Courses

Making African History is a seminar about process, tailored to the needs of individual Ph.D. and M.A. students. It has no fixed destination common to us all, and it is therefore a class without a syllabus. We will meet collectively on several occasions over the course of the semester, but we will also proceed along distinct tracks, which we might dub the “research” and the “reading” tracks. On the research track, more advanced students will pursue a research project while sharing their process and their results with the seminar as a whole. On the reading track, students not yet engaged in a research project will undertake a set of readings in Africanist historiography, to be tailored by the instructor to collective interests.

All students will be expected to attend and to be engaged in joint class sessions. The final product of the seminar will take one of two forms. Students on the research track will produce a paper either drawn from new research or based on a previous project further elaborated and refined by engagement with primary sources. Those on the reading track will produce an extended historiographical essay. In either case, the final paper should be on the order of 20-25 pages.