The Limits of History

Undergraduate / Graduate

Social scientists ultimately need three things: curiosity, intuition, and imagination. This course examines how recent historians (and other scholars using historical approaches) have wielded these more ethereal qualities in creative ways to write histories of topics once thought to be beyond the realm of possibility and history. We will explore histories of the silenced, the unseen, the impossible, and the paths not taken in texts that have reshaped the field. In the process, we will ask, how do we push fields forward while remaining true to some disciplinary guiding light? Indeed, does discipline even matter anymore, or is it just a means of hamstringing innovative scholarship? What "counts" as history, who decides, and why? How far can we go before "history" breaks down? By investigating how these scholars have pushed for a more expansive sense of history, we will come away with inspiration for how we might approach our own research anew.