CEGU

This seminar invites students to examine recent scholarly experiments in architectural history. Participants will read and discuss a corpus of books published in the last five years. Each week, we will take a deep dive into a single publication by synthesizing its argument, unpacking its structure, and demonstrating its potential limits. In-class activities will catalyze dialogue and debate on the readings as well as highlight resonances across assigned books. By the end of the quarter, students will have developed transversal views of contemporary practices in architectural history and heightened their senses of methodological self-awareness.

This graduate colloquium provides an advanced introduction to the vibrant field of environmental history. We will trace the evolution of this rich historiography, from first-generation classics-often focused on the American West-through to the geographical and thematic diversification of recent years. The course will give a flavor of this diversity, touching too upon influential works in emerging subfields like animal history, climate history, enviro-tech, and evolutionary history. Throughout, we will study how historians have addressed new analytical and aesthetic challenges: negotiating the insights of the natural sciences, incorporating nonhuman agency, and writing history at the vast scales of deep time and the planetary. The course is ideal for PhD students preparing a general examination field and/or designing a research paper, but is open to MA students as well. This course counts towards the Doctoral Certificate as a Foundations course.

In recent years, in the face of ever-more-spectacular manifestations of worldwide ecological crisis, public discourse about human relations with the rest of nature has coalesced around the master concept of “the Anthropocene.” On this understanding, humankind has brought about a new geological epoch in which the human species has assumed a decisive role in transforming the planet Earth as a whole. This co-taught, reading-intensive course takes up an alternative proposition, namely that it is not human beings in general but a historically specific social formation characterized by its own distinctive ways of organizing nature that has precipitated the cascading crises of the present. More often criticized and rejected in existing scholarly literatures, this alternative concept—the Capitalocene—has to date been the subject of neither theoretical nor historical elaboration. Drawing together works from several different disciplines, the seminar will therefore seek to explore the potential and limitations of this alternative approach to our shared planetary condition. Readings will include Jason W. Moore, Nancy Fraser, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Andreas Malm, Kohei Saito, and Soren Mau. Course open to PhD students only. Others may enroll with instructors’ permission. This course counts towards the Doctoral Certificate as a Foundations course.

What do we mean by nature, and how do humans relate to it? A recent French translation of Virgil’s “Georgics” was titled anew: “Le souci de la terre” (“care for the earth”). What does it mean to care? Is care disinterested, or does it serve a purpose? What logics of dominion or obligation shape it?
This course traces ideas of nature and care from Antiquity to early modernity. How did humans conceive of their place in the world? How did they understand its resources and their impact? From the commons to enclosures, from caretaking to exploitation, from interpreting nature to organizing it (aménagement), we will question linear narratives of progress (humans caring more) and degradation (humans caring less).

Focusing on France and French texts while engaging classical and theological sources, we will also consider exploration and exploitation beyond France. We will examine how religious ideas, canonical texts, and philosophical concepts have shaped discourses on nature, as well as the relevance of contemporary ecological terms. Attending closely to the multiple ways in which human beings variously have articulated their relationship to nature or the environment permits us to ask, instead of assume, what might be the conditions and practices of care incumbent upon human beings today.

Dams, sewers, container ships, water pipes, power lines, air conditioning, and garbage dumps: the critical infrastructures that enable modern life are so often invisible, except when they fail. This course explores the historical role of infrastructure as a set of planet-spanning systems of resource extraction and crucial conduits of social and political power. Looking at cases from apartheid South Africa and the Suez Canal to Mumbai and Chicago itself, we will consider the relationship of infrastructure with capitalism, settler colonialism, and postcolonial development. We will see how forms of citizenship and exclusion have been shaped and negotiated via wires, leaky pipes, and improvised repairs, and we will consider perhaps the biggest question of all: In this age of ecological crisis, do energy-guzzling infrastructural systems have a strange form of more-than-human agency all of their own?

This colloquium explores selected aspects of the social, economic, environmental, and cultural history of tropical export commodities from Latin America– e.g., coffee, bananas, sugar, tobacco, henequen, rubber, vanilla, and cocaine. Topics include land, labor, capital, markets, transport, geopolitics, power, taste, and consumption.

This course examines the US-Mexico Borderlands from a time before political borders to the contemporary moment. As a vast geographical and conceptual space of cooperation and antagonism, the borderlands that include what is today the southwestern United States and northern Mexico comprise a crucial site to interrogate the formation and limits of colonial imposition, national identity, state power, racial segregation, environmental transformation, and capitalist expansion. In this course, we will map the history of the Mexico-US borderlands by drawing from testimony, fiction, images, cartography, music as well as scholarship that centers the experiences of those who have lived in and moved through this territory. This course is open to all.

Ecocide is defined as a crime against the environment, originating from legal debate in the context of the Vietnam War. Taking Vietnam as our starting point, this course engages with a wide range of materials (from novels to poetry to ethnographic studies) and different places (Ukraine, Vanuatu, Iraq, Palestine, and many others) in order to examine the broader context in which the campaign to criminalize environmental destruction emerged. We discuss what forms of environmental justice we can envision and pursue today, and debate possibilities and limitations of legal accountability. The readings are inter- and multidisciplinary, drawing from environmental humanities, anthropology, legal studies, history, and other fields. The assignments include a possibility to develop one’s own research topic, which could take the form of a traditional paper or a critical-creative project (video essay, poster, other creative forms).

This graduate seminar explores various historical, sociological and anthropological theories of cities. The course analyzes major theoretical frameworks concerned with urban forms, institutions, economic structures and phenomenological experiences of urban life as well as particular instances of city development from early modern to contemporary periods. We conclude with a reflection on the future and fate of cities. The seminar will consist of weekly orienting lectures, followed by class discussion of selected texts and themes concerned with social theories of the city. Class participants will present their research projects in the final session of the course.

This course is a socio-spatial analysis of Florence and its most important urban complexes, which incorporated the interactive experience of images, objects, buildings, and urban communities. As a result, it draws on, both implicitly and explicitly, on the material, methods, and approaches of other disciplinary territories such geography, anthropology, social and cultural history, art and architectural history, as well as urban studies and it encourages you to think broadly about what it means to analyze history through an analysis of site specific practices both in terms of their design and production but also their historical reception, use, and experience. The motivation for this course comes from the way in which both Florence and the Renaissance have largely been explored from the perspective of design and production, artists, planners and patrons. Therefore, this course attempts to look at the way the city’s inhabitants actually responded to some of the most important developments in early modern cultural production, and how actively they contributed to some of the most familiar environments of western Europe and continues to be the site of some of the most intense cultural tourism.

In this co-taught course between the departments of English (Jennifer Scappettone) and Visual Arts (Amber Ginsburg), we will deploy those senses most overlooked in academic discourse surrounding aesthetics and urbanism–hearing, taste, touch, and smell–to explore the history and actuality of Chicago as a site of anthropogenic changes. Holding the bulk of our classes out of doors, we will move through the city seeking out and documenting traces of the city’s foundations in phenomena such as the filling in of swamp; the river as pipeline; and the creation of transportation and industrial infrastructure–all with uneven effects on human and nonhuman inhabitants. Coursework will combine readings in history and theory of the Anthropocene together with examples of how artists and activists have made the Anthropocene visible, tangible, and audible, providing forums for playful documentation and annotations as we draw, score, map, narrate, sing, curate and collate our sensory experience of the Anthropocene into a final experimental book project.

Making human life safe and secure has been a political value at least since the early-modern period in Europe. Furthermore, the human desire for and their myths around the idea of immortality has a history that goes far beyond Europe and its ancient legends. It is only after the onset of industrialization and urbanization, however, that it has been possible for humanity to increase human longevity and to support growing number of human beings, thanks to new technology and fossil fuel energy. This course examines the historical causes of human flourishing and longevity along with its social and intellectual consequences. How did concerns with reproduction and public health shape the transition to modern society? Has the increase in longevity meant human alienation from death? Why are birth rates now plummeting across the world? Readings will draw on literature from various disciplines including history, anthropology, philosophy, science, and economics.

Today South Asia is the world region perhaps most acutely threatened by climate change, air pollution, water scarcity, and extreme weather. At the same time, the Indian subcontinent has long been the source of the most vibrant and innovative research in environmental history beyond the West. Drawing on this rich body of scholarship, this course explores the deep historical roots of South Asia’s contemporary environmental crises. How have the Asian monsoon, the Indian Ocean, and the Himalayas shaped human history? What were the environmental consequences of British colonial rule? How have South Asian intellectuals and protesters pushed forward the boundaries of green thought and political action, from M. K. Gandhi to the “tree hugging” Chipko movement and anti-dam activists of the 1970s and 1980s? We will investigate both the South Asian avatars of classic topics in environmental history (like the plantation, mineral extraction, industrialized agriculture, and chemical toxicity) as well as place-specific issues like the environmental history of caste and Hindu nationalism. On the way, we will pay particular attention to how historians have wrestled with the conceptual and aesthetic challenges of incorporating non-human agency at diverse scales, from El Niño and unruly rivers to opium poppies and mollusks.