Studies in Historiography and Theory

3 credits · Graduate

This course is designed to help doctoral students become conversant with major twentieth-century developments in the discipline beginning with the French Annales school but focusing mostly on the 1960s to the present. Topics covered include nineteenth-century historiography, and especially the thought of Marx and Nietzsche (as background); the emergence and growth of social history in the 1960s and 1970s; the “linguistic” and “cultural” turns of the 1980s and 1990s; as well as developments in other areas of historical inquiry, including the history of gender and sexuality; the history of memory; and indigenous, colonial, and postcolonial history. The class covers major theoretical issues such as the relationship between history and memory; the role of narrative in history; the concepts of language, discourse, and power as they pertain to historical study; the question of truth and objectivity in history; and the place of speculation in historical argument.