Spring 2026 Graduate Courses

HIST 5129-801: Colloquium in Modern Asian History: China - Timothy Weston

This is a reading and writing intensive seminar focused on modern East Asia (1800-1950). The readings are united by their common focus on the political and social history of modernity. The largest number are on China, but we will also read on Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and transnational Asia. The class will focus on three thematic areas as they related to the question of modernity: gender and family; media and communications; empire, frontier and anticolonialism. 

HIST 6012-801: Readings in Modern European History: Imperialism, Fascism, and War - David Ciarlo

In this graduate course, we will delve into three topics that are often linked historically, conceptually, or in the popular mind, namely:  imperialism, fascism, and war.  Our foray into empire and imperialism will be broad, focusing on the 18th and 19th centuries, and on themes that range from colonial economics to ecological transformation, from anthropological "encounter" to race and racism.  We will also look at the role of war in the colonial context, which helped lead into the First World War (1914-1918).  Our work on the "Great" War will also touch on subthemes such as "modernity" or collective memory.  Our investigation of fascism and Nazism in the 1920s and '30s, meanwhile, will look at the politics of militarism, the role of national and cultural identity, the role of "race," and the contours of fascist aesthetics.  The primary goal of the course is dip into the historiographies of each of these three crucial topics, to come away with a sense of each subfield.   A secondary goal, however, will be to explore how these three historical moments are connected to each other. 

HIST 6317-801: Readings in the American West - Thomas Andrews

This course seeks to prepare graduate students for productive careers as researchers, interpreters, and teachers of the history of the American West.  Western history ranks among the oldest and most dynamic subfield in U.S. historiography. The field, as we will discover, has experienced numerous ups and downs since Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous “frontier thesis” of 1893 propelled it to the center of the American historical profession.  By the 1960s, many mainstream Americanists dismissed western history as marginal, even provincial, the field experienced a revival that began in the 1980s that has endured to the present.  

This work, most of it rooted in the scholarship of earlier generations of historians, literary scholars, civil rights activists, and others, has conceived of the American West in multiple ways:  as the (usually westward-moving) frontier of the United States; as the terrain West of the Appalachians, the Mississippi, or the Missouri; as former and present Indigenous homelands; as borderlands shared with Mexico, Canada, and sometimes other nations; and as a mythic construction.

Focusing largely on works published in the last decade, we will endeavor to understand the current state of the field of western history.  No less important, we will attempt to make sense of the historiographical evolutions and contingencies responsible for the current upswing in cutting-edge scholarship examining the history of an entity variously defined as frontier, region, Indian Country, borderlands, and/or mental territory.

Important note: Several of the authors we will read will be giving talks at CU-Boulder this spring. Attendance at these talks and related events will be strongly encouraged and, in at least some cases, required (most talks will be recorded, so this may be an option for students with especially packed schedules). Finally, our second meeting on January 15, 2026 will take place at the Denver Center of the Performing Arts and will center on the invited dress rehearsal for Nina McConigley's new play, Cowboys and East Indians. There will be no charge for attending this event.  

HIST 7000-801: Seminar in Historical Research and Writing - Matthew Gerber

This course prepares students to undertake independent research in history. With support from the professor and each other, students will master the steps of producing an original research paper: identifying a viable topic/question, responding to historiographical issues, selecting and interpreting appropriate primary sources, and revising successive drafts. Students from all historical fields are welcome and will be encouraged to consult with their advisor(s) in progressing their research agenda.