Applications for this program have closed.
World history is necessarily interdisciplinary, drawing on insights from across the humanities; and liberalism has been integral — fundamental, even — to world history. Here we will shift endlessly across time and space, discovering kernels of liberalism everywhere from ancient China to the English Civil Wars, challenging ourselves to think much more richly, deeply, and widely about what exactly liberalism is, what is has been, where it’s gone, and where it’s heading.
Readings:
September 27, 2021: The Myth of Chinese Isolation
- Nicola Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies (Cambridge University Press). 2004.
October 25, 2021: Comparative Revolutions
- Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (Vintage Books), 1965.
November 22, 2021: Liberalism and Foucault
- Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish (Vintage Books). 1995.
December 27, 2021: Islam and Human Liberty
- Mustafa Akyol, Reopening Muslim Minds (St. Martin’s Essentials). 2021.
January 31, 2022: Feminism in the Islamic Tradition
- Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (Yale University Press), 1993.
February 28, 2022: A Marxist on Modernity
- Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, (University of California Press). 2010.
March 28, 2022: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in the Long 18th Century
- Marcus Rediker & Peter Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon Press), 2013.
April 25, 2022: Videogames and Globalization
- Mia Consalvo, Atari to Zelda: Japan’s Videogames in Global Contexts (MIT Press, 2016).
