This course is designed to engage students in conversations about particular perspectives on the history of a selected nation, region, people, culture, institution, or historical phenomenon as specified by the respective instructor. By taking this course, students will come to understand, and develop an appreciation for, some combination of: the origins and evolution of the people, cultures, and/or political, economic, and/or social institutions of a particular region(s) of the world. They may also explore how human encounters shaped individual and collective identities and the complex political, economic, and social orders of the region/nation/communities under study. Instructors and subject will vary.

This course is devoted to the history of the Iberian Peninsula, home to modern Spain and Portugal, during the Middle Ages. While covering these centuries, it focuses extensively on the interactions between Christians, Muslims and Jews in medieval Iberia. The simultaneous presence of these three groups in large numbers, and the influence they had on one another, makes this land unusual, though not completely unique, in medieval Europe. More specifically, the course begins with the conquest of the post-Roman Visigothic Kingdom, which ruled most of the area, by Islamic armies from North Africa in 711. It then examines the era of Muslim ascendancy after 711, before turning to the surviving Christian kingdoms in the north. In the eleventh century, political and cultural initiative shifted in their direction, and they had obtained political and cultural predominance by the dawn of the fourteenth century. The last part of the course takes us from 1300 until the defeat of Granada, the last Muslim realm, by the Kingdom of Castile in 1492. At the same time however, Iberian rulers also sponsored fateful oceanic voyages, and the experiences of the Middle Ages helped shape their approach to the conquest and colonization of “new” worlds beyond the seas. There is no textbook for the course, though there are two shorter texts you will need to purchase or borrow. All other readings will be provided through bCourses. Instructor bio: Robert Iafolla is a historian of the politics and political culture of late medieval Europe, focusing on the Kingdom of Castile and the Iberian Peninsula. In his recently completed dissertation, Castile serves as a case study for examining how political power possessed, or wielded, by rulers, nobles and other actors was defined amid disputes in the consolidating, yet contested, monarchies of late medieval Europe. While completing his graduate studies at UCLA, he enjoyed sharing the appreciation for the Middle Ages which underlies his research with students in the classroom.

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