I have taught a wide variety of courses related to modern France and the French empire, modern Europe in transnational perspective, the Atlantic World as well as topical classes on empire, food history and commodity/material culture. Since arriving at Baruch College, I’ve also embraced the many opportunities offered by New York City to make the city a classroom and to promote primary research at the undergraduate level, thus leading to a recent foray into U.S. history.
Course offerings: (scroll down for selective course descriptions)
France and the French Empire
The Enlightenment and the French Revolution
Modern France, 1789-present
French Empire: History and Legacies
Producing Empire and Consuming Empire in Modern France
The Haitian Revolution and Its Afterlives
Transnational Europe and the Atlantic World
Themes in Global History from 1500 (Taught as Europe and the World) (Hybrid format)
Intimate Domains: A Global Learning Community (new in Fall 2016)
Feit Seminar: Outlaw Nation: Pirates, Slaves, Witches, and Other Subalterns of the Atlantic World (co-taught with Rick Rodriquez, English)
The Fin-de-Siecle and Its Discontents
Europe and Islam (new in Fall 2016)
Europe, 1914-1945
Transnational Approaches to Modern Europe (graduate seminar)
Topical Courses
Modern Imperialism
Colonial Commodities and Everyday Life in Europe and the United States
Introduction to Food Studies: Food, Food Scares, and Sustainable Agriculture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective
Promoting Undergraduate Research in the Classroom
Arts in New York (Macaulay Honors curriculum)
U.S. Food History
Capstone: Nuclear Families and Cold War Children in Postwar America
Hands on History: Leisure and Entertainment in Gilded Age New York City (in collaboration with the New York Public Library)
Social Theory
Self, Culture, and Society I, II, III
Course Descriptions
French Empire: History and Legacies
Modern French imperialism has often been characterized as an implicit contradiction. After all, how could a nation supposedly devoted to liberté, egalité, and fraternité and the rights of man subject entire populations to a coercive colonial regime? Why did France maintain an empire in which the general population supposedly had little interest? And, why did the French population fight tenaciously to retain this empire in the 1960s despite a global trend towards decolonization? The class will examine the extent to which this image of an empire rife with contradictions accurately reflects the history of the French empire. Using a wide range of primary and secondary sources, we will trace the history of French colonialism from the conquest of Algeria through the period immediately following the Algerian War. In addition the class will situate French colonial history within the larger narrative of French history and ultimately suggest that the history of the French empire—contradictions and all—is fundamental to an understanding of modern France.
The Haitian Revolution and Its Afterlives
In 1804 a group of military leaders gathered on the Caribbean island-colony of St. Domingue to declare the island’s independence from France and the birth of a new nation: Haiti. This class explores the events leading up to this momentous declaration, starting with an examination of the sugar-slave colony of St. Domingue in the late eighteenth century and the radical revolution that ultimately led to the overthrow of slavery and colonialism on the island. During the second half of the semester we will examine the legacy of the Haitian Revolution, considering both the response of the United States and Europe to the New World’s first successful slave revolt and the ways that international pressures and domestic problems have combined to shape Haiti’s troubled history during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twentieth-first century. Throughout all of our readings and discussions we will pay particular attention to the ways that people have interpreted and explained events happening in Haiti and how these interpretations reflect, reinforce, or counter long-held assumptions about the role of race, biology, and environment in determining the island’s history.
Transnational Approaches to Modern Europe
Transnational has become a buzzword in the field of history in recent years, but what exactly is transnational history? What does a transnational approach to the writing of history entail? How does transnational history differ in subject and method from histories focused on the longue durée, a world systems approach, comparative history, Atlantic history, imperial history, and global history? What is gained by a transnational approach and method? What are its limitations? During this semester, we will grapple with these questions in the hopes of trying to get a handle on transnational history as an approach to, and method for, writing history. We will work through these questions by reading recent works on Modern Europe. Along the way, we will also dabble in comparative, Atlantic, imperial and global histories in order to figure out how exactly transnational history differs from these other approaches.
U.S. Food History
Whether super-size sodas blamed for diabetes and fatty-liver disease, French fries made with trans-fats blamed for obesity, beef that causes mad cow disease, or hepatitis-causing green onions, food is in the news a lot these days. How did this American diet come into being and what does the future have in store? Focusing on New York, this class explores the creation of the modern American diet. We begin by looking at how New Yorkers ate in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. From there we explore how agricultural production, dietary habits, and consumption patterns changed over the course of the twentieth century. We will pay particular attention to the rise of industrial agriculture and how new farming methods across the United States helped to make new amounts of beef, chicken, pork, wheat, sugar, corn, fruits, and vegetables available to New Yorkers. From there we consider how social reform movements, war, supermarkets, and even school lunches helped to assimilate New Yorkers of all backgrounds to the “American diet.” Research trips will include visits to the New York Public Library, the New York Historical Society, the National Archives at New York City, the Union Square Farmer’s Market, Foods of the Lower East Side Tour with the Tenement Museum, and the Edible Schoolyard Project at P.S. 7 in Harlem.
Hands on History: Entertainment and Leisure in Gilded Age New York
In the late nineteenth century, New York was a bustling city teeming with new arrivals, new innovations, and new forms of entertainment and leisure for rich, poor, young, and old. Coney Island, singing saloons, upscale concerts, vaudeville acts, immigrant theater troupes, new parks, and “slum” tourism were but a small sampling of the many pleasures residents and visitors used to divert attention from the tedium of everyday life. This class examines the leisure activities and forms of entertainment enjoyed by New Yorkers though documents and artifacts of the period. Working within the holdings of the New York Public Library, students will explore first hand how New York’s populations socialized and entertained themselves in the Gilded Age and how these forms of leisure and entertainment helped produce a new popular culture that was, at once, uniquely New York and quintessentially American. Over the course of the semester, students will undertake guided research within the collections to discover for themselves New York’s rich history through primary sources. Collectively, students will produce a historical accurate guidebook for others hoping to explore New York’s vibrant past virtually.