Teaching

This course examines processes, ideas and events that have shaped the modern world, providing an understanding of the ways in which societies and nation-states have interacted with one another. Assigned materials will help us understand the cultural, social and political events that have shaped the human experience, as well as the causes and outcomes of such events. Some themes include exploration and contact, the industrial revolution, the rise of the West, colonization and decolonization, nationalism, communism, revolution, gender, racism and genocide.

This course will explore the comparative study of gender and sexuality across different non-western cultures. Topics may include how different societies define femininity and masculinity, and how work, play, language, appearance, and sexual expression come to be marked as 'appropriate' or even 'natural' for women and men. The course will examine non-binary gender systems, the variations in the sexual division of labor and economic organization, and the impact of forces such as colonialism and globalization on gender issues.

Fictional women cast into historical scenes of occupation, displacement, and resistance have been voices of global feminism within novels set across the twentieth-century postcolonial Global South. In this course, we evoke global feminist themes alongside postcolonial theory in historical fiction by exploring the political and cultural histories coloring the backdrops of fictional narratives. To do so, we will incorporate primary and secondary source analysis into our literary reading. By doing the work of historicizing fiction, we will engage in an interdisciplinary reading and critique of the global feminist novel.

The genre of historical fiction is where we find history and literature, opening us to poetic narratives of past people, periods, and places once lived. In this course, we explore works of postcolonial historical fiction set in twentieth-century Asia and Africa and address themes of displacement and dissent. Our readings will incorporate a skill in the historical discipline: contextualization. By interpreting historical fiction alongside source-based research, students will apply perspective and scholarship from postcolonial history towards their reading of postcolonial fiction.