History Lab

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

How is history relevant to the video games we play, films we watch, and podcasts we listen to? This class is about the varied ways that genres and disciplines beyond academic history have engaged with the past. Following an exploration of history itself as a discipline, we will study historical fiction, period-piece films, historical board games and video games, as well as explorations of the past in disciplines like economics, sociology, anthropology. The course will also be structured around students developing a "historical project" in a genre/discipline beyond academic history. They will research a topic and then produce a historically-minded work, whether a piece of fiction, art-work, a board game, or some other idea of their own making.