History: Topic Courses

2026-2027 Fall/Winter

 

HIS200H5S - Topics in History: Electrification, Environment, and Society: A Global History (Instructor: H. Lyu)

This course investigates how electricity shaped and was shaped by geopolitics, energy landscape, state developmentalism, and culture from the late nineteenth century to the present. We will examine the generation and consumption of electricity, the construction and operation of the electrical infrastructure, and the interplay between energy, politics, and the environment in different historical contexts. In addition to offering pictures of electrification in the cities and industry, this course also aims to unravel the unsetting part of electrification as the representative of modernity, and more broadly, the technological underground, by paying more attention to electrification in non-Western societies and in the countryside, and how the existing social hierarchs shaped the distribution and consumption of electricity to deepen our understanding of energy in an age of the Anthropocene. 

 

HIS395H5S - Topics in History: The Germanies of Latin America: German Immigration, Imperialism, and Transcultural Interactions (Instructor: D. Labastida)

This seminar examines the history of German migration to Latin America and the diverse relationships that German-speaking communities forged with local societies from the nineteenth century to the twentieth. Drawing on recent scholarship in migration history, global history, and the New Imperial History, the course investigates whether German settlements functioned as informal expressions of European imperialism through social, cultural, scientific, and economic forms of influence that extended beyond formal colonial rule. At the same time, it explores the extent to which these communities emerged through processes of transcultural exchange, cultural hybridity, and mutual adaptation, in which German immigrants and Latin American societies continually reshaped one another. Rather than privileging a single interpretive framework, the seminar encourages students to critically evaluate competing historiographical perspectives on migration, empire, identity, and cultural interaction across Latin America.
 

HIS493H5F - Advanced Topics in Global History: Environmental History of Modern South Asia (Instructor: B. Cannon)

Not unlike North America, the South Asian subcontinent is home to a huge range of topographies, from arid desert landscapes to deeply fertile river valleys, from semi-arid plateaus to snowy mountain terrain. Each of these ecologies has, in turn, shaped vastly different historical trajectories, especially in the ways that people connect to land and natural resources. The ability to control access to land and water – and thus, to sustainable livelihoods and well-being – has inspired routine conflict as much as intercommunal accord, from agrarian hierarchies foundational to socio-economic relations in the Mughal empire, to British-mediated projects of canal engineering. The increasingly tangible consequences of climate change – taking subcontinental temperatures to record highs, threatening access to fresh water, and increasing the precarity of monsoon rainfall – only further serve to intensify these relationships. This course will invite students to explore these and related questions on environmental change in South Asia across the last three centuries.