Elizabeth Reynolds

From the Belt and Road Initiative to high-tech surveillance, China is at the center of contemporary discussions about the future of the global economy. This course will expose students to a historical understanding of how China not only became part of the world economy, but in fact defined its development in major ways. Over the course of the semester, students will explore a variety of subjects, from the Great Divergence between Europe and China in the eighteenth century to the rise of Maoist socialism in mid-twentieth century, to China’s transition to capitalism and involvement in Africa in the twenty-first century. Examining the past two hundred fifty years of Chinese and global economic history, the students will gain a deep understanding of how China became the world’s second largest economy, and what that means for the future.

Far from the imagined “land of snows” closed off to the rest of the world, Tibet always had dynamic interactions with Inner Asia, South Asia, and China. With an expansive view on Tibetan history, this course traces these interactions from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century through a variety of topics, ranging from the power of the Dalai Lamas to the spread of Tibetan Buddhism across the world, to the effects of global warming on the “third pole.” Students will be exposed to religious texts, memoirs, and novels to trace the lives of women saints and Tibetan communists as well as exiled nationalists, and watch documentaries and films to interrogate Tibet’s place in China and the Tibetan diaspora’s experience in India and the United States. Using Tibet as a lens, students will learn to question larger problems of religion versus secularism, cultural preservation versus globalization, and national identity versus colonization, subjects that continue to matter to Tibet and the world today.

This course introduces the methods, issues, and debates that shape our understanding of economic change and development from the Industrial Revolution to the post-industrial age. Engaging economic theorists from Marx to Smith, to Ricardo and Wallerstein, this course problematizes the notion of rational economic actors and interrogates notions of free trade in an attempt to understand the impact of capitalism on the world. This course is designed both for students specializing in economic history and students in all disciplines interested in historical approaches to political/economic development.

This course provides an overview to the geographies of globalization and development in the world today. We begin by engaging with a variety of theoretical perspectives, definitions, and debates in order to establish the foundations upon which students can conceptualize and understand existing patterns of inequality, social injustice and environmental conflicts. In order to further highlight the different ways in which development and globalization interventions are experienced and contested, in the second half of the course we will focus our considerations towards specific contemporary issues at the forefront of globalization and development debates, including migration and refugees, urbanization, sustainable development, tourism, and alter-globalization social movements.

Stretching from China to Europe, the Silk Road looms large in contemporary imagination, as visions of caravans, monks, and scholars still animate the deeper reaches of our minds. But what was the Silk Road, and how did it turn from a “road” that connected diverse cultures and civilizations to one that is dominated by geopolitical and national interests? This course investigates the foundations of political and religious identities across Central Eurasia from the Taliban’s rise in Afghanistan to the internment camps in Xinjiang, to self-immolation protests in Tibet. Through a diverse array of religious texts, literary works, museum pieces, and state documents, this course invites students to examine the historical roots of present-day conflicts by rethinking the Silk Road. Throughout the course, we will explore how environmental conditions have shaped the rise and fall of civilizations, how technologies, people, and diseases have traveled across Eurasia, and how imperialism, capitalism, and globalization fundamentally transformed the historical landscape of the region. Ultimately, we will discuss whether the “Silk Road” may still offer us a critical framework to understand global connectivity in our current day when borders are becoming more rigid than ever.