Spring 2026
Core Courses
Historiography and Identity
(MELC 298 / STRELIG 200)
Yonatan Binyam
Wednesdays, 2 - 5 PM
Class #27999
Recent scholarship on the study of the premodern past has witnessed important shifts in perspective in the study of past identities, especially collective or group identities. Scholars across various disciplines (e.g. Classics, religious studies, medieval studies) have called for critical reassessments of the kinds of past that contemporary historiography produces. These shifts in perspective are in part precipitated by efforts to employ critical or postcolonial theories with the goal of decentering or reframing Eurocentric reconstructions of the premodern world. This course investigates the theoretical and methodological issues raised in this context. Particular attention will be paid to how historians of premodernity define analytic categories like identity, race/racism, ethnicity, and religion, emphasizing the contrast between conventional and critical formulations of these concepts. Interrogations of these issues will include the analysis of key historiographical problems like periodization, the objectivity question, and the problem of translation, along with an examination of relevant historiographical approaches like “the History of Ideas” and narrative and history. The course aims to foster a deeper understanding of how the mutually constitutive dynamics between identity and historiography play out both in premodern sources and in contemporary scholarship.
Students must register for 4 units to receive credit for DESR.