Admission requirements
BSA norm and a pass for both first year Themacolleges
Description
“After every war,” Nobel Laureate Wisława Symborska reminds us, “someone has to clean up. Things won't straighten themselves up, after all.” This seminar looks at the consequences of conflict in transnational perspective during the 19th and 20th centuries and explores how conflict altered international law, political belonging and the everyday experiences of people living in war's wake. While our readings will draw heavily on American and European stories of the modern period, we will cast our gaze to Africa, the Middle East and Asia as well. Using the writings of reflective diarists, letters penned by powerful diplomats, transcripts from the United Nation's Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, poetry and film footage alongside traditional historical monographs, we interrogate when postwar periods begin and the nature of their lasting afterlives. Further, we will try to understand how war unleashes psychological trauma, social revolution and new cultural practices. And finally, our readings will help us explore how events, battles and tragedies within wars become memorialized in postwar eras.
Usually, we will discuss selections from one historical monograph each week. If you are an active participant in this course by the end of the semester you will have: developed advanced reading skills that will allow you to digest a large amount of dense information within a short period of time; honed your ability to summarize and critique historical arguments in both written and spoken forms; written a review essay surveying one monograph on a postwar moment of your choice; and, developed a keen understanding of comparative postwar moments that will influence how you study, write and evaluate history at Leiden and beyond.
Course objectives
General learning objectives
The student can:
- carry out a common assignment
- devise and conduct research of limited scope, including
a. searching, selecting and ordering relevant literature:
b. organising and using relatively large amounts of information:
c. an analysis of a scholarly debate:
d. placing the research within the context of a scholarly debate. - reflect on the primary sources on which the scholarly literature is based;
- write a problem solving essay and give an oral presentation after the format defined in the first year Themacolleges, including
a. using a realistic schedule of work;
b. formulating a research question and subquestions;
c. formulating a well-argued conclusion;
d. giving and receiving feedback;
e. responding to instructions of the lecturer. - participate in discussions during class.
Learning objectives, pertaining to the specialization
The student has knowledge of a specialisation, more specifically:
-in the specialisation General History : the place of European history from 1500 in a worldwide perspective; with a focus on the development and role of political institutions;
-in the track American History: American exceptionalism; the US as a multicultural society and the consequences of that for historiography; the intellectual interaction between the US and Europe;
-in the track History of European Expansion and Globalisation: the development of global networks which facilitate ann ever growing circulation of people, animals, plants, goods and ideas, and the central role of European expansion in this from around 1500;Knowledge and insight in the main concepts, the research methods and techniques of the specialisation, more specifically:
-in the specialisation General History: of the study of primary sources and the context specificity of nationally defined histories;
-in the track American History: of exceptionalism; analysis of historiografical and intellectual debates;
-in the track History of European Expansion and Globalisation: of the combining of historiographical debates with empirical research of primary sources and/or the combining of various historiographical traditions through the use of innovative research questions.
Learning objectives, pertaining to this specific seminar
- Knowledge of comparative postwar moments.
- Knowledge of the memory of war.
- Knowledge of the interrelatedness of war, revolution and migration.
- Knowledge of key methodologies in the way we study war and what comes afterwards.
Timetable
The timetables are available through MyTimetable.
Mode of instruction
- Seminar (attendance required)
This means that students have to attend every session of the course. If you are not able to attend, you are required to notify the teacher beforehand. The teacher will determine if and how the missed session can be compensated by an additional assignment. If specific restrictions apply to a particular course, the teacher will notify the students at the beginning of the semester. If you do not comply with the aforementioned requirements, you will be excluded from the seminar.
Assessment method
Assessment
Written paper (5000-6000 words, based on historiography, excluding title page, table of contents, footnotes and bibliography)
measured learning objectives: 2-4, 6-11Oral presentation
measured learning objectives: 1, 3-4, 6-11Participation
measured learning objectives: 5
Weighing
Written paper: 60%
Oral presentation: 20%
Particiation: 20%
The final grade for the course is established by determining the weighted average with the additional requirement that the written paper must always be sufficient.
Resit
The written paper can be revised, when marked insufficient. Revision should be carried out within the given deadline, as published in the corresponding Brightspace course.
Inspection and feedback
How and when an exam review will take place will be disclosed together with the publication of the exam results at the latest. If a student requests a review within 30 days after publication of the exam results, an exam review will have to be organised.
Reading list
Glenda Sluga, The invention of international order: remaking Europe after Napoleon (Princeton University Press, 2021).
Thavonia Glymph, The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2020): ISBN# 9781469653631.
Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Deterimination and the International Origins of Anti-Colonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): ISBN# 9780195176155.
Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000): ISBN# 0395937582.
Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2017): ISBN# 9780691176949.
Sarah Cramsey, Uprooting the Diaspora: Jewish Belonging and the “Ethnic Revolution” in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1936-1946 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2023): ISBN#: 0253064961.
Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 (Doubleday: 2012).
Andrew Barshay, The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945-1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013): ISBN# 0520276159.
Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium (Oxford Univ. Press, 2012).
Philip Gourevitch, We wish to inform you that tommorow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998): ISBN# 0374286973.
Kimberly Theidon, Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012): ISBN# 0812244508.
Otto Dov Kulka, Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death: Reflections on Memory and Imagination (Boston: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013): ISBN# 0674072898.
Registration
Enrolment through MyStudyMap is mandatory.
If there is insufficient interest, seminars may be canceled and students will make an alternative choice in consultation with their study advisor.
General information about course and exam enrolment is available on the website
Contact
For substantive questions, contact the lecturer listed in the right information bar.
For questions about enrolment, admission, etc, contact the Education Administration Office: Huizinga.
Remarks
None