HIS 432 - Nations and Nationalisms

We live in globally interconnected times, facilitated and reinforced by trade networks, pandemics, wars and violence, climate change, migration, and technology. Yet national borders remain a defining feature of our world, structuring our political imagination: we often think of global connectedness as inter-national. At the same time, many politicians, scholars, and commentators have been warning of resurgent nationalism worldwide, implying the end of a brief ‘post-national’ moment. This seminar on the history of nations and nationalism asks how we arrived at this juncture. How, when, and why did our world become an ‘international community’ of nominally sovereign nation-states? Approaching these questions requires us to adopt a global lens and a comparative perspective. Until quite recently, historians narrated the past almost exclusively through the prism of the nation. The seminar will begin by looking at how nationalism’s emergence in the late 18th and early 19th century shaped the rise of history as an academic discipline. We will then read several foundational late 20th-century texts which still inform the basic concepts, timelines, distinctions, and debates in contemporary Nationalism Studies, an interdisciplinary field in which historians play a vital role. We will approach the second half of the seminar thematically. Focusing on comparative case studies from across the global north and south, and spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, we will examine how nations and nationalisms are bound up with histories of imperialism, colonialism, and genocide; mass politics and capitalism; arts and sciences; language and literature; and ideas about race and gender.

Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement.
Satisfies History major and minor requirements.