Questions in (Global) History

Global history emerged as an intervention in the discipline of history, asking new questions and contributing new answers to older debates. The diversifying landscape of global history today reflects and builds upon a plethora of movements, “turns” and interventions that reshaped the study of history since the nineteenth century. Its approaches, methods and theories – the kinds of questions it asks, how it asks them and how it goes about answering them – are indebted to this heterodox heritage. As much as global history today thrives on the diversity of the disciplinary backgrounds of its practitioners, its rooting in the peculiarities of the discipline of history can be a challenge for students coming from other fields. This seminar is geared towards students who might feel unfamiliar or uneasy with the “who is who” and “what is what” of history. Designed as a safe space for the puzzled and the curious, the seminar focuses on three interrelated sets of larger questions in historiography: questions of theory, questions of sources and questions of writing. We will encounter different ways of doing history, their heuristics, stakes and historical contingencies. We will discover different types of primary sources, their archives and how scholars have worked with them. And we will explore what it means to write historically and how to go about formulating historical questions.