Advanced Topics

Learners are encouraged to select one or two tracks aligned with their interests rather than attempting to complete all tracks.

History of Mentalities, Emotions, and the Senses

This track explores how historical actors understood, felt, and physically experienced their worlds by examining collective psychological limits, emotional standards, sensory habits, and microhistorical anomalies.

Histoire des Mentalités and Historical Psychology: The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais by Lucien Febvre (Harvard University Press) - Demonstrates how the linguistic and conceptual toolkit of the early modern era made modern religious disbelief cognitively impossible.

History of Emotions and Emotional Regimes: The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions by William M. Reddy (Cambridge University Press) - Introduces the foundational theory of emotives and emotional liberty, showing how political orders enforce emotional norms.

Sensory History and Olfactory Perception: The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination by Alain Corbin (Harvard University Press) - Analyzes how shifting thresholds of disgust and olfactory sensibilities reshaped class boundaries and urban planning in modern France.

Microhistory and Archival Exceptions: The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis (Harvard University Press) - Investigates a celebrated sixteenth-century trial of imposture to demonstrate peasant self-fashioning, domestic negotiation, and evidentiary ambiguity.

This track analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of texts, tracing how material media formats, censorship systems, and digital methods shape human communication and political action.

Book History and the Sociology of Texts: The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries by Roger Chartier (Stanford University Press) - Explores how the material forms of the written word govern the construction of meaning and the practices of reading.

Underground Literature and Clandestine Publishing: The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France by Robert Darnton (W. W. Norton & Company) - Uses publishing and police records to track the smuggling of illicit books and their role in eroding royal legitimacy.

The Bourgeois Public Sphere: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society by Jürgen Habermas (MIT Press) - A seminal sociological history tracing how eighteenth-century salons, coffeehouses, and periodicals created a space for rational-critical debate.

Computational Methods and Digital Humanities: Programming Historian (The Programming Historian Project) - An open-access platform providing structured, peer-reviewed tutorials in text mining, network analysis, and geospatial mapping for historical research.

The Body, Gender, and the Cultural History of Sexuality

This track investigates how power, institutions, and cultural narratives shape human corporeality, gender roles, sexual categorizations, and social pathologies over time.

The Disciplined Body and Biopolitics: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault (Vintage Books) - The definitive theoretical exploration of modern bodily surveillance, penal transformation, and institutional disciplinary techniques.

Gender as an Analytical Category: Gender and the Politics of History by Joan Wallach Scott (Columbia University Press) - Establishes gender as a fundamental historical category that articulates relationships of power across political and labor institutions.

Queer Geographies and Sexual Subcultures: Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 by George Chauncey (Basic Books) - Refutes the myth of the pre-Stonewall isolated closet by documenting the visible, complex queer public cultures of early twentieth-century New York.

Cultural Histories of Disease and Stigma: Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors by Susan Sontag (Picador) - Examines how cultures impose moral blame, military rhetoric, and aesthetic baggage onto physical disease.

Postcolonial Formations, Subalternity, and Imperialism

This track examines how imperial regimes constructed knowledge about colonized populations, how subaltern communities contested administrative power, and how cross-cultural contact produced diasporic cultures.

Orientalism and Imperial Discourse: Orientalism by Edward W. Said (Vintage Books) - The foundational critique of how Western scholarship, literature, and art systematically constructed the Orient as an exotic and subjugated object.

Subalternity and Archival Power: Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History by Michel-Rolph Trouillot (Beacon Press) - Analyzes the mechanics of historical erasure across source creation, archival preservation, and narrative assembly using the Haitian Revolution.

The Black Atlantic and Diasporic Modernity: The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness by Paul Gilroy (Harvard University Press) - Uses the transnational movements of people, intellectual traditions, and music across the Atlantic to rethink the history of modernity outside national boundaries.

Colonial Epistemology and Archival Ethnography: Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense by Ann Laura Stoler (Princeton University Press) - Demonstrates how to read colonial bureaucratic records not as factual repositories, but as sites of imperial sentiment, anxiety, and moral doubt.

Cultural Memory, Materiality, and Spatial History

This track investigates how societies commemorate the past, grapple with traumatic legacies, interact with physical things, and invest landscapes and built environments with cultural significance.

Collective Memory and Commemorative Sites: Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Volume 1: Conflicts and Divisions edited by Pierre Nora (Columbia University Press) - Articulates the concept of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) to demonstrate where collective remembrance crystallizes when living memory fades.

Traumatic Heritage and Restitution: The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution by Dan Hicks (Pluto Press) - Interrogates the ongoing display of imperial plunder in Western institutions, framing museums as weapons of colonial violence and sites for ethical restitution.

Material Culture and Commodity Biographies: The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective edited by Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge University Press) - Establishes the methodology of object biography to reveal how physical things accumulate and alter social meaning as they circulate.

Spatial Practice and Everyday Resistance: The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau (University of California Press) - Theorizes everyday tactics such as walking and reading as subtle forms of spatial and cultural resistance against dominant institutional structures.