt to summarize the diverse cultures of the hundreds of Native American tribes across the continent or Indigenous peoples globally. Instead, it focuses on several key issues in the lives of, and scholarship about, American Indian/Native American/First Nations/Indigenous peoples in the US (and beyond).

This class, a foundational course for the MA in Public Humanities with preference given to graduate students enrolled in MA in Public Humanities, will address the theoretical bases of the public humanities, including topics of history and memory, museums and memorials, the roles of expertise and experience, community cultural development, and material culture.

This seminar grapples with monuments as forms of “public speech” and “scriptive things”: elements of material culture that structure human actions but whose meaning is also contested. How do monuments shape political imaginations and civic practices? Whose stories have we told and to what effects? How have citizens experienced, ignored, or contested public commemoration at local and national levels, in universities and other locations? What should we do about oppressive monuments and disparities in public commemoration? Drawing on a variety of fields and disciplines, from political theory, philosophy, history, art and art history, visual culture, anthropology, etc., as well as the work of artists, philanthropic institutions, activists, and local and national governments, we will explore histories of commemoration and contestation, keeping in mind that public monuments are palimpsest of memory that seek to tell some stories and drown out others.

Diving into global debates, surround gender, sex, migration, and labor, this course considers forms of work that are inflected by race, gender, class, nation, and ability. Our course title, “7 Hours and 55 Minutes,” draws its inspiration from an advocacy game developed by the Empower Foundation, Thailand’s first sex worker rights organization. The game asks participants to consider Thai sex worker understandings an of sex work, within the context of an 8 hour working day. It examines how the global legal and civilian regulation of gendered bodies is met with vital forms of resistance and community organizing. Each week, our seminar will explore one book, article, documentary film, cultural artifact, or the mixed media artistic productions.

In 1616, John Smith of Pocahontas fame published “A Description of New England,” literally remaining and ostensibly claiming a “placeworld” Native peoples call the Dawnland. In this first-year seminar, students will utilize Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) methodologies to examine and appraise the circumstances and legacies of settler colonialism and the long struggle to remake and redefine the Northeastern Atlantic coast. Students will engage with traditional historical sources, literature, oral histories, and evidence found in popular culture to understand better the genesis and durability of the struggle for this contested landscape.