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.

In this course, we will survey the history of Central Asia in the “modern” era, from roughly 1600 to the present. While focusing on the regions that have now become post-Soviet Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, we will also include the connected regions of present-day Afghanistan and Xinjiang. In fact, it was during this period that what was once an interconnected Central Eurasian hub became increasingly fragmented into “peripheries” of empires centered outside the region, divided by increasingly solidified borders after the breakup (or reconfiguration) of these empires. Tsarist Russia, Qing China, and Great Britain all had imperial stakes in Central Asia, and Muslim religious and reformist networks further linked Central Asians to the Ottoman and Japanese empires. By re-centering a region that is often dismissed as a periphery, we can learn not only about Central Asia but about historical interconnectedness. Through it all, we will focus on the ways that people in Central Asia have experienced and shaped modernity, with all its violence and promise.

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Requirements class fulfills