Gender in World History

Prerequisite: Graduate standing.

What is gender? The answer to this differs across cultures and historical time periods. In this course we will examine this question using a comparative and interdisciplinary approach. Over the past three decades, historical scholarship on women and gender has vastly increased our knowledge about women’s lives and experiences and has transformed the way we think about history by challenging traditional historical interpretations and periodization and offering new theoretical tools and approaches for examining the past. In this course, we will examine a selection of scholarly works that employ a variety of approaches to the historical study of gender and address a diversity of regions and time periods. Our focus will be on the ways that recent historians have explored the relationship between gender, race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality. Our concern will be not to gain an expertise on the specific topics these works treat but rather to look at how they contribute to our understanding of the ways in which gender has historically shaped the way people viewed and experienced the world.

Credit: 3