Undergraduate Program

Spring 2025 Courses

Welcome to the Spring 2025 semester! This is a great moment to plan and declare your History major, minor, or cluster. The BA in history is a flexible major that consists of 10 courses, although many students exceed that number. The history minor requires 6 courses. The department also offers over sixteen options for the 3-course clusters in History. For more info on declaring, please visit the following page: Declaring a major or minor

History students also have considerable research opportunities through the HOUR Program, the Honors Program, and other initiatives.

First- and Second-Year Students

Students in the Class of 2028 and 2027 should enroll in HIST 200 – Gateway to History. This course is required for the History major and serves as an introduction to historical practice. Gateway courses explore what professional historians actually do and how they do it.

In Spring 2025, we are offering two Gateway courses: Race, Gender & the California Gold Rush and Deviants in Medieval History.

Race, Gender & the California Gold Rush

Professor Jed Kuhn, T/R 3:25-4:40PM

Eureka! This gateway course introduces students to historical practice—what professional historians actually do—through a focus on matters of race, gender, and indigeneity during the California gold rush. Stretching before and after the gold rush years of 1848-1855, this course presents California as a site of overlapping colonial histories (Spanish, Mexican, and U.S.) and an immense diversity of Indigenous cultures and languages. It is also a site of racial struggle, as Mexican landowners, Chinese laborers, Indigenous peoples, White settlers, and free Black men and women vied for land, resources, and power, a struggle in which gender and sexuality played a key role. As a historical methods course, this class will introduce students to the diverse array of evidence available to historians, from legal documents and newspapers to travelogues, novels, historical interviews, maps, and artwork. This class is required for history majors, but we encourage all interested undergraduates to enroll. 

Deviants in Medieval History

Professor Laura Smoller, M/W 11:50am-1:05pm

This section focuses upon the concept of deviance in medieval European society, studying the process of identifying persons as “deviants” because of their religious beliefs, sexual preferences, alleged witchcraft, or presumed status as werewolves. Along the way we will discuss the various ways in which historians have approached this topic and will engage with key primary sources. Readings will address the question of whether the persecution of “deviants” began only in the twelfth century as part of the process of centralizing power in church and state. We will consider the relationship between persecution and power, as we ponder why certain groups were singled out for persecution. And we will ask what Europeans really were afraid of when they labeled certain groups as “deviant."

Third- and Fourth-Year Students

Students in the Class of 2026 and 2025 should pursue writing-intensive “W” courses and work of completing their focus area. All majors are required to take two “W” courses, one of which must be at the 300-level. 

Transfer students interested in the major or minor should schedule a meeting to talk with Prof. Thomas Fleischman, director of undergraduate studies, by emailing thomas.fleischman@rochester.edu.

Suggested Spring 2025 courses

HIST 122 - Vox Populi: Medieval Popular Revolts

Instructor Rachel Walkover, T/R 3:25-4:40pm

Throughout time, people have revolted against governing bodies and rulers, and the Middle Ages is no exception. In this course, we will use a variety of themes (good governance, heresy, economic stratification, and the daily lives of non-nobles) to contextualize the reasons for and the goals of rebellions, including the Jacquerie in France, the Ciompi Revolt in Florence, and the Great Rising in England.

HIST 158 - The New Empire: The Rise of Global America

Professor Ruben Flores, M/W 10:25-11:40am

How did a nation surrounded by the French and British Empires at the end of the nineteenth century become the preeminent global superpower by the end of World Was II in 1945? We will study the political and economic decisions after the US Civil War that culminated in the Spanish-American War of 1898, including America’s global invasion of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. We will consider the role that America assigned itself to the march of world history. We will examine the place of commerce and consumer culture in the making of the Panama Canal and modern trade flows. And we will examine the rise of Communism in the context of American global power beginning with the Soviet Union and ending with the Vietnam War. Throughout, we will seek to understand how America’s military and economic strength has been understood internationally from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day.

HIST 171 - African-American History II since 1900

Professor Melanie Chambliss, T/R 11:05am-12:20pm

This course will present an introductory survey of the history of African American life from the early-seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth century. The course will focus largely on African American history in North America and the United States, but we will consider this history in the broader context of Black diasporic and Atlantic world history during this time. The history of the transatlantic slave trade and the development of slavery in the United States will be key to this course, but we will pay particular attention to examining how Black diasporic peoples attempted to determine and define their own lives in the context of American slavery. Examining the fundamental, ever-changing relationship between these two phenomena—American slavery and Black self-determination—will constitute the key focus of the course. Other key focuses of the course will include: histories of Black revolt in North America; Black cultural and intellectual life; the historical relationship between African American history and the development of the US nation-state; the relationship between slavery and Atlantic-world capitalism; the history of abolition movements in the United States; and the history of emancipation, Reconstruction and the advent of Jim Crow.

This course will take a longue-durée approach, beginning in the waning years of the 1970s and concluding in the first two years of the twenty-first century. Each week students will read primary and secondary sources about a moment of crisis, culture war, or change. These will include topics such as the sex wars, the AIDS crisis, stranger danger, police and prisons, and Rodney King, among many others. Students will grapple with the centrality of race, gender and class to each week’s topics, as well as interrogate the ways in which culture, politics and economics intersected in both old and new ways.

HIST 192 - Carnal Knowledge: Bodies, Sex, & Gender in Premodern Europe

Instructor Claire Becker, M/W 3:25-4:40pm 

This course surveys the varied ways in which Europeans made sense of the human body from the early days of Christianity to the discovery of the Americas. While questions of health, disease, and death certainly preoccupied premodern thinkers, this course follows recent trends in feminist and queer historical scholarship by privileging questions of gender and sexuality. As we read works on the body by modern historians and premodern thinkers alike, we’ll encounter medieval sex workers, lesbian nuns, a self-proclaimed “hermaphrodite” accused of sorcery, a fifteenth-century mystic whose unconventional writings described her sensual longing for Jesus Christ and, of course, plenty of so-called “sodomites.” As we transition from the medieval to the early modern period, we’ll consider the destructive and mutually transformative encounter between two civilizations - European and American - with distinct views on bodies, gender, and desire.Throughout the course, we’ll explore how sex became linked with sin, how virginity came to signify virtue and, more broadly, how certain gendered behaviors and embodiments become associated with transgression and others with normalcy (or even, in some cases, holiness). Most crucially, we’ll ask how knowledge about the body (“carnal knowledge,” if you’ll excuse the pun) has been produced, by whom, and to what ends, in concrete moments throughout European history.

HIST 195 - Animal Cities: From Pizza Rat to Neil the Seal

Instructor Richard Fadok, T/R 9:40-10:55am

What can our fascination with Pizza Rat’s herculean appetite or Neil the Seal’s traffic-jamming antics tell us about the relationships today between the beast and the borough, the human and the nonhuman? Why do we celebrate some urban wildlife while ignoring, reviling, and even exterminating others? This introduction to the interdisciplinary field of animal studies addresses these and other questions through recent scholarship on multispecies cities. The first part of the course surveys urban human-animal ecology from domestication to enclosure with an emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. In the second part, we ponder contemporary studies of interspecies contact, collision, and cohabitation, from macaques in Delhi and mosquitos in Dar es Salaam to capybaras in Buenos Aires and parakeets in London. Students will gain an understanding of the historical forces that have shaped everyday encounters with nonhuman animals, particularly as they concern matters of violence, intimacy, and justice. Alongside class discussions, we will collectively produce a ”subjective atlas” that explores the city of Rochester from the perspective(s) of its animal residents.

HIST 210 - Africa Welcomes China in a New Global Economy

Professor Elias Mandala, T/R 12:30-1:45pm

Africa’s engagement with China has to be read as a two-sided story: China has found in Africa a reliable supplier of natural resources while Africans look to China for aid and investments in agriculture, industry, infrastructure, and education. And, in a significant departure from the colonial model of economic interactions, Chinese companies do not only ship finished products to Africa; they also manufacture in Africa goods for internal use and for export. The impact of these multifaceted relations will not be decided in Beijing alone, as many assume in the West; the outcome will also depend on the decisions taken in African capitals.

HIST 238/W - Ukraine, Russia: History and History Wars

Professor Matthew Lenoe, M/W 11:50am-1:05pm

This course uses primary source materials (treaties, memoirs, government orders, newspaper articles, letters, films) and secondary (scholarly literature) to examine the history of Ukrainian-Russian relations from the early 16th century to the present, as well as the role of propaganda and beliefs about that history on both sides of the present conflict. We will study the Cossack hetmanate of the early to mid-17th century, and its memory as the source of Ukrainian national identity. Other topics will include the development of modern Ukrainian nationalism in the mid-19th century, shifting Russian imperial attitudes towards Ukraine, the interregnum of Ukrainian independence in 1918, the great famine of 1932-1933, and Ukrainian combatants in World War II. We will also examine Vladimir Putin's account of East Slavic history and his rationalization of the aggressive attacks on Ukraine beginning in 2014.

HIST 266/W - Gender and Sexuality in the United States, 1945-Present

Professor Jed Kuhn, T/R 12:30-1:45pm

The latter half of the 20th century was a period of dramatic societal change in the United States in which gender and sexuality played a key role. Surveying significant developments in this period including the Women’s movement and rise of feminism, the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights, the sexual revolution, the gender and sexual politics of the civil rights movement, the conservative backlash, and the AIDS/HIV epidemic, this course examines the struggle over rights, freedom, and competing worldviews that continues into our present moment. Moreover, we will consider how gender and sexuality are themselves socially constructed and historically contingent as well as deeply embedded in matters such as race and U.S. imperialism.

HIST 347W/447 - Archives & Absences: Writing from the Margins of History

Professor Melanie Chambliss, R 2-4:40pm

How do archival absences impact what we know about the past? How should these silences shape the histories we write? This course will explore the process of historical production through critical archival studies. We will discuss how “the archive” documents power dynamics in the past and present. We will read histories and theories of archives’ construction and examine different approaches to recovering African diasporic history. Researchers have turned to microhistory, memoir, fiction, theory, and other methods or genres to address archival absences, and we will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these choices. By the end of the semester, students will be familiar with key voices within critical archival scholarship and postmodernist theories of history, and students will learn different techniques for addressing absences in their own research.

HIST 383W/483 -Disease and Society from Antiquity to the Present

Professor Laura Smoller, W 2-4:40pm

What is the relationship between disease and the society in which it strikes? How do societies define disease, and how does culture affect the treatment of the sick? How have scholars written the history of disease? In this research seminar, students will explore such questions by examining interactions between disease and society in western cultures from antiquity through the present, at the same time pondering what this insight can tell us as we face the frightening prospect of new killers like Ebola and resistant strains of old diseases like tuberculosis. Throughout, the course will insist that the experience of disease in not simply a biological fact, but is conditions by the culture in which we live.