Fall Semester 2025
"Palestine, Israel, and a History of War"
October 3, 2025
Toby Jones, Associate Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
Since the early 20th century, Palestinians and Israelis have struggled to control the small piece of land along the eastern Mediterranean coast. Over the last two years, the tragically high cost of violence has renewed attention to what is arguably the Middle East's most important conflict. In this session I will present a historical overview of the histories of colonization, of violence, and the myriad political and ideological forces that have driven and shaped an unending war.
"War, Revolution, and the Abolition of Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean"
October 24, 2025
Yesenia Barragan, Associate Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the destruction of the centuries’-old institution of African slavery in the Americas, forever altering the lives of its enslaved and free inhabitants. This seminar explores the bloody and contentious process of the abolition of slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean during three key moments and places: the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804); the Wars of Independence in Spanish South America (1810-1825); and Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, the last bastions of slavery in the hemisphere. We will discuss how and why abolition was enacted in these distinct places and the differences between the immediate, gradual, and final abolition of slavery.
"Nationalism and Nation-States in the Modern Middle East"
November 14, 2025
Maya Mikdashi, Associate Professor, Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality, Rutgers University
The Ottoman Empire ruled much of the Middle East for more than four hundred years, governing over a multi-ethnic and religiously diverse population. This seminar on the modern history of the Middle East will focus on the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the aftermath of World War One on the region. We will study the transition from the larger Ottoman Syria region into the British and French mandates over Lebanon and Syria, and Palestine, alongside the rise of competing forms of nationalism over the course of the nineteenth century and the creation of new nation states in the twentieth century, including Turkey. In this session, we will examine primary sources, explore how people experienced this tumultuous era, and reflect on how national identities are made and unmade. Finally, we will discuss how the partition of the Ottoman Empire [1918-1922] continues to animate political events and movements in the contemporary Middle East.
"Women and Gender in Islam"
December 5, 2025
Sandy Russell, Associate Professor, Departments of History & Religion, Rutgers University
Muslim women have now entered every profession, play Olympic sports, and are present in pop culture as well as the US Congress. Nevertheless, they are still frequently misunderstood by the American public. Often seen as oppressed, they are considered victims of a religion that institutionalizes sexism and inequality. In this seminar, you’ll be exposed to the perspectives of Muslim women themselves: what they have to say about their status in the Qur’an, Islamic law (the Shari`a), contemporary religious life, and most importantly, their frequent status as pawns in global geopolitics.
Spring Semester 2026
"The United States and Ukraine in Revolution, War, and Peace, 1917-2025"
January 30, 2026
David Folgesong, Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
This seminar will focus on relations between the United States and Ukraine from the revolutions of 1917 through the Second World War and Cold War to the Russian-Ukrainian war that began in February 2022. We will examine many questions that are not well understood, including why US presidents did not support Ukrainian aspirations for independence from 1917 to 1991 despite the commitment of the US to the principle of self-determination, how the US covertly used and backed Ukrainian insurgents fighting Soviet forces after 1945, how Ukrainian-Americans appealed for sympathy from members of Congress during the Cold War, why President George W. Bush pushed for Ukraine’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 2008, despite the fact that most Ukrainians did not want to be in NATO then, and why Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
"Accidents and Disasters in the US and the World"
February 13, 2026
Jamie Piertruska, Associate Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
In the present day, catastrophe has become commonplace in the United States and around the world. The number of billion-dollar weather- and climate-related disasters in the United States has increased sharply in the 21st century, with a record-setting 28 billion-dollar disasters in 2023 followed by 27 in 2024. A major factor in this trend is the global temperature record: the past 10 years (2015-2024) are the hottest 10 years in recorded history. Approximately 94 percent of Americans live in a county that has received FEMA aid since 2011, and insurers worldwide reported $140 billion USD in losses to natural hazards in 2024, the third-highest total on record. How did we get to where we are today?
Although accidents and disasters are often understood as isolated, rare events, they have become increasingly central to the history of the United States and the world over the past four centuries. Through efforts to anticipate hazards, develop new tools for risk management, build infrastructures for relief, expand government capacity for disaster response, and remember victims, accidents and disasters have become a part of everyday life. In this seminar, we will explore the material and environmental dimensions of disaster alongside shifting cultural meanings of catastrophe. We will begin with an introduction to some concepts (including normal accidents, unnatural disasters, and disaster capitalism) that scholars have used to understand risk and catastrophe in modern life. Then we will trace the history of hurricane prediction, beginning with knowledge about hurricanes in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic World, then examining the late nineteenth-century use of telegraph networks for storm tracking and the creation of the U.S. hurricane reporting network in the West Indies during the Spanish-Cuban-American War, and concluding with computerized hurricane forecast models in the context of Hurricane Katrina. The seminar will also suggest ways to incorporate the history of disaster into broader themes in U.S. history courses, including American imperial expansion, the growth of federal administrative capacity, and racialized patterns of housing and transportation in American cities.
"Fascism and Nazism"
March 6, 2026
Mark Bray, Assistant Teaching Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
This Seminar will explore the history, politics, and ideology of fascism and Nazism. We will analyze the evolution of the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler, the ideas that propelled their populist authoritarianism, and the lamentably lasting impact of their destructive examples on white supremacist movements for generations to come.
"Martin Luther: The Man Who Changed the World"
April 17, 2026
Anthony Di Battista, Lecturer, Department of History, Rutgers University
This seminar will explore the pivotal role of Martin Luther in the Protestant Reformation, examining his theological challenges to the Catholic Church, his 95 Theses, and the broader impact of his ideas on religious and political structures in Europe. Through an examination of primary source documents and polemical engravings, participants will gain insight into Luther’s contributions to the rise of Protestantism, the translation of the Bible into the vernacular, and the shifting power dynamics of the 16th century. The seminar will highlight how Luther’s actions sparked a movement that transformed Christianity and reshaped Western civilization.
"World War II on the Eastern Front: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Fate of the Jews"
May 1, 2026
Jochen Hellbeck, Distinguished Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
The seminar brings together scholarship on the Eastern Front and on the Holocaust in new ways. In acknowledgment of the intricate dynamic between ethnic prejudice and war, historians of the Holocaust have in recent years shifted the weight of their studies toward the Second World War. But their focus remains on events in Germany and Poland, obscuring the centrality of Soviet Jews in the German imagination. While the Nazis depicted Jews as part of a global conspiracy and railed against “Jewish banks in New York, the Jewish-plutocratic establishment in London, and the Jews of the Kremlin in Moscow,” they considered the Jews who hailed from the Soviet Union to be the greatest threat to Germany. Jewish revolutionaries, the Nazis believed, had seized power in Russia in 1917 and were preparing the Soviet state to destroy Germany and the world. And so, on June 22, 1941, a German army of three million attacked the Soviet Union with the goal to exterminate “Judeo-Bolshevism,” Hitler’s cardinal obsession. While Europe’s Jews were expelled, exiled, and persecuted by the Nazis, Soviet Jews were immediately slated for destruction. The Soviet lands thus became “ground zero” for systematic extermination, which was only later extended to all Jews, igniting the Holocaust.