HIST 400D Topics in History: World / Transregional

Overview of Course

This course examines how human societies have understood sex, gender, desire, marriage, reproduction, morality, the body, and identity across time, and how religion, law, labor, migration, empire, science, medicine, media, and consumer culture have shaped those understandings. It explores gender and sexuality in world history from prehistory to the modern age, with special attention to Asia, Africa, Europe, and the connected worlds of maritime exchange in port regions of the voyage. Students will analyze primary sources, historical scholarship, visual culture, and field observations to examine how ideas about bodies, desire, family, rights, and identity have been created, contested, regulated, and transformed across time. They will identify major changes in the history of gender and sexuality over time, compare how different societies organized sexuality through religion, law, kinship, labor, medicine, and state power; and communicate historical arguments clearly in discussion, analytical writing, collaborative curation and a synthetic final project. The course is organized around recurring shipboard rhythms: establishing historical frameworks at sea; gathering observations, images, impressions, and site-based evidence in port; and comparing in-port encounters with longer global patterns after port. The result is a world-history course in which ports function not as interruptions, but as case studies.