2026 Courses

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.

More Information(link is external)

Fall 2026

Core Courses

Manichaeism: A World Religion?

(AHMA 210 / STRELIG 200)

Duncan E. Macrae, Adam Benkato

Tuesdays,  2 - 5 PM

Class #2617

This seminar will introduce the history of Manichaeism in late antiquity. The seminar will focus on a remarkable set of textual sources that attest to Manichaean ideas, practices and communities stretching across North Africa, Egypt and the Near East, Iran, to Central Asia and western China from the 3rd c. CE to the early 11th c. CE. We will also devote attention to the archaeology available from Kellis (Egypt) and Turfan (China), the sites of two particularly well-documented Manichaean communities, and to the materiality of the extant Manichaean texts. Our inquiry will center on the value of the categories of “religion” and “world religion” as tools for interpreting the history of Manichaeism and for understanding it in the context of early Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and other religions. For interested students, the instructors will support advanced readings for students working in Iranian languages, Greek, and Latin; there will also be opportunities to read Coptic texts.

Electives

Public and Private Personhood in Early Modern England
(HISTORY 280B / STRELIG 290)

Ethan Shagan

Wednesdays, 2 - 5 PM

Class #33441

Early modern England, once known to historians too grandiosely as the “first modern society,” was the site of precocious experiments to convert private subjectivity into public life, experiments we associate with the emergence of liberalism. In a wide range of contexts—religious interiority, republican theories of citizenship, life-writing, voting and majority rule, women’s roles in litigation, the rise of commercial credit, the bourgeois public sphere, and many others—interiority achieved a paradoxical new public significance, not only shaping people’s own experiences but shaping society. In this course, we will explore how early modern subjects created a familiar modern condition in which the more interiority matters, the more exposed it becomes. This focus will give students a chance to explore several canonical subjects in early modern British history and to think in novel ways about connections between them.

(HISTORY 280B / STRELIG 290)

This seminar is designed to introduce students to an intensive examination of the major themes and issues concerning the history of the Jews in Germany from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Among the topics to be explored are the debates over Jewish emancipation, the German-Jewish struggle with Jewishness, Wissenschaft des Judentums, integration into and separation from the mainstream, German antisemitism and Jewish responses, economic and family life, and Jewish culture in the Kaiserreich and Weimar Republic.