Graduate Seminar Offerings – Spring 2024

Proseminar 1 (3 credits) – required for all doctoral students in the first year of study
56:163:501
Monday/Wednesday 4:20 – 5:40 pm
Dr. Meredith Bak

This two-semester course provides an overview of paradigms and critical issues in Childhood Studies. Researchers from within the University and around the area present the latest research on children.

Historical Research Methods (3 credits)
56:163:526
Monday 6:00 – 8:50 pm
Dr. Susan Miller

This course is an introduction to historical methodology and research methods. We will discuss trends in historiography and theory – especially as they pertain to the history of childhood – but we will always keep the hands-on business of historical research in mind, and put it into practice as much as possible. All of which is to say that we will ask a lot of questions about questions: Why do historians of childhood interrogate some aspects of kids’ lives but leave others relatively untouched? Why are we ourselves inclined to ask certain questions about childhood and sidestep others? How do scholars select and compile sources, and how is it possible to frame questions about those sources before understanding their content?
Unusual for a history course, this seminar is structured around the character of our sources and texts, and not beholden to chronology. As the semester progresses we will move from the most private of sources, such as diaries, letters and memoirs, to ever more public sources, such as advice manuals, organizational records and government documents.

Childhood and Violence (3 credits)
56:163:600
Tuesday 6:00-8:50 pm
Dr. Anthony Wright

This course will explore an interdisciplinary range of texts focused on childhood, youth, and various forms of violence that shape young bodies and lives.  Following the work of medical anthropologists, students will approach violence not as an aberration from social order, but rather as a constitutive condition of it.  Social orders are forged and maintained through violence—from spectacular forms of physical brutality to subtle forms of psychological violence.  Sites of violence to be explored include: colonial and post-colonial governments; national school systems; global markets; war and other international conflicts, etc.