Global Histories
This field emerged out of a collaborative faculty seminar supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2000-02.
World history has enjoyed renewed popularity in recent years, largely because economists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and other students of "globalization" are increasingly interested in how areas of the globe that were once thought to be distinct have actually been interconnected for a very long time. This field engages these currents by encouraging graduate students to think beyond familiar boundaries, to identify multi-sited research projects, and to design pedagogically meaningful syllabi for teaching world history. The core problems course as well as the related graduate courses in a variety of fields support a conceptualization of world history that spans the pre-modern and modern periods, without accepting as a given their conventional chronological distinction. Courses in the field also cross East-West and North-South divides, working against facile spatial or continental categories.
As with all emergent fields, world history has a particular genealogy. The contemporary fascination with "the global" shares methodological concerns with comparative history and relates to themes of colonialism and postcolonialism. But world history goes beyond these fields to help us understand how and why globalization is not new and to visualize the variety of terrains in which transnational influences have shaped social, political, economic, cultural, and other developments. Understanding points of connection and divergence across time and space both complicates and enriches our attempts to historicize the human experience.
A major or minor in this field prepares students to think beyond conventional borders, study the complex interactions between different parts of the world, and historicize the structures of power that have fostered conflict and violence world-wide. It also furthers an understanding of the intermixture and fusion of cultural forms and practices across local and regional borders. Students working in this field study a diverse range of topics. Phenomena such as U.S. Hip-Hop culture, Chinese martial arts film, diasporic imaginaries, deforestation, slavery, military conflict, labor, and responses to disease -- to name just a few -- all lend themselves to transnational analysis. Courses in the minor raise questions about the boundaries between "East-West," "North-South," and "local-global" by exploring the multiple and interconnected histories between them and the intricate ways in which their connections have constantly been mediated and translated by regional structures and relations.
Despite the fact that the nation and the nation-state have long dominated historical writing and thinking, especially though not exclusively in the modern west, historians of many different interests have countered these narratives with more transnational -- if not global -- scholarship. Integrative themes and related fields in the history department that support this field include colonialism and postcolonialism, the history of science, environmental history, international relations history, gender and women's history, labor history, and cultural history. Our strong area studies programs (in Africa, Latin America, Russia and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and South Asia, and East Asia) as well as our U.S. ethnic studies programs (Afro-American, Latino-Latina, Asian-American, Native American) are equally important sites for interdisciplinary work, given their long-standing engagement with transnational problems and themes.
Some questions which a minor in the field might raise are: how do we consider the global without losing sight of the local? conversely, how do we attend to regional specificity without fetishizing the local? is national history over? what is the relationship of transnational histories to more conventionally national ones? where does imperial history end and global history begin? what happens to distinctions between "East" and "West" in global landscapes? who is the audience for "world history"? where do critical analyses of race, ethnicity and class fit in histories that exceed the nation? what models does women's and gender history, long transnational and comparative, have to offer world historians? how do we position the west in the grand narratives of world history that are taught to undergraduates? how might a global perspective reshape our histories of capitalism, liberalism, fascism, and other great isms ? how do language and linguistic difference both facilitate and limit the transmission of goods, culture and knowledge across geographical space? what kinds of new pedagogies does the emphasis on global connections require? And last but not least, how do we prepare undergraduates and graduate students to be responsible, critically thinking citizens in the current global age?