Courses

This graduate readings course will grapple with the implications of the so-called “transnational turn” in American hemispheric studies. It takes up the challenge posed by recent work on transnationalism and globalization by training graduate students in the theories and methodologies of a field that is emerging from older models of international and comparative scholarship to more recent approaches that highlight the movement of peoples, commodities, and ideas across borders. Students will encounter an eclectic mix of older and more recent transnational scholarship from fields including: African Diaspora Studies, Borderlands history, commodity chains studies, migration studies, among others. While the course will draw mostly from the discipline of history, it explicitly incorporates scholarship from other disciplines to encourage students to develop interdisciplinary approaches. The ultimate goal of the course is to prompt students to conceptualize the Americas as a broader American interconnected transborder space, rather than a hemisphere of different nation-states.