Courses

Donald Kagan traces Greek civilization from the Bronze Age collapse and rise of the polis through Athenian democracy, the Persian Wars, and Thucydides' Peloponnesian War.

Joanne Freeman reconstructs the political, social, and ideological upheaval of British North America from imperial crisis and street protest through independence, war, and constitutional founding.

Pulitzer Prize historian David Blight examines the causes, military turning points, emancipation, constitutional remaking, and contested memory of the American Civil War and Reconstruction.

Timothy Snyder explores a millennium of European state formation, empire, nationhood, language politics, and historical methodology through the history of Ukraine.

Systematic historical and textual examination of the United States Constitution, tracing its eighteenth-century ratification, structural separation of powers, and Reconstruction amendments.

Historical, literary, and archaeological study of the Hebrew Bible in its Ancient Near Eastern context: Mesopotamian myth, covenant law, prophecy, wisdom literature, and canon formation.

Surveys modern literary theory from Russian formalism, hermeneutics, semiotics, structuralism, and deconstruction to psychoanalysis, New Historicism, and postcolonial criticism.

Absolutism, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, industrialization, urban life, nationalism, imperial rivalry, World War I, the Russian Revolution, and World War II.

Traces late Roman transformation, Christianization, Byzantium, the rise of Islam and the Abbasid Caliphate, monasticism, Charlemagne's Carolingian Empire, and Viking expansion.

Traces how bubonic plague, smallpox, cholera, tuberculosis, yellow fever, influenza, and HIV reshaped state power, urban sanitation, medical science, and social order.

Concrete vaulting, urban forums, Pompeii, imperial palaces, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, Hadrian's Villa, and architectural engineering across the Roman provinces.

Historical-critical study of early Christian texts within Greco-Roman and Second Temple Jewish society, from Pauline letters and synoptic Gospels to apocalyptic literature.