Fall 2026
“The Aztecs: Heart-Eating Monsters or Regular Folks?”
September 25, 2026
Camilla Townsend, Board of Governors Distinguished Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
The Aztecs have long been understood to be the very worst of all humans—people who believed that they needed to sacrifice dozens of lives every day in order to keep the sun in the sky. The Spaniards certainly promoted such a vision. However, recent studies of materials that the Aztecs wrote in their own language for their own descendants paint a different picture: There, they appear like most other people, albeit with a very ambitious government. In this session we will consider various types of evidence and come to our own conclusions about these much-maligned people.
"Fascism and Nazism"
October 9, 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.
"Ethics of Empire, 1750"
October 23, 2026
Seth Koven, G.E. Lessing Distinguished Professor of History and Poetics, Rutgers University
Koven will discuss how and why women and men across Britain and its vast overseas empire invoked "freedom of conscience" to advance radically different ideas about gender, race, sexuality, class, bodily autonomy, religious difference, and the proper role of the state in everyday life. Koven will draw on several examples of what he calls "conscience wars" to explore with participants intractable tensions within the ideals and practices of liberalism and "liberal empire" in the 19th and 20th centuries between humanitarian benevolence and racial capitalist exploitation and land expropriation; between Christian conscience and state coercion in forging moral subjects. Koven's presentation will range across the British empire from early 19th century Scotland, Tasmania and New South Wales to late 19th and early 20th century England and KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Koven will invite participants to think about the deep historical roots of contemporary "conscience wars" including the rights of parents to conscientiously object to mandatory vaccinations for their children as well as invocations of religious conscience in conflicts surrounding the provision of goods and services for gay marriages.
"War in the Middle East"
November 13, 2026
Toby Jones, Associate Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
In late February 2026 the United States and Israel launched a war on Iran and Lebanon. The effects of this regional war were immediate, producing mass human harm and unleashing global economic disruption including the interruption of the flow of oil and fertilizer, critical for global energy and food systems. The longer-term consequences are likely to be equally disruptive and unpredictable. What explains the forces that drove the war and how should we understand both its historical roots and its potential future consequences? This workshop will connect the war in the context of complex forces in the region, including the United States, Israel, and Iran and Palestine. It will also explore how the terms for the war were shaped by developments and tensions that emerged from the 1970s until today, including the rise of American power in the Middle East, Israeli territorial ambition and its conflict with Palestinians, the shaping of a new financial order around oil in the late 20th century, and the rise of the Persian Gulf as one of the global centers of not just energy production, but global capitalism.
"War, Revolution, and the Abolition of Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean"
November 20, 2026
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.
"Muslim Monsters: A History of Western Representation"
December 11, 2026
Sandy Russell Jones, Associate Professor, Departments of History & Religion, Rutgers University
In her book, Muslims in the Western Imagination, Sophia Rose Arjana argues that although contemporary representations of Muslims as inherently violent emerge in response to current social and political contexts, the image of the Muslim terrorist "has ancestors." In this seminar, we will explore the history of Western representations of Muslims. From Medieval creatures given blue or black skin, physically deformed, and sexually deviant, to early modern "Orientals" considered backward and inferior vis a vis the Enlightened West, to today's terrorist, we will discuss how these various imaginings served Western interests in specific historical moments.
Spring 2027
"History of Homelessness: Unhoused Populations in US History"
January 29, 2027
Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan, Assistant Professor, Department of History and Director of Public History, Rutgers University
This seminar will explore the social and legal history of homelessness and unhoused populations in the United States, from the colonial period to the present. We will consider the legal, political, cultural, and economic factors that led to current conditions, challenging the dominant notion that poverty and homelessness are inevitable facets of life and society by exploring the contexts in which poverty and houselessness have been created and addressed throughout US history. To this end, we will consider epistemological questions about how scholarly and popular understandings of poverty and homelessness have developed and the archive on which that knowledge is based, including: What has it been like to experience houselessness throughout US history? Who has comprised the population of people experiencing houselessness, and why? What has caused houselessness? How has houselessness been addressed structurally, personally, and culturally? How have stereotypes about the unhoused developed over time? We will chart how the answers to these questions developed over time, as well as how historical and contemporary sociocultural perceptions, narratives, and stereotypes about houselessness have evolved throughout US history.
"Age of the Black Death"
February 12, 2027
Leah Devun, Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
In the fourteenth century, a fearsome epidemic arrived in Europe, ultimately killing at least one third of the population. Although they lacked modern scientific understandings of contagion, medieval Europeans managed the plague through medical, religious, and legal remedies, and they faced a society transformed by the sheer volume of deaths. Some villages were almost completely depopulated, while others remained unscathed; survivors recorded dramatic and emotional accounts of the disease’s progression. This seminar examines the experience of the plague through contemporary reports, and it explores the epidemic’s influence on scientific and religious discourse, literature, and visual art. We will also familiarize ourselves with a wave of new scholarly studies that brings together historical thinking and cutting-edge research in genetics and bioarchaeology to answer questions about what “really” caused the epidemic and how the disease traveled and developed. Because the plague followed on the heels of another catastrophe, the Great Famine, and coincided with a series of brutal territorial battles, the fourteenth century is considered among the most tumultuous in European history and, as a result, a fascinating subject for modern students. This seminar will examine this dynamic period, as well as how it might help us to think about more recent experiences of epidemic disease.
"Rethinking The Hundred Years' War"
March 5, 2027
Anthony di Battista, Lecturer, Rutgers University
The Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) was far more than a prolonged medieval conflict between England and France—it reshaped monarchy, warfare, national identity, and the political future of Europe. It has fascinated artists and writers from William Shakespeare to Kenneth Branagh, and the mysteries and legends surrounding the war continue to fascinate historians.
The seminar will examine the causes, key phases, major figures, technological shifts, and long-term consequences of the most consequential war of the Middle Ages.
"Teaching and AI: A Conversation Across the University and High-School History Classsroom"
April 9, 2027
Julie Stephens, Associate Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
Philip Nicolosi ,Teacher at West Morris Central High School
Since the public launch of ChatGPT in late fall 2022, teachers have been struggling with a new presence in their classrooms – the AI chatbot. Many first encountered AI in the form of strange patterns in their students’ writing submissions—essays that were at once slickly fluent and riddled with factual errors and phony citations. Over time, it has both become more difficult to weed out actual student writing from AI-generated prose, and the magnitude of the impact of artificial intelligence on students’ lives, from the media they consume to the livelihoods that they hope to pursue in the future, is being profoundly shaped by this new technology. The initial conversations about preventing AI “cheating,” while still deeply relevant to teachers, are now just one node in a much larger conversation about how we cultivate authentic, human learning in a world increasingly reshaped by artificial intelligence.
During this workshop, Phil Nicolosi, a teacher at West Morris Central High School and a doctoral candidate at Moravian University, and Julia Stephens, a professor and the undergraduate program director in the History Department at Rutgers University, will facilitate discussion about different approaches to AI in the history classroom. We’ll think about the range of different attitudes and approaches to AI that our students encounter as they navigate the journey from high school to college. Are there ways to usefully incorporate AI into historical pedagogy, for example, through more immersive historical role-playing exercises or AI-powered research tools? What might be the dangers of these approaches, given the documented racial and gender biases, in AI-generated content? How do we talk to our students about the ethical, psychological, and environmental impacts of AI in ways that empower them to make their own choices about these new technologies, even as they grow up in a world in which their presence is increasingly ubiquitous? What role might historical context play in cultivating critical AI literacy? On the flipside, what other impacts might we see in the teaching of history, such as a greater emphasis on in-class writing and oral presentations as means of assessment, and how do we prepare our students for shifting expectations, both in our classrooms and in the wider world? Rather than promoting a particular position for or against AI in the classroom, the workshop aims to bring together different perspectives and, above all, to think about how we support our students as they navigate the impacts of these new technologies.
"Disease and Disability in U.S. History"
April 30, 2027
Elaine LaFay, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
More than 1 in 4 Americans have a disability, but people with disabilities are rarely at the center of our cultural narratives. This seminar will explore the history of disability in the United States. It centers the lived experience of people with disabilities to interrogate how their experiences reflect or contradict social definitions of disability and normality. In our examination of how disabled people challenged prevailing cultural ideas of acceptable norms, we will historicize concepts like “impairment vs. disability,” “normal vs. abnormal,” and “ableism."